DICIEMBRE 23 DEL AÑO

My first experience in the field was a b rie f one. I was living in Thailand on a reconnaissance trip to study Thai language and to flesh o u t the details o f my research topic on international politics. A w eekend away to an island near Bangkok (K oh Samet) initiated a dram atic and unexpected shift in my research focus from international politics tow ards gender and sexuality. T he following narrative highlights the ways that I initially viewed a particular kind o f enco un ter on the T hai beach scene.

I arrived on Koh Samet (an island resort about 5 hrs travel by bus/ boat from Bangkok) in the afternoon with my Scottish friend M ia from the guesthouse in Bangkok. We spent the afternoon searching fo r a Thai man named Dum, who M ia had been attracted to on her last visit to the island, and later chatting to one o f M ia ’s friends, A nn a. A n n a had been staying with her Thai boyfriend for one month on Koh Samet. Tater that night we went to meet A n n a and her boyfriend, Too, at a bar on the beach.

A s we sat in the bar th a t evening surrounded by T h a i men whom I found 'good looking', an d who wore much less clothing than m ost men in B a n g k o k (as people tend to do a t beach resorts) A n n a a sked ‘So U n d a , do y o u lik e T h a i m en?’ The question seemed innocuous enough, but in the context o f the bar a n d our earlier conversations that day when A n n a ha d repeatedly emphasised the se x u a l p a r t o f her relationship with N o o , the meaning was clear, she was a skin g i f I fo u n d T h a i men sexually attractive. Moreover, the implication was th a t i f I d id ‘like T h a i m e n ’ I had only to choose one fr o m the m any men a ll around me, since, as A n n a inferred, they were sexually available to any ‘Western ’ woman.

In the bar it was a plausible question, ‘D id I like T h a i m en?’, because the m en did look like they were sexually available (as did the tourist women). T he bar staff-— a ll T h a i m en— were variously engaged with tourist women (talking^ kissing^ dancing), a n d interm ittently doing a range o f peform ances such as fire dancing and juggling th a t emphasised the men ’s bodies a n d sexuality. In

these fir e dancing a n d juggling displays the p ow er o f the m e n ’s bodies was accentuated: shirts were off, muscles bulged, s k in glistened. The tourist women around me were lus fu lly coveting the men, a n d having long conversations with each other extolling the virtues o f T h a i m en— their physical pefection, se x u a l prowess a n d so on.

M y emotional responses to being included in this discourse, which 1 read to be bordering on imperialism (scantily clothed non-W estern O thers being lusted after by relatively wealthy, leisured Westerners) m ainly hinged on m y disidentification w ith the identity being presum ed of me. L i k e the instance recounted in the beginning o f the thesis (jewellery seller/jewellery buyer) where I was included in an ‘us ’ that was positioned in opposition to a ‘them ’ th a t I didn ’tfe e l fitte d the way that I perceived m y own identify, this situation, too, caused a disjuncture o f identification fo r me. I t was instances like this, where I felt like I was placed on the ‘wrong’ side o f a binary understanding oj identity, th a t prom pted me to critically reflect on the ways that identities in tourism encounters are delineated. Yet, a t the same time, the men were attractive to me— I wondered i f desire across these cultural an d economic axes o f difference would necessarily be about exploitation— so where did I f i t in the discourse o f desire, privilege and race ?

This scene rem inded me o f docum entaries I had seen about the sex tourism industry in Thailand (see for example: O 'R ourke, 1991), only the ones doing the ogling in this case were tourist w om en (not tourist men) and the ‘objects’ o f their desire were Thai men.

T he parallels betw een the versions o f overt sexuality I was seeing in the bar with tourist w om en coveting and discussing the bodies o f T hai m en and the sex w ork bars catering to male tourists interested in purchasing sexual services from Thai w om en in Bangkok were obvious. T he parallels that were m o st perceptible to me were the econom ic difference betw een the w om en and their sexual partners and the way that the w om en objectified the m en by focusing their conversations with o ther tourist w om en on the m en ’s sexual prow ess rather than o th er personal attributes. I read these encounters as exploitation o f the m en because as far as I could understand it, the w om en had little insight into Thai culture and appeared to be interested in the m en primarily only as sexual partners, a situation which, at the time, signalled to me that these encounters may be a form o f sex work.

Reading these encounters as similar to sex w ork and as exploitation stem m ed from assum ptions that the m en w ould be disadvantaged in their ow n com m unities by their interactions with tourist wom en. My reading o f the encounters was also underpinned by m oral judgem ents that I m ade at the time, w here I assum ed that appropriate behaviour involved a m ore ‘responsible’ concern for, and deeper engagem ent with, sexual partners than w hat I tho ugh t was being displayed in these encounters. M oreover, I assum ed that the m en were less pow erful in som e significant o r intrinsic sense simply because they were tourism workers in Thailand and their partners were tourists from developed countries. F o r these reasons, at that time, I could n o t perceive the m ore com plex pow er relations in the relationships that I now do.

Reflecting on my initial reactions to cross-cultural sexual encounters while writing a new research proposal led me to understand that my reactions to the relationships I had seen th at w eekend on K o h Samet were overlain by pow erful discourses o f morality situated in essentialist binaries. T he key discourses influencing my analysis and experience focused around the issues o f tourism in developing countries, sex across cultures and sex w ork raised in the literature I have reviewed in the previous chapter. Mere I w ant to reflect on how I experienced the reson ant pow er o f those discourses in the field w ork. I do this by examining som e o f the assum ptions em bedded in the recounted narrative (above), which was w ritten im m ediately after I returned to Australia from Bangkok and one m o n th after my trip to the island.

