Eight people, including six women of East Asian descent, at three massage spas were killed on 16 ... more Eight people, including six women of East Asian descent, at three massage spas were killed on 16 March 2021 in Atlanta, USA by a 21-year-old White man who sought to eliminate ‘temptation’ for a sex addiction he claimed to experience. This mass killing compelled public discussion about the hypersexualisation of Asian women in White, Western contexts and the risks faced by Asian women in ‘intimate labour’. This occurred alongside a dialogical shift towards sex worker rights in public and media discourses, yet these public dialogues appeared to occur alongside each other, rather than in interaction with each other. In between these dialogues remained questions about the legacies of hypersexualisation and what this means for Asian women in sex work, an industry that resists convenient understandings of desire and power and where hypersexuality may be simultaneously contested and deployed. This article bridges these dialogues to explore how a sex worker rights framework can engage with questions of race, hypersexualisation and erotic capital for Asian women in sex work. This is followed by an analysis of responses to hypersexualisation within Asian diasporic communities, and the implications for a more inclusive sex worker rights movement.
Hong Kong offers a unique laboratory for housing studies given its notoriety for housing inequali... more Hong Kong offers a unique laboratory for housing studies given its notoriety for housing inequalities. This study utilized participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and photovoice to explore place-making practices in one type of illegalized housing, the residential use of industrial buildings. In contrast to studies of housing inequalities that have typically focused on marginalized communities, we found that the use of industrial buildings was adopted by educated, ‘local’ (i.e. ethnically Chinese) Hong Kongers who aspired towards socio-economic mobility. Place-making required spatial adaptations to sub-standard living environments and acclimation to routine, ongoing fears of detection from law enforcement. We argue that illegality is not necessarily an impediment to place-making, but may serve to mark the temporariness of residential spaces in industrial buildings, a temporariness that accommodates residents’ aspirational socio-economic trajectories more effectively than formal housing markets. In our study, the meaning of a place was not necessarily tied to rootedness or permanence, but rather a liminal temporality enforced by illegality.
International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2022
Can methods travel the way migrants do? We reflect on this question through the development of wh... more Can methods travel the way migrants do? We reflect on this question through the development of what we call ‘virtual participatory video’ or the delivery of participatory video methods for migrant domestic workers and asylum-seekers in Hong Kong – transnationally, online and over Zoom during the pandemic in 2020. The pandemic realities that we grappled with as migration studies scholars and participatory video practitioners reflect realities that working-class and precarious migrants were routinely required to navigate long before the pandemic (e.g., family separation, restriction of personal mobility, maintaining connection through technology). Therefore, we paid particular attention to the challenges and opportunities posed by virtual participatory video, particularly on resultant changes to attention, creativity, and relationality (core tenets of face-to-face participatory video) when time and space are, by necessity, fragmented. The fragmentation of time and space in virtual participatory video entailed a greater presence of migrant realities and demands into the method itself, perhaps most notably a tangible sense of competing demands that participants were expected to negotiate at any particular moment. Attentiveness to competing demands can be particularly valuable when working with members of communities that may experience varying forms of scarcity in relation to time or space, such as migrant domestic workers or asylum-seekers. Re-thinking fragmentation as part of the texture of virtual participatory video illustrated the durability of creativity when day-to-day realities are permitted to intrude on learning over Zoom.
This article explores the concept of biographical work as a sustained pursuit during interviews w... more This article explores the concept of biographical work as a sustained pursuit during interviews with persons engaging in stigmatized and criminalized work. Based on interviews with women engaging in sex work and intimate economies in Hong Kong, the article examines the research interview as an interactional and institutional encounter where interviewer and interviewee jointly create meaning and articulate experiences to produce credibility. Relying on the sex workers’ rights framework and its adjacent debates, the article argues that social theory and critique construct reality by shaping public discourse and moral sensitivities in institutional encounters and act as moral resources that inform positionalities. The article argues for the importance of attending to both interactional and institutional demands made by interview encounters in data interpretation.
This paper explores the intercorporeal dimensions of dehumanization in intimate labor through the... more This paper explores the intercorporeal dimensions of dehumanization in intimate labor through the control of food for domestic workers by employers. The concept of dehumanization, or “the denial of full humanness to others” (Haslam, 2006) offers a useful framework for understanding the spectrum of harms that workers may experience, including those that may be legible as criminal offenses as well as harms that may be woven into the day‐to‐day management of private households. We argue that food insecurity offers a fruitful lens for understanding how intercorporeal relations are shaped through workers' bodies. This analysis starts with an examination of dehumanizing food practices, based on interviews with 48 Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. This is followed by an analysis of domestic workers' resistance to dehumanization and concludes with a discussion of the potential of food practices in rehumanizing domestic work.
