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This project aims to:
- Explore the historical origins and contemporary transformations of the sex industry in Cambodia and examine the relationship between the size, structure and nature of sex work and larger transformations in the country's modern history.
- Explore women's agency in sex work and the complexity of life choices and agency available to women in Cambodia.
- Interrogate dominant understandings of sex work internationally, which focus on a free/forced dichotomy and its ability to account for sex workers' experiences.
Based on ethnographic research and interviews with sex workers in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, the research scrutinises dominant theorisations of the 'Third World prostitute' and attempts to enrich people’s understandings of women's agency in sex work. It aims to take a step towards developing a model of sex workers' experiences that combines an analysis of determination by social forces and women's determination as agents in their own lives.
This project is part of the broader struggle to resignify the place of sex workers internationally, especially in the complex interplay between structural constraints and determinants and women’s agency and self-determination. Its primary objective is to show that an awareness of women's agency does not mean that we have to ignore structural inequalities, grounded in gender or economics.
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