First, I assum ed there was a pre-existing pow er binary in w hich tourists were positioned as pow erful and tourism w orkers were positioned as powerless, and this assum ption underpinned my reactions to the relationships. N arratives o f tourists as pow erful agents o f change and ‘locals’ as recipients o f w hat are o ften fram ed as socially destructive impacts are abundant in the popular press and o n television in the form o f exposes o f tourism ’s ‘terrible’ effects on ‘innocent locals’.1 T hese discourses m ade m e m ore likely to read interactions betw een Thais and tourists as relationships o f exploitation because o f the assum ed binary o f pow erful to u rist/p o w erless local.

Second, I was influenced by assum ptions ab o u t sex across cultures, w hereby sex betw een people w here econom ic status, education and race is different is positioned as

bad in a hierarchy o f sexual activities (see for example: B ow m an, 1989). T he use o f the term ‘cross-cultural-relationship’ is indicative o f assum ptions about the significance o f difference around the axis o f race, education and econom y in sexual relationships. ‘Cross-cultural relationships’ are m uch m ore likely to be interrogated for signs o f exploitation o r m easured up against a com m ercial sex/non-com m ercial sex binary than ‘non-cross-cultural’ relationships. I was interested in critically analysing this assum ption and detailing its consequences by asking a nu m b er o f questions. F o r instance, why is it that a relationship betw een a Thai and an A ustralian is so easily labelled ‘cross-cultural’, yet a relationship betw een an Australian and a Canadian is not? W hy are the identities o f the people w ho have ‘cross-cultural’ relationships pinned dow n to their nationality or ethnicity? A re not all social actors connected w ith m any identification points, some stronger or weaker in different contexts? Are race and nationality som ehow m ore

authentic o r basic identification points than age class, sexual affiliation, or m any others one could name?

Third, and following on from the previous point, I realised that assum ptions about sex w ork are intertextually linked with assum ptions ab o u t cross-cultural sex and rom ance. In my initial readings o f relationships betw een T hai tourism workers and tourist w om en I was influenced by discourses that configure sexual relationships in a co m m e rc ial/n o n ­ com m ercial sex binary, with non com m ercial sex being the privileged term and com m ercial sex positioned as bad, exploitative, and illegitimate. I was looking for

See for example ‘Backpackers Inc’, June 10 2002, Sydney Morning Hera/d.

evidence o f gifts o r in-kind su p p o rt th at w ould p o in t to these relationships being a type o f sex w ork. ‘A m biguous’ sex w ork transactions betw een tourists and Thais are labelled by C ohen (1996) as ‘open-ended p ro stitu tio n ’. H e defines ‘open-ended p ro stitu tio n ’ encounters as relationships that:

...do not attain the...form of a purely emotional relationship, based on love and social exchange, but frequendy involve a considerable amount of ambiguity. They often feature simultaneously a component of economic exchange and one of feigned or intended social exchange or love, and tend to oscillate between an emphasis on each of these poles (Cohen,

1996: 264)

I later came to ask m yself w hat, exactly, it w ould have m eant if I had found such evidence, if I had been able to label the relationships ‘open-ended p ro stitu tio n ’ (Cohen, 1996)? It becam e clear to me th at the ascribed label ‘open-ended p ro stitu tio n ’ w ould have obscured o ther possibilities and ways o f interpreting the outcom es o f the encounters. It w ould have solidified a particular reading o f the relationships, that is, as com m ercial sex, devoid o f ‘real’ love or em otion, (i.e. the hegem onic narrative o f com m ercial sex).2 Such a reading w ould certainly have obscured oth er potential readings and understandings, for example, th at people establish and continue relationships in b o th com m ercial and non-com m ercial sexual encounters for a myriad o f reasons, and these reasons are no less im p o rtan t o r significant than an arbitrary m oral standpoint that could be taken (as is done w hen viewing relationships through a narrowly defined g o o d /b a d binary).

D eveloping the idea that alternative interpretations o f cross-cultural sexual encounters could potentially lead to m ore productive insights about subjectivity and pow er in out o f the way places led me to critically engage w ith the w ork o f post-structuralist fem inist and cultural geographers, as well as researchers from other disciplinary areas researching sex w ork (and especially sex w ork in Thailand) (see for example: A nderson, 1996, Askew, 1999, 2002, Law, 2000, M ahtani, 2002, M anderson, 1992, M ontgom ery, 2001). As detailed previously in the section Research Methodology: Feminist Research Practice,

these researchers reject the m oral fram ew orks o f g o o d /b a d sexuality, and seek to theorise subjectivity and pow er outside o f binary categories. This re-thinking process

2 The idea that there is a clear separation between relationships based ‘purely’ on economy and relationships based on some conceptualisation of ‘love’ and emotion is itself a social construction and has been critiqued by many scholars researching sexuality (see for example: Bell, 1994, Zatz, 1997).

significantly altered the kinds o f questions I was interested in asking while in the field, and re-fram ed m y approach to my research relationships with my research inform ants.