This paper examines women’s movement between sex work and intimate economies, with a specific foc... more This paper examines women’s movement between sex work and intimate economies, with a specific focus on how non-Chinese women in Hong Kong leverage intimacy as a means of managing legal and socio-economic precarity within various institutional and individual constraints. To capture the diversity of women’s experiences, we use the term ‘intimate-material exchanges’ to broadly refer to compensation or material support provided in exchange for sexually intimate relations. We ground our analysis of the interactional processes involved in intimate-material exchanges in 39 interviews with ethnically non-Chinese women and men in Hong Kong. For the women in this study, intimate-material exchanges were shaped by migration and distinguished by pragmatism, strategy and intentionality that involved adapting, improvising and experimenting with sexual scripts in an ambiguous legal space in order to derive maximum material benefit. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of migration and intimate-material exchanges for sex worker rights.
This paper explores the practice and presence of enchantment (Bennett, 2001) in the project Susta... more This paper explores the practice and presence of enchantment (Bennett, 2001) in the project Sustainable Sunday Couture which featured upcycled gowns designed by Elpie Malicsi, a Filipino domestic worker based in Hong Kong. We analyse the creative transformation of space, materials and labour in catalyzing affective, intellectual and ethical disruptions for public audiences and the new potentialities that may contribute to the respect and recognition of domestic workers’ creative contributions in Hong Kong. In exploring the creative transformation of migrant labour into creative communities and waste into fashion, we are considering the transformation of that which is foundational to but often under-recognized in the operation of the city. In doing so, we examine the potential and risks of enchantment in contributing to social change. The ethics of enchantment, in contrast to the ethics in enchantment, is perhaps most salient when the locus for enchantment is situated within a context of inequality. We argue that any analysis of the practice of enchantment must be firmly embedded in an analysis of power and social difference, particularly when understanding the effect of enchantment in social change efforts.
Questions about payment and what it signifies, lie at the heart of feminist debates concerning th... more Questions about payment and what it signifies, lie at the heart of feminist debates concerning the morality and legitimacy of sex work. Yet the materialities of payment still remain interestingly under-explored in sex work research. This article addresses this gap by examining immigrant, migrant and racialized sex workers’ pricing practices in Vancouver, Canada and Melbourne, Australia. Determining one’s prices or rates in the sex industry was not a neutral, market-driven calculation for many workers, but was infused with strong ideas about safety, risk, experiential knowledge and the specificities of sex work. Analysing prices and pricing practices through a practice theory lens offers an opportunity to re-think the role of choice in feminist debates about sex work, by highlighting the decisions workers make on a day-to-day basis and capturing the myriad knowledges gained more commonly through experience rather than instruction.
In this article, we explore the reflexive use of emotion in understanding emerging relational rhy... more In this article, we explore the reflexive use of emotion in understanding emerging relational rhythms in participatory video. The focus of our analysis is the Visualizing the Voices of Migrant Women Workers project, which involved a series of eight video-making workshops from February–April 2017 in Hong Kong for over 40 domestic workers, asylum seekers, and ethnic minority participants. The emotions that were key to navigating relational rhythms central to this creative space were (1) feelings of discomfort to understand relations between the workshop participants and the facilitation team, (2) gratitude to assess the ‘chemistry’ or relations between workshop participants and (3) trepidation to re-write participants' relations with the city of Hong Kong. There is an important opportunity to explore the role of emotion in analysing relational rhythms in PV practice, in order to nurture creative solidarities and create new ethical potentialities.
Intersectionality attends to the interactions between social difference and power, although theor... more Intersectionality attends to the interactions between social difference and power, although theoretical models vary in their emphasis on one or the other. Difference-centred models often distinguish between processes of constructing social difference, systems that institutionalize social difference and identities that include social difference. This article discusses the analytical expectations that can emerge in intersectional research that focus on difference, by analysing the use and construction of difference by im/migrant and racialized women in sex work. The first analytical expectation is the distinction between salience and difference when starting from the lived realities and voices of individuals, groups and communities. The second analytical expectation concerns the interaction between two intersectional methodologies, between identities and lived experiences, and processes of constructing difference.
In 2014, the Refugee Union – the only asylum-seeker-led organisation in Hong Kong – organised an ... more In 2014, the Refugee Union – the only asylum-seeker-led organisation in Hong Kong – organised an eight-month-long protest against assistance policies and practices which they argued dehumanised and jeopardised their dignity and survival. Central to this public protest, termed ‘Refugee Occupy’, was the transformation of a traditional mechanism for asylum-seeker containment – the refugee camp – into a vehicle for asylum-seeker voice, participation and resistance. In this article, we discuss the asylum-seeker assistance policies and practices over the last decade that have resulted in a borderless refugee camp in Hong Kong. We explore the asylum-seekers’ use of the camp concept and its spatial and political transformation into an instrument for asylum-seeker resistance and political engagement. We conclude by situating the Refugee Union’s formation alongside other migrant-led social movements in Hong Kong and globally.
