The impact of globalisation has also been profound in drawing women from outside Japan into the sex industry. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, ‘more than two million migrant women were estimated to be working in the [East and Southeast Asian] region, accounting for one third of its migrant population’ (Yamanaka and Piper 2005: […]

The Prostitution Prevention Law and the Entertainment Business Law have not stopped pro­stitution but have rather hidden it in a grey area where in practice it can take place unofficially along with other sorts of regulated sexual services which are overt. In other words, the sex industry has been both normalised through legalisation under the […]

There are two major laws in Japan which affect the sex industry and its workers: the Prostitution Prevention Law (Baishun Boshi Ho, promulgated 1956; effective 1958) and the Entertainment Business Law (FUzoku EigyO Ho, 1948). The Prostitution Prevention Law is the basic law against prostitution and its history goes back to the end of the […]

Kaoru Aoyama Introduction In Japan, as in many parts of the world, the sex industry is regulated by the law. The aim of such regulation can be summarised as being to protect ‘good public morals’, in particular to protect women and young people from being exposed to commercial sexual activities, at the same time as […]

Since the late 1980s, Chinese police have tried to halt the development of a commercial sex industry in the PRC by implementing periodic anti-vice campaigns against illegal activities in recreational enterprises. Early campaigns were based on two articles contained in the PRC’s first Criminal Law of 1979, effective 1 January 1980. Article 140 stipulated that […]

The sex industry is controversial in China, in part because of its celebrated absence during the Maoist period. In keeping with Marxist theory (Engels 1972 [1884]), the early Chinese Communist Party (CCP) viewed prostitution as an expression of the degraded position of women under feudal-capitalist patriarchy, and therefore as incompatible with the goals of building […]

Elaine Jeffreys A 2006 article in the International Herald Tribune claims, somewhat remarkably, that the sex industry is probably the fastest growing industry in China, a situation which ‘ordinarily’ would be ‘grist for all manner of conversation’, from social inequalities to the public health implications and to the need for legal reform. That article concludes, […]

The subcultural gender identities and communities that gay and les have created across the decades are now interfacing with emerging VNGO work around LGBT human rights. In 2008, VNGOs began to bring together the resources of long-standing foreign aid and Vietnamese gay and les volunteers to publicly advocate for LGBT human rights domestically and globally. […]

Despite multiple sources of homophobia and lesbophobia across Vietnamese society, gay and les social networks, subjectivities, and communities still thrive, historically and contemporaneously. Bi and transgender individuals do participate in gay and les networks, but they are tightly intertwined with the dominant gender-segregated communities of gay and les. Bi women do not necessarily collaborate collectively […]

Vietnamese laws and State media campaigns aside, the everyday lives of gay, les, bi, and trans­gender people (ngudi chuyen do-i gidi tinh) are perhaps more affected by the environments of homophobia and heterosexism across institutions such as the family, the ‘science’ of sexuality in medicine and psychology, and nationalism and racialised identity formation. Across cultures, […]