NAVIGATING THE CONTOURS OF MORALITY: THE PARADOXICAL SPACES OF GEYLANG’S RED-LIGHT DISTRICT

Abstract

Sex workers’ relationship with society has always been in fraught. Even within feminist research, the view that sex work is aberrant rather than a rational survival strategy is underpinned by masculinist notions that foreclose alternative expressions of agency. However, when the subject of Woman occupies a position beyond the violence of the master subject and is simultaneously trapped within the limits of his desires and fears, she insists on an ‘elsewhere’ beyond the web of half-truths and prejudices in which patriarchy has defined and confined it. Using Rose’s post-structuralist theory of paradoxical space as my conceptual framework, this thesis suggests that women reproduce and challenge gender and sexual norms as they negotiate the rights of their bodies in Singapore’s Geylang’s Red-Light District (GRLD). Drawing on photographic evidence in GRLD and semi-structured interviews with transgender sex workers; men and women who in the past or present live, work or frequent Geylang, I contend that masculinist territories are constantly remade and breached within complex relations of culture, power and difference in space. This complex position that simultaneously grounds and denies the female feminist subject challenges a hegemonic understanding of women’s political identities that have been defined in relation to the masculine. Altogether, this thesis speaks to a wider debate about power and oppression in capitalist systems of patriarchal dominance and control that locate all women, sex workers or not, to a space of struggle and resistance.