Beyond the Voluntary/ Forced Dichotomy

This paper looks at the dominant voluntary/forced dichotomy shaping understandings of sex work internationally. It argues that the distinction between forced and voluntary participation in sex work cannot account for or help explain the multiple and contradictory subjectivities some women embrace and the constrained agency they exhibit in sex work. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with sex workers in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, this paper shows how elements of individual choice and coercion are intricately intertwined in women’s experiences. For some women, working in the sex industry is a way of expanding life choices and livelihood strategies (see Law, 1997; Kempadoo, 1998a; Doezema, 2000). Indeed, some sex workers speak of constrained choice: they not only highlight the social and economic inequalities impacting on their lives as women in Cambodia, but also articulate their own self-determination. The dominant voluntary/forced prostitution dichotomy, with its binary oppo-sites, struggles to address such multiple subjectivities and divergent iden-tifications. In this paper, I describe some of the experiences recounted by women I interviewed in Sihanoukville, Cambodia in 2003 and illustrate some of the ways in which women become involved in sex work. I show how women working in the Cambodian sex industry embrace multiple and conflicting subjectivities as they simultaneously discuss structural constraints such as poverty and patriarchy and their own agency and self-determination. In addressing how structural factors interact with subjective choices, I exam-ine how women themselves conceive the complex issue of “choice.