麻豆约拍

Lecture by Prof. Maria Hwang (IGSF and East Asian Studies, 麻豆约拍)

This talk compares the regional circulation across Asian global cities of independent women sex workers from the Philippines and the global mobility of their male clients, who are mostly professional expatriates and business travelers from Global North countries. Based on a qualitative study conducted in Hong Kong and the Philippines between 2010 and 2018, this talk expands current theorizations of global circuits by empirically revealing the asymmetries in the mobility of transnational professionals and transnational low-wage workers. It demonstrates the emergence of 鈥渦nbound and bound spheres of globalization鈥� in which the formal circuits of professional expatriates and business travelers are indeed unbound and global in scope while their low-wage counterparts in Asian global cities, which includes Filipina sex workers, are more than likely to only circulate within a bound 鈥渞egional pocket of free travel鈥� in Asia.