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

• In Event: On the Move for Money, Left Behind for Love: Negotiating Work and Family in Cross-Border Migration

Abstract

With an influx of marriage migrants, particularly from Vietnam and China, to Taiwan, there have been a considerable number of entertainment places featuring foreign women’s service as hostesses in tea shops and snack shops, places that are assumed to be patronized by lower-class Taiwanese and foreign workers. To counter the widespread discourse that foreign spouses involved in the sex industry are either agents of Jiajiehun zhenmaiyin (fake marriage/real prostitution) or victims of human trafficking, this paper takes a Vietnamese snack shop with hostess service as a field site to explore this socially specific phenomenon in Taiwan. I use the concept of “disjunctive harmony” to describe the life of this marginalized group of marriage migrant women working in this snack shop. It is harmonious because they have gained skills in negotiating contradictions between family and work and among their different identities as a wife, daughter, and/or mother. Yet, it is disjunctive because the harmony is a social space and context-based performance, and ruptures are easily generated in their move from one space and context to another. This paper will look into their daily life in the small snack shop to see how the socially hidden space can be reproduced as a “counter social space,” a contradictory space that is full of exploitation, doubts and competition but still functions like an “alternative family” to these socially marginalized foreign spouses. The paper will also challenge the binaries of victim/ perpetrator, liberation/exploitation, and subjugation/resistance in the global affective economy.

Author

• Hsunhui Tseng, Chinese University of Hong Kong