IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v35y1992i7p891-901.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Mother sold food, daughter sells her body: The cultural continuity of prostitution

Author

Listed:
  • Muecke, Margorie A.

Abstract

This article provides a cultural interpretation of female prostitution in contemporary lowland Buddhist Thai society. The heterosexual transmission of AIDS through prostitution has exposed the shallowness of our understanding of prostitution as a sociocultural phenomenon. The data were collected through case studies, participant-observation, and review of Thai language media and texts. It is argued that in the past decade or so, the simultaneous rapid growth of prostitution as a lucrative sex industry and of the Thai economy as an emerging newly industrialized country (NIC) have, paradoxically, enabled female prostitutes to conserve the basic institutions of society. This has occured at a time when landlessness, rampant commercialism and poverty have threatened the survival of traditional lifeways among the majority rural agricultural population. Prostitution, although illegal, has flourished at least in part because it enables women, through remittances home and merit-making activities, to fulfil traditional cultural functions of daughters, conserving the institutions of family and village-level Buddhism, as well as of government.

Suggested Citation

  • Muecke, Margorie A., 1992. "Mother sold food, daughter sells her body: The cultural continuity of prostitution," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 35(7), pages 891-901, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:35:y:1992:i:7:p:891-901
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(92)90103-W
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Orchard, Treena Rae, 2007. "Girl, woman, lover, mother: Towards a new understanding of child prostitution among young Devadasis in rural Karnataka, India," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 64(12), pages 2379-2390, June.
    2. Vanchai Ariyabuddhiphongs & Joseph Li, 2016. "Buddhist Good Karma of Giving, Optimism, and Happiness Among Thai Female Sex Workers," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 127(2), pages 903-917, June.
    3. Ushma Upadhyay, 2000. "India's New Economic Policy of 1991 and its Impact on Women's Poverty and AIDS," Feminist Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 6(3), pages 105-122.
    4. Emma Tomalin, 2006. "Religion and a rights-based approach to development," Progress in Development Studies, , vol. 6(2), pages 93-108, April.
    5. Md Kamrul Hasan, 2012. "AIDS-Related Stigma in Thailand," Millennial Asia, , vol. 3(2), pages 187-206, July.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:35:y:1992:i:7:p:891-901. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.