title: Subjectivity, hygiene, and STI prevention: a normalization paradox in the cleanliness practices of female sex workers in post-socialist China.
abstract: This article illuminates the principal mechanisms that increase the risk of STIs for female sex workers in China. It draws primarily on my 26 months of ethnographic fieldwork (2006-2009) in red-light district neighborhoods in Haikou that have become centers of internal migration in post-reform southern China. Chinese sex workers here challenge dominant representations of them as illegal, immoral, and unclean subordinates and understand themselves also as sacrificing, capable, and modern women. I show how the women's conflicted subjectivity, continuously shaped through social networks, affects their personal health decisions and, significantly, leads them to adopt clinically risky practices. I conclude by arguing that public health interventions in southern China in and around certain red-light districts should take these conflicted subjectivities into account in working to improve sex workers' health.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.
authors.forename: Yeon Jung
authors.initials: YJ
authors.lastname: Yu
mesh_terms: D060432:Anthropology, Medical; D002681:China; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006920:Hygiene; D012307:Risk Factors; D060386:Sex Workers / Q000523:psychology*; D012749:Sexually Transmitted Diseases / Q000517:prevention & control*; D014171:Transients and Migrants; D047568:Unsafe Sex / Q000517:prevention & control / Q000523:psychology*; D014930:Women / Q000523:psychology*
keywords: STIs; migrants; post-socialist China; sex work; subjectivity