The idea of ‘exiting’ the sex industry plays a powerful symbolic role in the feminist debates aro... more The idea of ‘exiting’ the sex industry plays a powerful symbolic role in the feminist debates around the morality, legitimacy and regulation of sex work. Drawing on interviews with 39 women sex workers in Australia and Canada, we explore three key contrasts between dominant narratives and interventions that frame ‘exiting’ as escape from trauma or exploitation, and sex workers’ assessments of ‘exiting’ as a personal or professional strategy. First, we explore sex workers’ perceptions of sex work as temporary work. Second, we analyse the symbiosis between exit plans and current work practices. Third, we examine workers’ assessment of the value of ‘exiting’ sex work in the context of changing market forces within the sex industry, the ‘square’ labour market (or non-sex work sectors) and exiting interventions (i.e. programmes to assist workers in leaving sex work).
Korean women sex workers have attracted attention from Australian border security, South Korean g... more Korean women sex workers have attracted attention from Australian border security, South Korean government officials and Korean-Australian communities. This article considers how the bodies of these women have become the ‘iconic sites’ (Luibhéid, 2002: ix–xxvii) on which the South Korean government and immigrant Korean-Australian communities perform ‘national values’. Within Korean-Australian communities, Korean sex workers have been perceived as threats to the immigrant project of socio-economic mobility and ‘legitimate’ citizenship. We consider the silence that is desired of sex workers within immigrant communities and how this can be co-opted by anti-trafficking discourses that are still predicated on the helpless, voiceless female victim.
The role of borders in managing sex work is a valuable site for analysing the relationship betwee... more The role of borders in managing sex work is a valuable site for analysing the relationship between criminal justice and migration administration functions. For the purposes of this article, we are concerned with how generalized concerns around trafficking manifest in specific interactions between immigration officials and women travellers. To this end, this article contributes to a greater understanding of the micro-politics of border control and the various contradictions at work in the everyday performance of the border. It uses an intersectional analysis of the decision making of immigration officers at the border to understand how social differences become conflated with risk, how different social locations amplify what is read as risky sexuality and how sexuality is constructed in migration. What the interviews in our research have demonstrated is that, while the border is a poor site for identifying cases of trafficking into the sex industry, it is a site of significant social sorting where various intersections of intelligence-led profiling and everyday stereotyping of women, sex work and vulnerability play out.
Ingat: An Anthology of Works by Migrant Domestic Worker Creatives in Hong Kong is a collection of... more Ingat: An Anthology of Works by Migrant Domestic Worker Creatives in Hong Kong is a collection of creative writing, poetry, photography and visual art by members of the Migrant Writers of Hong Kong and Lensational. The collection was edited by Yvonne Yu, Christine Vicera and Julie Ham, designed by Daniella Bilo and published with Small Tune Press. The anthology considers the various meanings of ingat in Tagalog and Bahasa – to remember, carefulness, to say goodbye, caution, and to take care of. The book’s design evokes the balikbayan box familiar to many Filipino families and an iconic symbol of the care that migrant domestic workers send across borders to loved ones in their countries of origin. We hope that readers will receive the anthology in the same way that families receive balikbayan boxes, that is, with an understanding of the thought and care that has been put into the contents within.
Public discourses around migrant sex workers are often more confident about what migrant sex work... more Public discourses around migrant sex workers are often more confident about what migrant sex workers signify morally but are less clear about who the ‘migrant’ is. Based on interviews with immigrant, migrant and racialized sex workers in Vancouver, Canada and Melbourne, Australia, Sex Work, Immigration and Social Difference challenges the ‘migrant sex worker’ category by investigating the experiences of women who are often assumed to be ‘migrant sex workers’ in Australia and Canada.
Many ‘migrant sex workers’ in Melbourne and Vancouver are in fact, naturalized citizens or permanent residents, whose involvement in the sex industry intersects with diverse ideas and experiences of citizenship in Australia and Canada. This book examines how immigrant, migrant and racialized sex workers in Vancouver and Melbourne wield or negotiate ideas of illegality and legality to obtain desired outcomes in their day-to-day work.
Sex work continues to be the subject of fierce debate in the public sphere, at the policy level, and within research discourses. This study interrogates these perceptions of the ‘migrant sex worker’ by presenting the lived realities of women who embody or experience dimensions of this category. This book is interdisciplinary and will appeal to those engaged in criminology, sociology, law, and women’s studies.
The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is concerned with the various relatio... more The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is concerned with the various relationships between migration, crime and victimization that have informed a wide criminological scholarship often driven by some of the original lines of inquiry of the Chicago School. Historically, migration and crime came to be the device by which Criminology and cognate fields sought to tackle issues of race and ethnicity, often in highly problematic ways. However, in the contemporary period this body of scholarship is inspiring scholars to produce significant evidence that speaks to some of the biggest public policy questions and debunks many dominant mythologies around the criminality of migrants.
