Postcard from Bangkok, December 08

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

Note: Rather unusually, this post has a political content that I usually keep for myself or for friends and close relatives. Politics is too serious to be discussed on the Internet and a 600-word post can only gloss over events, beliefs and concepts that would need books on their own. The ...

Sex Workers: Unwanted Rescues

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

This is a cross posting from Laura Agustín's blog, Border Thinking on Migration and Trafficking: Culture, Economy and Sex. It is worth circulating broadly in an age where everything is conflated and reduced to a black and white understdanting. Briefly, sex workers at the Barn Funn Brothel have been forcibly "rescued ...

When “good doers” don’t do any good

Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008

Bar Street, Siem Reap, Cambodia © peripheries IRIN reports how recent legislation against human trafficking introduced by the Cambodian government early this year, is shifting sex work from brothels to bars and karaokes leading to the development of new sexual behaviours increasing the spread of the HIV infection. Like Thailand, Cambodia's fight against ...

If I don’t pay her, she can’t be a sex worker, can she?

Saturday, October 18th, 2008

IRIN reports on African long haul truck drivers who entertain monogamous relationship with a girlfriend whilst they are on the road and their wife is a home. "I decided to have one girlfriend, because if you go out with so many women then you risk getting HIV or other diseases," ...

Geography of sex, geography of knowledge

Monday, September 1st, 2008

Thailand is a deeply conservative society where extra marital sex and sex amongst men is common, known, not as socially accepted as many Western observers would like to think and certainly rarely talked about in public. Despite a praised and recognized success in fighting a growing heterosexual HIV epidemics in the ...