Contenu du sommaire : Le commerce du sexe en Asie du Sud-Est. Approches pluridisciplinaires

Much has been published already in the world about prostitution. Lawyers, politicians, doctors, journalists, academics and churchmen have written on the subject. In South-East Asia, knowledge of the subject has benefited from surveys caused by the spread of AIDS in the region in the 1990s. Despite the sum of the work already done, the complexity of the phenomenon and its various forms requires a pluridisplinary approach, All the more so because many aspects of the phenomenon remain to be studied.

While most countries of Southeast Asia resist the classification of prostitution as an industry, or sex work as an acceptable occupation in national statistics, there is no doubt that millions of women in the region earn a livelihood from selling sexual services. To do this virtually all of these women are forced to leave their birthplaces and residences and migrate to places where they will have some anonymity. Often this migration is involuntary, and sometimes it involves cruel exploitation. This paper pulls together the limited data available to gain insights into the shadowy world of Asian prostitution. It concludes that while governments frequently crack down on women selling sex, they ignore the roles of male customers, and often protect the criminal elements who use kidnapping and violence to exploit the women. There is a need for legalization of the sex industry to protect women and expel criminals.

The study of prostitution in the Philippines, through the long period of time, shows some cycles of development of this phenomenon based on the integration of the archipelago to international colonial capitalism, the militarization of the territory through garrisons and huge American military bases and finally on aggressive public policies for the touristic development and the promotion of work abroad since the Marcos years until the present administration. Facing this sector, the legislation has fluctuated but could not reduce this activity. The explosion of AIDS epidemics in the last four years could launch a new national debate on prostitution.

The history of sex work in Indonesia is filled with contradictions and conflicts. Women from poor families were recruited by nobles to take the position of concubines to serve the twin roles of domestic and sexual servants. Foreign traders, soldiers and officials also exploited the opportunity to recruit poor women to maintain temporary households, and petty officials took on the role of pimps to organize sex workers for increasingly commercialised operations. The complaints of religious leaders from both the Christian churches of the colonisers and the Islamic and Hindu believers among indigenous people put pressure on the state to regulate or forbid sex work, largely unsuccessfully. In a detailed review of the history of prostitution up to the end of the New Order this article traces the transformation of sex work from a largely socially acceptable practice into a widely condemned, but begrudgingly accepted social reality.

Mobility is a distinctive feature of the world of prostitution since prostitutes often come from various areas to work in one city. In colonial Tonkin, the Northern part of Vietnam, there were Vietnamese, Chinese and even Japanese and European prostitutes. And, on the other hand, China was an important destination for Vietnamese prostitutes. This mobility, whether internal or external, was a challenge for the French colonial authorities who intended to fight against human trafficking. Focusing on the mobility of prostitutes to and from colonial Tonkin, this article puts back Vietnam within the more general context of prostitution in Southeast Asia.

Although technically illegal, sex work is widespread in Vietnam. Almost inexistent in Vietnam from 1975 to 1986, a booming prostitution followed the opening of the country, when the social yoke was loosened inducing a freedom of movement and to a more or less successful adaptation to the market economy. Even though this phenomenon was more easily perceptible in Saigon, Hanoi did not make exception. The following lines result from notes taken on the spot, this investigation was conducted in the capital city from 1994 to 2001.

Since prostitution for Thai has been much less studied that sex tourism, this article propose a brief history of sex work in Thailand, from the kingdom of Ayutthaya (14th-18th century) to the present time. The aim is first to highlight—as all over the world—the foremost prominence of the commercial aspect, prostitution being a trading exchange of a sexual service against payment. However, in present-day Thailand, and, at least for the last half-century, money is just like the true god (ngoen khue prachao) and the prospect to obtain more money tolerates any behavior and any corruption. Still to comprehend better the unusual development of prostitution in Thailand it is necessary to unveil the socio-cultural fertilizers. One of them could be the peculiar situation of the mae may, a term inappropriately translated by widow in bilingual dictionaries, following the first lexicographers of the Thai who were all Christian missionaries.

The fantasized image of Thai woman is largely widespread in western countries. Many Westerners travelling or living in Thailand share this representation. In parallel to this valorisation, more or less fantasized, of Thai woman, many of these men mention and reject the “masculine” behaviour of their fellow country women. “Independent”, “not taking care of themselves”, “in a constant competition” or “in no need of men”, they are assimilated to mutantes (Dorlin 2009) because they are questioning gender borders. Constructed and fantasized in opposition to Western women, Thai women seem to allow Western men to counter this Western sexual identity crisis. The geographic and cultural displacement of these Westerners enable themselves to valorise their masculinity when they enter in contact with a local woman described as “feminine”, “docile”, “modest” and “traditional”. The expatriation in Thailand thus allows a valorisation of the masculinity, and widely a social valorisation as well as an identity re-invention. This process uses the local culture, even if distant and exotic, to return to more traditional values within the couple, family and social interactions. This desire of elsewhere, of exotic, of a far-off culture and country enable, in this way, a kind of resistance to change.

Investigating the clientele of prostitutes in order to have a better knowledge of their expectations and practices, to reveal the reasons for their behaviour, is not easy. This penetration of the intimate sphere of the person contradicts deep desires to preserve anonymity and to remain faceless. They want to enjoy clean consciences, by denying any acknowledgement of personal responsibility. This is one of the reasons why clients, although key players in the prostitution industry, have not received the attention of social researchers. Feminists regard this gap as a deliberate omission due to the tacit acceptance of male privilege in the control of sexual practices. Studies focus much more on supply than on demand because of the moral stigma surrounding the subject. There are methodological difficulties in identifying the diversity and heterogeneity of clients. Through 38 interviews with local and foreign clients of Asian prostitutes in Indonesia, Thailand and Hong Kong, and the testimonies of 15 Indonesian prostitutes, this paper to identifies the motivations, justifications, and profiles of men paying for sex. In the West, the subject in itself is taboo so there are few rewards to declare oneself “the client of a prostitute”. Our interviews show similar aversions in Asia. Anonymity avoids shame and the redefinition of commercial payment into various alternative narratives building on the unequal status of the women in economic, social, and cultural terms protects the male sexual privilege.

Prostitution is studied in this article on the basis of a corpus of four Malaysian novels and six Malaysian short stories from the 1920th to the 1970th, written by four authors, namely A. Samad Said, Ahmad Rashid Talu, Marwilis Hj. Yusof and Hamzah Hussin. After introducing the authors and these literary works, the article analyses the different aspects of prostitution in the corpus (the prostitutes, the pimps [men or women], the clients, its legal status), which reflect to a large extent the reality. In most of these works moralistic and didactic intentions as well as the militant aspect can be perceived, seeking to awaken the conscience of the readers of the harmful effects and the root causes of prostitution and to show them how to fight to eradicate it.

For a couple of years now and thanks to its positioning between fiction and journalism, the Vietnamese tạp văn (essay), of which Cave (The bargirl) is an example, has allowed Nguyễn Việt Hà to describe lively and sometimes paradoxical fragments of social life. Humor is central to his texts. The type of humour used is diversion, but satire is also often used, which is an ancient tradition in Vietnam. It ridicules characters (classical or contemporary writers, television stars) social types, institutions or literary works.