Leslie Barnes, "Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)

April 7, 2026·1 hr 23 min·6 clips

Leslie Barnes reveals how the sex worker is everywhere in Southeast Asian cultural production, yet rarely has a voice.

1. Sacramento State historian Michael Vann interviews Australian National University associate professor Leslie Barnes about her 2025 book 'Sex Work in Southeast Asia: Scenes of Ambivalence in Literature and Film,' published by Edinburgh University Press. 2. Barnes's academic background is French and Francophone studies, with particular focus on Cambodia and Vietnam; she previously wrote 'Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature' (2014) and co-edited a volume on Cambodian director Rithy Panh. 3. The book's core argument, which Barnes calls 'very simple,' is that public discourses on sex work — NGO narratives, legislative policy, social science — rely on 'moral and epistemological certainty, righteousness even,' and that literature and film can cultivate ambivalence where those discourses cannot. 4. Barnes defines her scope broadly: street work, debt-bonded work, escort services, sex tourism, sex trafficking, and cross-border marriage across Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Taiwan, and Australia. 5. Her motivation began with noticing the ubiquity of the cisgender female sex worker in cultural production about Southeast Asia — 'she's everywhere from the colonial novel to the films about the war' — but that she 'very rarely has a voice, or if she does, it's primarily to demean herself.' 6. Barnes cites Full Metal Jacket as the 'most egregious example' of harmful stereotyping of Vietnamese feminine sexuality, and contrasts it with Rithy Panh's 2007 documentary 'Le Papier Ne Peut Pas Envelopper La Brèze' (Paper Cannot Wrap Ember), which follows sex workers in Phnom Penh's White Building. 7. An early peer reviewer pushed Barnes to declare whether she was for or against sex work and to rewrite around 'allyship,' but this challenge helped her commit to the opposite approach: sustaining what she calls the 'double negative.' 8. The double negative holds that a sex worker in Phnom Penh 'is not a victim, but she's not also not a victim' — the meaning depends on what kind of victimization is in question, and the book insists on sitting with that contradiction. 9. Barnes uses Jacques Rancière's concept of the 'scene' — the material, intellectual, and emotional conditions in which a text acquires meaning — as the theoretical frame for reading these works for ambivalence rather than political confirmation. 10. On terminology, she explains that 'sex work' was coined by American activist Carol Lee in the 1970s to resist the violent history of 'prostitution,' a term that radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin use to define all transactional sex as exploitation and violence. 11. Barnes opted for 'sex work' throughout but uses 'prostitution' in specific historical contexts — colonial Indochina, South Vietnamese political collaboration — where the term appears in the primary sources she cites. 12. She traces how imperialism has fueled sex industries in Cambodia and Vietnam: the French brothel system during the colonial period, and American rest-and-recreation facilities during the Vietnam War that expanded the Thai sex industry around Pattaya and air bases. 13. In her Global Vietnam: Gender, Labor, Migration field course, Barnes confronts progressive feminist students whose 'swift and damning judgments' of Vietnamese gender norms mirror the epistemic confidence of colonialism — telling them, 'The colonizer knew better, too.' 14. She argues that Western feminist concepts like consent — defined in Australia as 'free voluntary participation' — do not map neatly onto rural Vietnamese contexts where women and men negotiate filial duty, obligation, and opportunity sacrifice. 15. Chapter one analyzes two Rithy Panh films — the 1998 feature 'One Evening After the War' and the 2007 documentary 'Paper Cannot Wrap Ember' — to examine how knowledge of the sex industry is constructed through the use of windows, frames, and mirrors that alternately create and undermine the illusion of documentary access. 16. Chapter two centers on Somaly Mam, whose 2005 memoir about being sold into a brothel as a child was later accused of fabrication in 2014 press investigations, and on New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who live-tweeted a Cambodian brothel raid in 2011. 17. Barnes labels Mam and Kristof a 'native informant and global savior' whose anti-trafficking campaign — amplified by Bush-era US legislative policy — silenced sex workers in Cambodia who did not see themselves as victims, and in some cases placed them in police custody where they faced continued sexual danger. 18. She argues the rescue industry serves primarily to perpetuate itself and its advocates' celebrity status rather than to eradicate trafficking, citing Kristof's detractors who observed that 'Kristof's always the story.' 19. Chapter three moves to Michel Houellebecq's novel 'Platform,' which Barnes reads as a portrait of the French sex tourist recovering in Thailand the 'privilege and right to access women's bodies' he feels he has lost to liberalism at home — a precursor to manosphere discourse. 20. The episode suits listeners interested in postcolonial theory, gender and sexuality studies, Southeast Asian cultural production, or the politics of humanitarian intervention; it is less suitable for listeners seeking travel content or straightforward policy analysis.

As heard by us

A sharp interview about how film and literature frame sex work, visibility, and the limits of seeing.

Leslie Barnes talks through a book on sex work in Southeast Asia with a close eye on literature and documentary film, and the piece is strongest when it stays with the act of looking.

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Why you'd press play

You want an attentive interview that follows documentary theory into questions of visibility, access, and what images can actually prove.

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