[Upcoming Seminar] Disjunctive Harmony: Life and Work of Foreign Spouses Engaging in Sex Work in Taiwan

Disjunctive Harmony: Life and Work of Foreign Spouses Engaging in Sex Work in Taiwan

Speaker: TSENG Hsunhui (Assistant Professor, Gender Studies Programme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Time: 12:30 p.m., 27 March, 2015 (Friday)

Venue: Room 401 Humanities Building, New Asia College, CUHK

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For the past decade in Taiwan, newspapers and TV news programmes have reported how the police have ferreted out marriage migrants from Southeast Asia and China engaging in sex work. Indeed, Taiwan has seen massage parlors and Karaoke clubs with hostesses bourgeoning in dark street corners after the influx of marriage migrants in the early 2000s. How should we interpret this phenomenon? Who are these foreign women? Why and how do they enter the sex industry? In this talk, Prof. Tseng Hsunhui will share her recent fieldwork in a karaoke snack restaurant featuring Vietnamese hostesses (yuenan dian, Vietnamese store) in mid-south Taiwan as an example to look into how the market of foreign-born spouses as sex workers was formed as well as to explore how these migrant women negotiate their multiple lives in the family as a mother, daughter, and sometimes, a wife, at the workplace as a worker, and in society as a citizen.

ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME.