Legitimizing sex and empowerment : an interpretation of narratives on sex trade in Thailand

Abstract

This research investigates how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working against human trafficking in Thailand and male tourists travelling to Thailand for sex legitimize their actions and perspectives on their websites. The research material is constituted by two websites for each of both categories. Plot analysis was used as a main method, based on Northrop Frye’s mythoi and Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic hexad. Subsequently, plots were deconstructed by pointing out omissions, inconsistencies, and dualities. From the analysis, it derived that all parties produce a form of knowledge that legitimizes their power, which in turn is necessary in order to produce knowledge. They sample the population and re-present it to their readers, creating an idea of an exceptional ‘Thailand’ on which they base their actions. NGOs aim to establish their own idea of normality, with their women beneficiaries doing a dignified job and being integrated in their communities. Organizations have a nurturant and allegedly empowering attitude, and take care of both their bodies and their minds. Sex tourists, on the contrary, escape their Western normality and are eager to adjust to Thai abnormality, where sensual women who naturally love to please men can be disposed with impunity. They have brought with them from the US their strict father values based on discipline and obedience. NGOs and sex tourists can exert their power because an important actor is either missing or playing a minor role in the picture they present to their readers, namely the idea of the ‘state’. The Thai state is either benevolent guidance for sex tourists, or does not exist at all, or can be educated, supported and manipulated by NGOs. Both parties can in this sense play the role of the state themselves and set their own rules.