Cambodia’s commercial sex industry has long been the subject of transnational concern, yet this enduring problematization has yielded little in the way of lasting ‘solutions.’ Central to constructions of Cambodia’s sex trafficking problem are stories – narrative and numerical – that are not entertainment or fact, respectively, but political and ideological discourses that structure social problems and their solutions while masquerading as unmediated. In this media ethnography, I thematically analyzed aid documentaries, websites, reports, and tax returns to explore how sex trafficking in Cambodia is constructed in aid discourses as a problem to be solved. I argue that anti-trafficking rhetoric, narrated over iconographies of Cambodia’s savagery, entangles notions of material and moral poverty. Documentaries construct Cambodian families as both broke and broken, and thus as giving rise to Cambodian sex trafficking’s central, archetypal dyad: the bad mother and the innocent daughter. I further articulate how the trope of the innocent daughter is contingent on her framing as a ‘sex slave.’ These reductive discursive constructions enable similarly oversimplified solutions. The solution to ‘bad mothers’ is ‘better parents,’ enacted through maternalistic and paternalistic interventions; the solution to ‘sex slavery’ is ‘freedom at all costs,’ articulated through raid and rescue interventions. I suggest that articulations of the civilizing mission run through anti-trafficking discourses and interventions, evidenced by their attempts to use numbers to render the complexities of sex trafficking knowable and therefore manageable, but also in their commitment to ‘developing' the Cambodian sex slave through rehabilitation programs that replace sex trafficking with more civilized, though still exploitative, forms of gendered labour. The ways in which sex trafficking in Cambodia is constructed in aid discourses as a problem to be solved therefore ensures the ongoing presence of the anti-trafficking apparatus in Cambodia and the ongoing exploitation and abuse of the Cambodian girls subjected to aid interventions. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/27759 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Seldon, Alana |
| Contributors | Biruk, Cal, Anthropology |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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