The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is also concerned with the theoretical, empirical and policy knots found in the relationship between regular and irregular migration, offending and victimization, the processes and impact of criminalization, and the changing role of criminal justice systems in the regulation and enforcement of international mobility and borders. The Handbook is focused on the migratory ‘fault lines’ between the Global North and Global South, which have produced new or accelerated sites of state control, constructed irregular migration as a crime and security problem, and mobilized ideological and coercive powers usually reserved for criminal or military threats.
Offering a strong international focus and comprehensive coverage of a wide range of border, criminal justice and migration-related issues, this book is an important contribution to criminology and migration studies and will be essential reading for academics, students and practitioners interested in this field
Eight people, including six women of East Asian descent, at three massage spas were killed on 16 ... more Eight people, including six women of East Asian descent, at three massage spas were killed on 16 March 2021 in Atlanta, USA by a 21-year-old White man who sought to eliminate ‘temptation’ for a sex addiction he claimed to experience. This mass killing compelled public discussion about the hypersexualisation of Asian women in White, Western contexts and the risks faced by Asian women in ‘intimate labour’. This occurred alongside a dialogical shift towards sex worker rights in public and media discourses, yet these public dialogues appeared to occur alongside each other, rather than in interaction with each other. In between these dialogues remained questions about the legacies of hypersexualisation and what this means for Asian women in sex work, an industry that resists convenient understandings of desire and power and where hypersexuality may be simultaneously contested and deployed. This article bridges these dialogues to explore how a sex worker rights framework can engage with questions of race, hypersexualisation and erotic capital for Asian women in sex work. This is followed by an analysis of responses to hypersexualisation within Asian diasporic communities, and the implications for a more inclusive sex worker rights movement.
Hong Kong offers a unique laboratory for housing studies given its notoriety for housing inequali... more Hong Kong offers a unique laboratory for housing studies given its notoriety for housing inequalities. This study utilized participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and photovoice to explore place-making practices in one type of illegalized housing, the residential use of industrial buildings. In contrast to studies of housing inequalities that have typically focused on marginalized communities, we found that the use of industrial buildings was adopted by educated, ‘local’ (i.e. ethnically Chinese) Hong Kongers who aspired towards socio-economic mobility. Place-making required spatial adaptations to sub-standard living environments and acclimation to routine, ongoing fears of detection from law enforcement. We argue that illegality is not necessarily an impediment to place-making, but may serve to mark the temporariness of residential spaces in industrial buildings, a temporariness that accommodates residents’ aspirational socio-economic trajectories more effectively than formal housing markets. In our study, the meaning of a place was not necessarily tied to rootedness or permanence, but rather a liminal temporality enforced by illegality.
International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 2022
Can methods travel the way migrants do? We reflect on this question through the development of wh... more Can methods travel the way migrants do? We reflect on this question through the development of what we call ‘virtual participatory video’ or the delivery of participatory video methods for migrant domestic workers and asylum-seekers in Hong Kong – transnationally, online and over Zoom during the pandemic in 2020. The pandemic realities that we grappled with as migration studies scholars and participatory video practitioners reflect realities that working-class and precarious migrants were routinely required to navigate long before the pandemic (e.g., family separation, restriction of personal mobility, maintaining connection through technology). Therefore, we paid particular attention to the challenges and opportunities posed by virtual participatory video, particularly on resultant changes to attention, creativity, and relationality (core tenets of face-to-face participatory video) when time and space are, by necessity, fragmented. The fragmentation of time and space in virtual participatory video entailed a greater presence of migrant realities and demands into the method itself, perhaps most notably a tangible sense of competing demands that participants were expected to negotiate at any particular moment. Attentiveness to competing demands can be particularly valuable when working with members of communities that may experience varying forms of scarcity in relation to time or space, such as migrant domestic workers or asylum-seekers. Re-thinking fragmentation as part of the texture of virtual participatory video illustrated the durability of creativity when day-to-day realities are permitted to intrude on learning over Zoom.
This article explores the concept of biographical work as a sustained pursuit during interviews w... more This article explores the concept of biographical work as a sustained pursuit during interviews with persons engaging in stigmatized and criminalized work. Based on interviews with women engaging in sex work and intimate economies in Hong Kong, the article examines the research interview as an interactional and institutional encounter where interviewer and interviewee jointly create meaning and articulate experiences to produce credibility. Relying on the sex workers’ rights framework and its adjacent debates, the article argues that social theory and critique construct reality by shaping public discourse and moral sensitivities in institutional encounters and act as moral resources that inform positionalities. The article argues for the importance of attending to both interactional and institutional demands made by interview encounters in data interpretation.
