A01=Leslie Barnes
ambivalence
Author_Leslie Barnes
Category=ATFA
Category=DSBH5
Category=DSBJ
Category=DSK
Category=JBFW
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender
imperialism
labour
migration
sex work
Southeast Asia
Product details
- ISBN 9781399532884
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Examining the ambivalences that mark Southeast Asian sex industries under global imperialism, this book explores the multi-layered subjectivities of sex workers, procurers and clients, and interrogates the frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work circulate. Engaged with debates concerning the status of transactional sex, Leslie Barnes explores the symbolic force and concrete conditions of sex work in Cambodia and Vietnam, considering how these debates and the figures they ensnare are mediated by fiction and creative nonfiction. The book's scenes of ambivalence show how the aesthetic treatment of sex work stretches the paradigms we use to make sense not only of sex work, but also of art, the evidentiary status of testimony and the spectacles of pleasure and suffering. Contesting essentialism and authenticity, and working to suspend judgement, these scenes encourage a re-examination of what we think we know about sex work, how we know it and what we do with that knowledge.
Leslie Barnes is an Associate Professor of French Studies at the Australian National University. She is author of Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (2014) and co-editor of The Cinema of Rithy Panh: Everything Has a Soul (2021).
