To browse Academia. 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.
Although women are still connected with their traditional lives in rural Thailand, their work causes an apparent break from their former lives. Even though these processes are burdensome, they are rooted in deeply felt respect, appreciation, and love. 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. Women actively and consciously create bonds with their customers with authentic feelings and acts of care. Although the negotiation processes are either duty-bound or location-bound, the intimacy created in both also goes beyond these boundaries.
It allows women to negotiate with their families, the broader Thai society, and customers. It further allows them to adapt to new forms of intimacy emerging in modernity, which take on new cultural meaning in Thailand. Promising research from Thailand already highlights women in the sexual entertainment industry as being active participants in both intimate relationships and commercial transactions simultaneously.
Notably, they are neither victims nor alienated laborers, as some activist narratives assert. One result is that new forms of intimacy emerged, taking on new cultural meanings. Focusing on intimacy distances research about sex work away from western assumptions about the commodification and alienation of labor. This gives a more holistic understanding of the complexity of overlapping and intersecting dimensions of the work women perform in sex entertainment.
