Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Arunima Datta, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Young rural women in Southeast Asia are encouraged to migrate to urban centres for work or education, often excited as well by the possibilities of adopting an imagined urban lifestyle. Thousands of them will find employment as beer sellers; employment that is deemed more lucrative and less demanding than factory labour. In this presentation, I draw from the first phase of a participatory research project with rural-to-urban migrant beer sellers in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand to illuminate the heterogeneity of the beer selling industry in terms of labour practices and expectations of gendered performances within the context of macro-level political-economic phenomena and government policies and the micro-level implications on, and resistances of, individual beer seller’s bodies/lives. Beer sellers opine that their work is widely stigmatized due to its association with sex work and often families at home remain unaware of their daughters’ occupation. The presumed relationship, between beer selling and transactional sex, is reinforced by programs, policies, interventions, and research that generally classify beer promotion labour under the rubric of indirect sex work. Regardless of work setting (restaurants, beer gardens, nightclubs, karaoke bars), beer sellers are often subject to sexual harassment, physical violence (or threats thereof), coerced drinking, and the disapprobation of neighbours, family, and friends whether or not beer sellers actually engage in transactional sex with customers. Many migrant beer sellers reject these latter associations, and are determined to unsettle the boundaries between the binaries that inform these circulating discourses such as good girl/bad girl, rural/urban, and tradition/modern. Instead many of the migrant beer sellers I met are creating spaces for themselves in the messy borderlands in-between; taking pride in and demanding respect for their work, asserting control over their bodies, and claiming the rights to both a range of gender performances and to continued mobility between rural homes and urban settings.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Denise L. Spitzer, PhD, is a Professor in the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies at the University of Ottawa where she served as the Canada Research Chair in Gender, Migration and Health and a Principal Scientist in the Institute of Population Health for a decade. Her current program of research focuses on the impact of the global economy on immigrants, migrants and refugees in different parts of the globe and engages with critical perspectives of the body, transnationalism and constructions of identity; the impact of policy on health; community-based research and intersectional analysis. She has published in journals such as Gender & Society, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and The Canadian Journal of Public Health. Her edited collection, Engendering Migrant Health: Canadian Perspectives, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2011 and was recognized by the Women’s and Gender Studies Association in 2013 with a WGSRF Outstanding Scholarship citation.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you click on the “Register” button above to RSVP.