The global sex industry has emerged as one of the most pressing and debated humanitarian concerns of our age. Much of the debate has centred on whether individuals working in the sex industry are victims of male sexual violence or liberated, labouring agents. Rather than weigh in on this debate, I explore the false opposition at its core through a focus on literary and filmic representations of the industry in Cambodia and Vietnam.

My aim is to acknowledge the symbolic force of sex work and the concrete conditions that lead to its prevalence within these contexts, drawing out the ambivalences that mark the sex industry under global imperialism, exploring the subjectivities of those who sell, buy, and facilitate paid sex, and interrogating the neocolonial frameworks in which discourses surrounding sex work, my own included, circulate. In this presentation, I will attempt to answer a deceptively simple question that has come up many times since I began this project ten years ago: why are you writing about that?

Dr Leslie Barnes is Associate Professor of French Studies in the ANU School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics and an HRC Internal Fellow in 2023.