This paper explores the intercorporeal dimensions of dehumanization in intimate labor through the... more This paper explores the intercorporeal dimensions of dehumanization in intimate labor through the control of food for domestic workers by employers. The concept of dehumanization, or “the denial of full humanness to others” (Haslam, 2006) offers a useful framework for understanding the spectrum of harms that workers may experience, including those that may be legible as criminal offenses as well as harms that may be woven into the day‐to‐day management of private households. We argue that food insecurity offers a fruitful lens for understanding how intercorporeal relations are shaped through workers' bodies. This analysis starts with an examination of dehumanizing food practices, based on interviews with 48 Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. This is followed by an analysis of domestic workers' resistance to dehumanization and concludes with a discussion of the potential of food practices in rehumanizing domestic work.
This paper examines women’s movement between sex work and intimate economies, with a specific foc... more This paper examines women’s movement between sex work and intimate economies, with a specific focus on how non-Chinese women in Hong Kong leverage intimacy as a means of managing legal and socio-economic precarity within various institutional and individual constraints. To capture the diversity of women’s experiences, we use the term ‘intimate-material exchanges’ to broadly refer to compensation or material support provided in exchange for sexually intimate relations. We ground our analysis of the interactional processes involved in intimate-material exchanges in 39 interviews with ethnically non-Chinese women and men in Hong Kong. For the women in this study, intimate-material exchanges were shaped by migration and distinguished by pragmatism, strategy and intentionality that involved adapting, improvising and experimenting with sexual scripts in an ambiguous legal space in order to derive maximum material benefit. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of migration and intimate-material exchanges for sex worker rights.
This paper explores the practice and presence of enchantment (Bennett, 2001) in the project Susta... more This paper explores the practice and presence of enchantment (Bennett, 2001) in the project Sustainable Sunday Couture which featured upcycled gowns designed by Elpie Malicsi, a Filipino domestic worker based in Hong Kong. We analyse the creative transformation of space, materials and labour in catalyzing affective, intellectual and ethical disruptions for public audiences and the new potentialities that may contribute to the respect and recognition of domestic workers’ creative contributions in Hong Kong. In exploring the creative transformation of migrant labour into creative communities and waste into fashion, we are considering the transformation of that which is foundational to but often under-recognized in the operation of the city. In doing so, we examine the potential and risks of enchantment in contributing to social change. The ethics of enchantment, in contrast to the ethics in enchantment, is perhaps most salient when the locus for enchantment is situated within a context of inequality. We argue that any analysis of the practice of enchantment must be firmly embedded in an analysis of power and social difference, particularly when understanding the effect of enchantment in social change efforts.
Questions about payment and what it signifies, lie at the heart of feminist debates concerning th... more Questions about payment and what it signifies, lie at the heart of feminist debates concerning the morality and legitimacy of sex work. Yet the materialities of payment still remain interestingly under-explored in sex work research. This article addresses this gap by examining immigrant, migrant and racialized sex workers’ pricing practices in Vancouver, Canada and Melbourne, Australia. Determining one’s prices or rates in the sex industry was not a neutral, market-driven calculation for many workers, but was infused with strong ideas about safety, risk, experiential knowledge and the specificities of sex work. Analysing prices and pricing practices through a practice theory lens offers an opportunity to re-think the role of choice in feminist debates about sex work, by highlighting the decisions workers make on a day-to-day basis and capturing the myriad knowledges gained more commonly through experience rather than instruction.
In this article, we explore the reflexive use of emotion in understanding emerging relational rhy... more In this article, we explore the reflexive use of emotion in understanding emerging relational rhythms in participatory video. The focus of our analysis is the Visualizing the Voices of Migrant Women Workers project, which involved a series of eight video-making workshops from February–April 2017 in Hong Kong for over 40 domestic workers, asylum seekers, and ethnic minority participants. The emotions that were key to navigating relational rhythms central to this creative space were (1) feelings of discomfort to understand relations between the workshop participants and the facilitation team, (2) gratitude to assess the ‘chemistry’ or relations between workshop participants and (3) trepidation to re-write participants' relations with the city of Hong Kong. There is an important opportunity to explore the role of emotion in analysing relational rhythms in PV practice, in order to nurture creative solidarities and create new ethical potentialities.
Intersectionality attends to the interactions between social difference and power, although theor... more Intersectionality attends to the interactions between social difference and power, although theoretical models vary in their emphasis on one or the other. Difference-centred models often distinguish between processes of constructing social difference, systems that institutionalize social difference and identities that include social difference. This article discusses the analytical expectations that can emerge in intersectional research that focus on difference, by analysing the use and construction of difference by im/migrant and racialized women in sex work. The first analytical expectation is the distinction between salience and difference when starting from the lived realities and voices of individuals, groups and communities. The second analytical expectation concerns the interaction between two intersectional methodologies, between identities and lived experiences, and processes of constructing difference.
