Globalization, Colonization, and Prostitution: Strange Carnage in the Philippines (A Public Lecture)

Globalization, Colonization, and Prostitution: Strange Carnage in the Philippines

Kathleen M. Nadeau
Associate Professor and Applied Anthropology Coordinator
Department of Anthropology
California State University-San Bernardino

August 7, 2008 (Thursday)
5:00-6:30 p.m.
Bulwagang Sala'am (Asian Center Conference Hall)
Romulo Hall, Asian Center
University of the Philippines
Diliman, Quezon City

The research takes the position that sex tourism in the Philippines and Southeast Asia, more broadly, corresponds to Euro-American colonial forms of slavery that dealt in humans as non-human commodities. In other words, prostitution practices today are not coterminous with a pre-colonial Philippine past. Rather ancient communities in all their diversity and difference, preponderantly, treated their slaves as part of their living and related societal body. Modern policy makers, international lending bodies, military trajectories and local governments are only rationalizing, and thereby perpetuating the sex tourism industry saying that it has always existed and is an innate aspect of select Asian cultures. But, in actuality, the kind of sexuality that can be bought and sold as a commodity on the market, for example, wherein "a man can turn his desire into a thing" is not the same kind of sexuality that was integral to the social reproduction of the ancient Philippines and other, nearby, social formations. The research concludes that a brand new type of sexual slavery has emerged in postmodern times, with a more complicated way of exploiting women, gay men, and nowadays, seemingly much more than before, children.

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Globalization, Colonization, and Prostitution: Strange Carnage in the Philippines (A Public Lecture)