For some women, working in the sex industry is a way of expanding life
choices and livelihood strategies (see Law, 1997; Kempadoo, 1998a; Doezema,
2000). Indeed, some sex workers speak of constrained choice: they not only
highlight the social and economic inequalities impacting on their lives as
women in Cambodia, but also articulate their own self-determination. The
dominant voluntary/forced prostitution dichotomy, with its binary opposites,
struggles to address such multiple subjectivities and divergent identifications.
In this paper, I describe some of the experiences recounted by women
I interviewed in Sihanoukville, Cambodia in 2003 and illustrate some of the
ways in which women become involved in sex work. I show how women
working in the Cambodian sex industry embrace multiple and conflicting
subjectivities as they simultaneously discuss structural constraints such as
poverty and patriarchy and their own agency and self-determination. In
addressing how structural factors interact with subjective choices, I examine
how women themselves conceive the complex issue of “choice.”