In 2014, the Refugee Union – the only asylum-seeker-led organisation in Hong Kong – organised an ... more In 2014, the Refugee Union – the only asylum-seeker-led organisation in Hong Kong – organised an eight-month-long protest against assistance policies and practices which they argued dehumanised and jeopardised their dignity and survival. Central to this public protest, termed ‘Refugee Occupy’, was the transformation of a traditional mechanism for asylum-seeker containment – the refugee camp – into a vehicle for asylum-seeker voice, participation and resistance. In this article, we discuss the asylum-seeker assistance policies and practices over the last decade that have resulted in a borderless refugee camp in Hong Kong. We explore the asylum-seekers’ use of the camp concept and its spatial and political transformation into an instrument for asylum-seeker resistance and political engagement. We conclude by situating the Refugee Union’s formation alongside other migrant-led social movements in Hong Kong and globally.
The idea of ‘exiting’ the sex industry plays a powerful symbolic role in the feminist debates aro... more The idea of ‘exiting’ the sex industry plays a powerful symbolic role in the feminist debates around the morality, legitimacy and regulation of sex work. Drawing on interviews with 39 women sex workers in Australia and Canada, we explore three key contrasts between dominant narratives and interventions that frame ‘exiting’ as escape from trauma or exploitation, and sex workers’ assessments of ‘exiting’ as a personal or professional strategy. First, we explore sex workers’ perceptions of sex work as temporary work. Second, we analyse the symbiosis between exit plans and current work practices. Third, we examine workers’ assessment of the value of ‘exiting’ sex work in the context of changing market forces within the sex industry, the ‘square’ labour market (or non-sex work sectors) and exiting interventions (i.e. programmes to assist workers in leaving sex work).
Korean women sex workers have attracted attention from Australian border security, South Korean g... more Korean women sex workers have attracted attention from Australian border security, South Korean government officials and Korean-Australian communities. This article considers how the bodies of these women have become the ‘iconic sites’ (Luibhéid, 2002: ix–xxvii) on which the South Korean government and immigrant Korean-Australian communities perform ‘national values’. Within Korean-Australian communities, Korean sex workers have been perceived as threats to the immigrant project of socio-economic mobility and ‘legitimate’ citizenship. We consider the silence that is desired of sex workers within immigrant communities and how this can be co-opted by anti-trafficking discourses that are still predicated on the helpless, voiceless female victim.
The role of borders in managing sex work is a valuable site for analysing the relationship betwee... more The role of borders in managing sex work is a valuable site for analysing the relationship between criminal justice and migration administration functions. For the purposes of this article, we are concerned with how generalized concerns around trafficking manifest in specific interactions between immigration officials and women travellers. To this end, this article contributes to a greater understanding of the micro-politics of border control and the various contradictions at work in the everyday performance of the border. It uses an intersectional analysis of the decision making of immigration officers at the border to understand how social differences become conflated with risk, how different social locations amplify what is read as risky sexuality and how sexuality is constructed in migration. What the interviews in our research have demonstrated is that, while the border is a poor site for identifying cases of trafficking into the sex industry, it is a site of significant social sorting where various intersections of intelligence-led profiling and everyday stereotyping of women, sex work and vulnerability play out.
Ingat: An Anthology of Works by Migrant Domestic Worker Creatives in Hong Kong is a collection of... more Ingat: An Anthology of Works by Migrant Domestic Worker Creatives in Hong Kong is a collection of creative writing, poetry, photography and visual art by members of the Migrant Writers of Hong Kong and Lensational. The collection was edited by Yvonne Yu, Christine Vicera and Julie Ham, designed by Daniella Bilo and published with Small Tune Press. The anthology considers the various meanings of ingat in Tagalog and Bahasa – to remember, carefulness, to say goodbye, caution, and to take care of. The book’s design evokes the balikbayan box familiar to many Filipino families and an iconic symbol of the care that migrant domestic workers send across borders to loved ones in their countries of origin. We hope that readers will receive the anthology in the same way that families receive balikbayan boxes, that is, with an understanding of the thought and care that has been put into the contents within.
Public discourses around migrant sex workers are often more confident about what migrant sex work... more Public discourses around migrant sex workers are often more confident about what migrant sex workers signify morally but are less clear about who the ‘migrant’ is. Based on interviews with immigrant, migrant and racialized sex workers in Vancouver, Canada and Melbourne, Australia, Sex Work, Immigration and Social Difference challenges the ‘migrant sex worker’ category by investigating the experiences of women who are often assumed to be ‘migrant sex workers’ in Australia and Canada.
Many ‘migrant sex workers’ in Melbourne and Vancouver are in fact, naturalized citizens or permanent residents, whose involvement in the sex industry intersects with diverse ideas and experiences of citizenship in Australia and Canada. This book examines how immigrant, migrant and racialized sex workers in Vancouver and Melbourne wield or negotiate ideas of illegality and legality to obtain desired outcomes in their day-to-day work.
Sex work continues to be the subject of fierce debate in the public sphere, at the policy level, and within research discourses. This study interrogates these perceptions of the ‘migrant sex worker’ by presenting the lived realities of women who embody or experience dimensions of this category. This book is interdisciplinary and will appeal to those engaged in criminology, sociology, law, and women’s studies.
