led to the perception among sex workers of powerful feminists beating on the weak and
the marginalized in complicity with the male agents of liberal states (e.g., vice police) in
taking away their means of livelihood and driving them into underground. At the same
time, an “emancipatory” reading of sex work as sex radicalism can slide into an
imbalanced celebration of the power, subversion and pleasure sex workers derive from
running the sex acts to the neglect of power differentials among sex workers (class, race,
education, global locations, and hierarchy within sex work) in confronting the forces of
global capital, client power, masculine ideology, brothel management, state authority and
neo-colonial relations. My following discussion, therefore, will negotiate the dueling
poles of domination and agency by contextualizing and theorizing sex workers’
resistance and contestation within the complex interlocking systems of power that dictate
their life chances.
I divide up the chapter into five sections. First, I shift the term of discourse in
transnational prostitution from “sexual trafficking” to “sexual traveling” in order to
configure global sex workers not as trafficked victims but as traveling agents who
“illicitly” pass through state surveillance and consciously turn their bodies into erotic
instruments in negotiating and making do with the forces of global capital, masculine
ideology, and racism. Second, I engage with the arguments in certain strands of radical
feminist and Marxist theoretical discourse that consider the commodification of women’s
body for male erotic/sexual pleasure as signs of gender domination and alienation. I
argue that this line of reasoning adopts a theoretical posture of “judging prostitution” that
emanates from an internalized “high,” privileged, (white) maternal body that denies the
agency of the prostitute’s “low,” violated and degraded body. As we shall see, this
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Convention