Sex entertainment in modernity: affective labor and negotiation of intimacy

Abstract

This thesis aims to understand how modernity influences affective labor in the sex entertainment business. It further examines the negotiation process between women working in the sex entertainment business and their customers, families, society, and themselves through affective labor. This study found that modernity increasingly creates a discontinuity of traditional norms, affecting women working in Chiang Mai’s sex entertainment businesses. Although women are still connected with their traditional lives in rural Thailand, their work causes an apparent break from their former lives. The difference between their “two” lives requires negation on different dimensions. “Duty-bound” negotiation is based on bun khun obligations and the responsibility to appear as a “good daughter” for their parents, the broader community, and society. Even though these processes are burdensome, they are rooted in deeply felt respect, appreciation, and love. “Location-bound” negotiation occurs in a modern working environment that requires adapting to customers’ demands for a more intimate, personalized, and authentic experience. These processes, although challenging, are marked by sanuk, sabai sabai, freedom (of choice), liberation, and self-determination. Within these processes, feelings of joy, pleasure, desire, and love are mixed with jealousy, sadness, and loneliness. The deterministic view that capitalism appropriated people’s emotions, alienating them from their feelings, is not apparent in women working in Chiang Mai’s sex entertainment. Women actively and consciously create bonds with their customers with authentic feelings and acts of care. Since modernity also blurred the line between one’s self at work and self in private life, affective labor efforts go beyond the bar and massage parlor without clear boundaries. Although the negotiation processes are either duty-bound or location-bound, the intimacy created in both also goes beyond these boundaries. A crucial finding of this study is that the intimacy created on different dimensions, either with their families, friends, broader Thai society, and their customers, is based on the Thai concept that people must “take care” dulae of each other. To understand work in Thailand’s sex entertainment, the creation of intimacy, which translates to dulae in the Thai context, is crucial as it ties together the issues of money, labor, and the need to care for someone and be taken care of. It allows women to negotiate with their families, the broader Thai society, and customers. Most importantly, it also allows women to negotiate with themselves, reassuring their status as “good daughters” or “good Thai women” in a stigmatized occupation. It further allows them to adapt to new forms of intimacy emerging in modernity, which take on new cultural meaning in Thailand.