The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is concerned with the various relatio... more The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is concerned with the various relationships between migration, crime and victimization that have informed a wide criminological scholarship often driven by some of the original lines of inquiry of the Chicago School. Historically, migration and crime came to be the device by which Criminology and cognate fields sought to tackle issues of race and ethnicity, often in highly problematic ways. However, in the contemporary period this body of scholarship is inspiring scholars to produce significant evidence that speaks to some of the biggest public policy questions and debunks many dominant mythologies around the criminality of migrants.
The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is also concerned with the theoretical, empirical and policy knots found in the relationship between regular and irregular migration, offending and victimization, the processes and impact of criminalization, and the changing role of criminal justice systems in the regulation and enforcement of international mobility and borders. The Handbook is focused on the migratory ‘fault lines’ between the Global North and Global South, which have produced new or accelerated sites of state control, constructed irregular migration as a crime and security problem, and mobilized ideological and coercive powers usually reserved for criminal or military threats.
Offering a strong international focus and comprehensive coverage of a wide range of border, criminal justice and migration-related issues, this book is an important contribution to criminology and migration studies and will be essential reading for academics, students and practitioners interested in this field
This chapter explores the linkages between knowledge production and cultural production through c... more This chapter explores the linkages between knowledge production and cultural production through creative works produced by migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong, a global city characterized by diverse and creative domestic worker communities. Through creative works produced by migrant domestic workers, such as video, photography, writing, costume-making and craft-making, this chapter investigates the knowledges that emerge about labour migration, and the work that stories and art do in local and global discourses. In doing so, we offer a theoretical toolkit, grounded in decolonial aesthetics, for stakeholders involved in arts-based initiatives about migrant worker rights. More specifically, we explore the role of decolonial aesthetics in contributing to social change for migrant workers. We argue that collaborating on creative endeavours with migrant domestic worker communities requires an astute understanding of the structural context in which creative labour emerges, and the interactions between narratives driven by migrant domestic workers and narratives tailored for diverse publics in Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong, private, intimate spheres such as households are shaped by transnational circuits o... more In Hong Kong, private, intimate spheres such as households are shaped by transnational circuits of labour, bodies and care. Distinctions between the private and public are intimately tied with the spatiality of domestic workers’ lives, in which the intimate sphere of the household remains a workplace that may involve negotiating surveillance and control, in contrast to public spaces that may offer refuge for workers’ private lives. These demarcations have had significant implications for anti-pandemic measures that aim to reconfigure public and private spatialities. Attentiveness to the specific harms prioritized by migrant worker-led organizations during the pandemic raises an opportunity to consider the legibility of harm in domestic work, including harms that are recognized as offences with institutional remedies (e.g. physical abuse) and harms that remain illegible within current regulatory systems (e.g. overwork). The care provided by migrant domestic workers during the pandemic – for families and communities in countries of destination and origin – speaks to the transnational dimensions in the criminology of the domestic, and suggest an alternative approach in which public health measures could affirm the labour rights of domestic workers and vice versa.
White Supremacy, Racism and the Coloniality of Anti-Trafficking, 2022
For researchers and advocates who are all too familiar with the impact of the anti-trafficking fr... more For researchers and advocates who are all too familiar with the impact of the anti-trafficking framework in North America and Europe, it can be unsettling to see the enthusiastic promotion of a nascent anti-trafficking framework by NGOs and donors in Hong Kong in recent years. The emergence of the anti-trafficking framework in Hong Kong presents an opportune context to analyse the experiences of trafficking and anti-trafficking that are recognized or obscured for two groups of women – African asylum seekers and Filipino domestic workers. This chapter offers (1) an activist-informed reflection of the analyses developed by domestic workers on human trafficking and (2) an empirical analysis of asylum-seekers’ experiences of trafficking. The experiences of domestic workers and asylum-seekers reveal that moving towards racial justice may not necessarily require focusing on race as the determinative variable, and that a critical analysis of race in anti-trafficking also includes gauging the potential of migrant rights frameworks in contributing to racial justice.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 2020
The positioning of Southeast Asia (comprising Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Mala... more The positioning of Southeast Asia (comprising Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar or Burma, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) as an anti-trafficking hub belies the global relevance of regional patterns. The configurations of anti-trafficking vary across countries; however, the specific trends and patterns hold relevance to the region as a whole. For instance, the research on anti-trafficking in Thailand examines the co-constitutive interactions between the illegibility of human trafficking and the growth of the anti-trafficking industry, particularly in relation to market-based interventions. Critical research on Vietnam offers an instructive analysis of the fusion between humanitarianism and punishment that characterizes “rehabilitation” efforts in anti-trafficking. Research on Singapore and Indonesia considers the function of co-constitutive interactions between the hyper-visibility of sex trafficking and the relative invisibility of labor trafficking. In Indonesia—as a country of origin, transit, and destination—the fractured contours of anti-trafficking responses have produced unexpected or unpredictable interactions, marked by competing understandings of what trafficking is and the accountability of differing governmental bodies. Recent research on the Philippines illustrates the use of gendered surveillance in barring the departure of Filipino nationals as a means of “preventing” human trafficking. These patterns demonstrate the uneasy fusions and alliances among humanitarianism, market economies, law enforcement, and border control that mark responses to human trafficking in Southeast Asia.
