Sex, Love and Money in Cambodia: Professional Girlfriends and Transactional Relationships

This book deals with the complex and discomforting 'grey' area where sex, love and money collide. It highlights the general materiality of everyday sex that takes place in all relationships, in all parts of the globe. In doing so, it draws attention to and destigmatizes the transactional elements within many 'normative' partnerships be they transnational, inter-ethnic or otherwise. Interdisciplinary in nature, the study draws from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and gender and sexuality studies. Focusing on Cambodia, on a subculture of young women employed in the tourist bar scene referred to as 'professional girlfriends', the author shows that the resulting transnational relationships between Cambodian women and their foreign partners are complex and multi-layered. She argues that the sex-for-cash prostitution framework is no longer an appropriate model of analysis. Instead, a new, less stigmatizing vocabulary of 'professional girlfriends' and 'transactional sex' is used, with which the nuanced complexities of these transnational partnerships are analysed. This exciting book inspires new understandings of gender, power, sex, love, desire, political economy and materiality within everyday relationships around the globe.