‘PROFESSIONAL GIRLFRIENDS’

Abstract

This paper explores the sexuality, subculture and solidarity of young women who work in the hospitality and entertainment sectors in Cambodia. Specifically, the focus is on women described as ‘professional girlfriends’ and ‘bar girls’ employed in the hostess bar scene in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Professional girlfriends are young women who engage in a performance of intimacy within multiple sexual or non-sexual ‘transactional’ relationships with ‘western boyfriends’ in order to benefit materially and support their livelihoods. Because of their initial material motivations within the multiple partnerships and the strict cultural taboos surrounding sex and sexuality, professional girlfriends, and most other bar girls, are simultaneously stereotyped as ‘prostitutes’ and ‘broken women’ by general society, and as ‘victims’ by the development community. Despite their simultaneous stigmatization and victimization, however, these young women utilize bar girl subculture, alternative kinship systems, linguistic ability, consumption, intimacy and interpersonal partnerships in order to improve their social status, secure their futures and achieve a sense of enjoyment in their otherwise complicated lives. Homosocial friendship groups that emerge from subcultural networks and communal living work to provide support, social cohesion and care in the face of marginalization, structural constraints and gendered violence. ‘Hedonistic’ bar girl subculture also provides the space for young women to experiment with their sexualities and explore heteroflexibility. Through the lens of cultural studies, and via the practice of ‘intimate ethnography’, this paper also pays particular attention to the negotiation of intimacy and friendship between the respondents and researcher.

Keywords:

• sexuality
• subculture
• alternative kinship
• professional girlfriends
• transactional sex
• Cambodia

Notes

1. Real names of people have been changed so as to protect anonymity.

2. Hostess bars are venues where girls act as ‘hostesses’ and sit and chat with customers at their tables or at the bar to earn tips and ‘ladies drinks’. For every alcoholic/non-alcoholic drink that is purchased for a girl by a customer, a $1 surcharge is added to the price, which is then given back to her on top of her wages. Therefore, if a hostess gets 10 ‘ladies drinks’ bought for her in a night, she then earns an extra $10 for that shift.

3. I intermittently refer to women who work in bars, clubs and restaurants with the colloquial and commonly-used title of ‘bar girls’, as it is a term with which they reference themselves.

4. ‘Western boyfriends’ is the term used by women in Cambodia to describe their foreign partners from the Americas, Europe and Australasia, also referred to as barang. They tend to also associate the term ‘western’ with cultural products or practices deemed ‘modern’ and/or ‘liberal’. Though the concepts have been problematized, I use ‘western’ (and its derivatives) interchangeably with ‘global north’ to refer to socio-economically advantaged persons or places, as well as the hegemonic cultures, values, and beliefs embodying those persons or places.

5. This third binary is borrowed from Constable (2003).

6. Despite their biological ages, I deliberately use these terms interchangeably to imply the overall youthfulness of female participants, and because they generally refer to each other in English as ‘girls’, ‘women’ or ‘ladies’.

7. An even less empowering term used by Eleanor Brown (2007) to describe women employed in ‘direct and indirect commercial sexual exploitation locations’ such as ‘brothels, karaokes, discos and bars’ are ‘direct and indirect CSEWGs – commercially sexually exploited women and girls’ (pp. 1–20). She uses this term, however, from entirely within the framework of ‘anti-trafficking’ discourse, which centers around a vocabulary of exploitation and victimhood within all forms of sex or entertainment work.

8. Although some argue the term ‘professional’ itself implies ‘work’, I uphold an alternative definition as ‘engaging in a given activity as a source of livelihood’ – which does not by necessity connote ‘work’. I also refer to the definition of ‘professional’ that means ‘having or showing great skill’ or expertise in a given area. These definitions of ‘professional’ can be found at: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/professional (accessed 30 May 2009). Quite simply, these young women are highly skilled at being girlfriends. It must also be noted that this definition is applicable to all genders. I met many Cambodian ‘professional boyfriends’ who sought relationships with foreign men as well. However, due to lack of space, this paper focuses mostly on women. A detailed analysis of the PG/transactional sex framework can be found in Hoefinger (2010).