The role of borders in managing sex work is a valuable site for analysing the relationship betwee... more The role of borders in managing sex work is a valuable site for analysing the relationship between criminal justice and migration administration functions. For the purposes of this article, we are concerned with how generalized concerns around trafficking manifest in specific interactions between immigration officials and women travellers. To this end, this article contributes to a greater understanding of the micro-politics of border control and the various contradictions at work in the everyday performance of the border. It uses an intersectional analysis of the decision making of immigration officers at the border to understand how social differences become conflated with risk, how different social locations amplify what is read as risky sexuality and how sexuality is constructed in migration. What the interviews in our research have demonstrated is that, while the border is a poor site for identifying cases of trafficking into the sex industry, it is a site of significant social...
In this article, we explore the reflexive use of emotion in understanding emerging relational rhy... more In this article, we explore the reflexive use of emotion in understanding emerging relational rhythms in participatory video. The focus of our analysis is the Visualizing the Voices of Migrant Women Workers project, which involved a series of eight video-making workshops from February–April 2017 in Hong Kong for over 40 domestic workers, asylum seekers, and ethnic minority participants. The emotions that were key to navigating relational rhythms central to this creative space were (1) feelings of discomfort to understand relations between the workshop participants and the facilitation team, (2) gratitude to assess the ‘chemistry’ or relations between workshop participants and (3) trepidation to re-write participants' relations with the city of Hong Kong. There is an important opportunity to explore the role of emotion in analysing relational rhythms in PV practice, in order to nurture creative solidarities and create new ethical potentialities.
Uploads
Journal Articles by Julie Ham
Books by Julie Ham
Many ‘migrant sex workers’ in Melbourne and Vancouver are in fact, naturalized citizens or permanent residents, whose involvement in the sex industry intersects with diverse ideas and experiences of citizenship in Australia and Canada. This book examines how immigrant, migrant and racialized sex workers in Vancouver and Melbourne wield or negotiate ideas of illegality and legality to obtain desired outcomes in their day-to-day work.
Sex work continues to be the subject of fierce debate in the public sphere, at the policy level, and within research discourses. This study interrogates these perceptions of the ‘migrant sex worker’ by presenting the lived realities of women who embody or experience dimensions of this category. This book is interdisciplinary and will appeal to those engaged in criminology, sociology, law, and women’s studies.
The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is also concerned with the theoretical, empirical and policy knots found in the relationship between regular and irregular migration, offending and victimization, the processes and impact of criminalization, and the changing role of criminal justice systems in the regulation and enforcement of international mobility and borders. The Handbook is focused on the migratory ‘fault lines’ between the Global North and Global South, which have produced new or accelerated sites of state control, constructed irregular migration as a crime and security problem, and mobilized ideological and coercive powers usually reserved for criminal or military threats.
Offering a strong international focus and comprehensive coverage of a wide range of border, criminal justice and migration-related issues, this book is an important contribution to criminology and migration studies and will be essential reading for academics, students and practitioners interested in this field
Many ‘migrant sex workers’ in Melbourne and Vancouver are in fact, naturalized citizens or permanent residents, whose involvement in the sex industry intersects with diverse ideas and experiences of citizenship in Australia and Canada. This book examines how immigrant, migrant and racialized sex workers in Vancouver and Melbourne wield or negotiate ideas of illegality and legality to obtain desired outcomes in their day-to-day work.
Sex work continues to be the subject of fierce debate in the public sphere, at the policy level, and within research discourses. This study interrogates these perceptions of the ‘migrant sex worker’ by presenting the lived realities of women who embody or experience dimensions of this category. This book is interdisciplinary and will appeal to those engaged in criminology, sociology, law, and women’s studies.
The Routledge Handbook on Crime and International Migration is also concerned with the theoretical, empirical and policy knots found in the relationship between regular and irregular migration, offending and victimization, the processes and impact of criminalization, and the changing role of criminal justice systems in the regulation and enforcement of international mobility and borders. The Handbook is focused on the migratory ‘fault lines’ between the Global North and Global South, which have produced new or accelerated sites of state control, constructed irregular migration as a crime and security problem, and mobilized ideological and coercive powers usually reserved for criminal or military threats.
Offering a strong international focus and comprehensive coverage of a wide range of border, criminal justice and migration-related issues, this book is an important contribution to criminology and migration studies and will be essential reading for academics, students and practitioners interested in this field