My blood, sweat and tears: female sex workers in Cambodia - victims, vectors or agents?

Abstract

This thesis sets out to explore and demystify two dominant images of female sex workers produced by hegemonic discourses of our period: one a ruined, victimised woman; the other a destroying body that is a public health menace. It challenges these discourses of alterity, of the sex worker as “other” and their antithetical constructions of women’s agency. ... My Blood, Sweat and Tears is part of the broader struggle to resignify the place of sex workers internationally, especially in relation to the complex interplay between structural constraints and determinants and women’s agency and self-determination. Its central conclusion is that an awareness of women’s agency does not mean that we have to ignore structural inequalities, grounded in gender or economics.