Sexualities, Economies, And Emotions: Queer Perspectives From Cambodia

The queer spaces of Siem Reap, Cambodia, manifested as a constellation of bars, hotels, and drag shows, are a significant feature of the city‟s tourist industry. Adorned with the symbols of queer cultures from the Global North and marketed ostensibly towards the queer (male) tourist, these commercial spaces bring the economically mobile visitor into (sexualised) contact with the locals who serve and befriend them. However, these spaces also appear side by side with another significant feature of the touristic landscape of the city. This is the highly visible presence of NGOs who appeal to the emotions of the visitor for economic aid towards the development and empowerment of locals in this „context of poverty‟. With respect to these intersections, ethnographic engagement with people operating in these spaces has revealed a particular kind of relationship practice in which queer men from the Global North provide a form of economic „sponsorship‟ for local men. This is a practice discursively constructed across a spectrum, from simple acts of charitable support to intimacy and, in some cases, sexual transaction. On the surface, this kind of practice may appear to sustain and reproduce globally pervasive imaginings of sex work, exploitation, and victimisation which have often come to define sexualised interstices of the Global North and South. However, the queer perspectives adopted for this research have been tasked with problematizing these kinds of normative assumption. To this end, we will explore the discursive complexities surrounding queer sexualities in this context by focusing on their intersections with economies and emotions. The linguistic data for the analysis consists of media texts pertaining to queer tourism in Siem Reap and emotion work in the small stories from interviews conducted with local men. Our ethnographically informed discourse analysis will therefore address how the economies of consumption and development, compounded by „the affective dimensions of agency‟ (Silva & Borba, ftc) relevant to this context, inform the construction of local sexualities in these cases. In this way, our analysis will consider how these sexualities may find saliency as a form of transformative queer action, where local men are able to challenge normative assumptions surrounding their practices. This is towards discursively shaping the local conditions of possibility that constitute this sexualised North/South interstice to their advantage, thus enacting knowledges from the Global South and problematizing classist assumptions about who can access agency, awareness and competence.