9. For other perspectives on transactional sex in Africa, see LeClerc-Madlala (2003), Dunkle et al. (2004), Minki et al. (2004), Dunkle et al. (2007) and Swidler and Watkins (2007).

10. Connect Four is a popular table-top game that the women play in order to gamble for ladies drinks; most have memorized every possible move and rarely lose to their duped male opponents. Introduction to bar life usually includes the practice of more experienced girls passing on this vital information (game moves) to bar girl ‘newcomers’.

11. At one particular gathering I held, which was attended by a variety of people from different social groups and subcultures, there was a noticeable and distinct difference in styles between the female middle-class Khmer NGO workers, who wore more modest, plain jeans and t-shirts, and the bar girls, who had huge curly hair-styles, caked-on make-up, colorful revealing clothes, high heels, lots of jewelry, flashy mobile phones, diamond encrusted teeth, and gaudy hand bags. However, in general, many young ‘modern’ middle-class women are also adopting at least some elements of this style, as they aspire to look like Cambodian pop stars, or global pop stars, such as Britney Spears, Beyoncé and Shakira.

12. For more on ‘glocalization’ and its history and uses, see its online entries in Wordspy: http://www.wordspy.com/words/glocalization.asp and Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glocalisation

13. From Wikipedia entry of ‘Glocalisation’ (accessed 17 December 2009).

14. For more on the ways Cambodian women are resituating traditional ideals in the contemporary period, see Brickell (2011).

15. For more on alternative kinship systems see Stack (1974), Glenn (1983), Butler (1993), Kibria (1993), Ebaugh and Curry (2000), Kim (2009). While many of these authors refer to this type of kinship as ‘fictive’, I prefer to use the term ‘alternative’, as fictive implies the notion of ‘fake’ or ‘not real’, whereas ‘alternative’ simply implies ‘different’, ‘other’ or ‘undesignated’.

16. For more on ‘broken women’ in Cambodia see Lind van Wijngaarden (2003a).

17. Chenda was one of the few female participants who not only actively carried around her own condoms, but used them during oral sex.

18. For more on drug and alcohol consumption in relation to sexual activity among bar girls and PGs, see Hoefinger (2010).

19. For more on homosociality, see Sedgwick (1985) and Binhammer (2006); on heteroflexibility, see Ambrose (2009).

20. However, see Karen Quintiliani (1995) for an interesting study on a diasporic Cambodian ‘gay’ community in the United States during the 1990s.

21. For more on kteuys, ‘ladyboys’, transgenders or MSMs (‘men who have sex with men’), see Jackson (1999), FHI (2002), Totman (2003), Morineau et al. (2004) and Earth (2008).

22. On a few occasions, women, including Chenda and Veata, made seemingly sexual advances towards me – however I found it difficult to differentiate whether the advances were sexual or merely homosocial ‘locker room’ playfulness. When drunk, Veata would attempt to ‘flirt’ and make jokes about being a lesbian, and on one occasion she attempted to sexually touch my breasts and kiss me on the dance floor. Similarly, Chenda would hint that she wanted to ‘kiss’ me, and one day, while interviewing her at her house, she came out from the bathroom fully nude in an attempt to show off her body (which went against all my previously-held understandings of modesty about nudity). It was unclear if the gestures were sexual, or some other expression of heteroflexibility or homosociality. In any case, I acted casually and ignored the advances. As Kulick (1995) points out, what ‘counts as sexual’ differs in different contexts and cultures.

23. Although they have appropriated the English term ‘lesbian’ into their discourse, I observed women such as Veata use it to refer to herself in order to excite men's imaginations. Although she did admit to ‘playing’ with girls, she did not identify as lesbian or gay when questioned about it seriously.

24. For an interesting new Kinsey study on inconsistent and varied meanings of the phrase ‘had sex’ in the US context, see Sanders et al. (2010).