Subjectivity, hygiene, and STI prevention: a normalization paradox in the cleanliness practices of female sex workers in post-socialist China
Yu, Y.Jung.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27(3): 348-367
2013
ISSN/ISBN: 0745-5194 PMID: 24123232 DOI: 10.1111/maq.12050Document Number: 579389
This article illuminates the principal mechanisms that increase the risk of STIs for female sex workers in China. It draws primarily on my 26 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2006-2009) in red-light district neighborhoods in Haikou that have become centers of internal migration in post-reform southern China. Chinese sex workers here challenge dominant representations of them as illegal, immoral, and unclean subordinates and understand themselves also as sacrificing, capable, and modern women. I show how the women's conflicted subjectivity, continuously shaped through social networks, affects their personal health decisions and, significantly, leads them to adopt clinically risky practices. I conclude by arguing that public health interventions in southern China in and around certain red-light districts should take these conflicted subjectivities into account in working to improve sex workers' health.
Document emailed within 0-6 h
