‘Shades of grey’: spaces in and beyond trafficking for Thai Women involved in commercial sexual labour in Sydney and Singapore

In this article I explore the migration trajectories of some Thai women trafficked internationally for commercial sexual exploitation, suggesting that many figuratively ‘cross the border’ between coerced and consensual existence in volatile migrant sex industries during the course of their migration experiences, thus complicating debates around the notion of choice in ‘sex’ trafficking. In exploring these women's transitions I seek to understand why women who had either never previously been sex workers or who were sex workers operating without duress, but who were then trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation remain in, or re-enter volatile forms of migrant sex work at a later point under voluntary arrangements. In answering this question I focus on the temporal and spatial aspects of individual women's experiences in migrant sex industries drawing in detail on the narratives of two Thai women trafficked to Sydney, Australia and Singapore. I make some suggestions about methodologies used in trafficking research that can assist in bringing to light some of these complex time–space dimensions of women's experiences through their shifting positions in commercial sexual labour. The article also reflects on the implications of these women's trajectories for the ‘prostitution debate’ as it relates to trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation by suggesting that many trafficked women occupy ambiguous or in-between positions in migrant sex industries, neither easily distinguishable by the label of victim of trafficking or migrant sex worker.     

Intimate Consumption and New Sexual Subjects Among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea

This article examines the transformation of sexual meanings, attitudes, norms, and practices surrounding depletion and pollution across decades (1974–2010) among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea. In the premodern village, all sexual intercourse, whether with boy‐initiates or women, was ritualized and ultimately controlled by the men's secret society. Intimate consumption refers traditionally to a symbolic complex of beliefs, concepts, emotions, and ritual experiences involving sexuality, bodily health, social relationships, and gendered politics. But it also covers sexual anxieties corresponding to the transfer and loss of bodily fluids via the perceived depletion and pollution of self and body. For adult men, the sense of intimate consumption requires repeated substance replenishment and purification. Intimate consumption made oral and vaginal sex highly rule‐bound, taboo laden, and intensely regulated in terms of the meaning, scope, duration, and intended goals of sexual exchange. Pacification, colonization, out‐migration, Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) Christianity, and primary schooling in the Sambia Valley over a period of decades instigated social transformations that challenged and wore down this system of sexual regulation. Thus, the transition from ritual to non‐ritual practices, i.e., more individualistic sexual relationships, highlight narratives of change in the Sambia sexuality. With the demise of ritual initiation in the 1980s and 1990s, and the appearance of HIV and SikAids in the Sambia Valley, explicit ritual sexual techniques were no longer socialized. Modernity (in the sense of a set of policies, attitudes, and rules introduced through institutions such as the government community school) and SDA church sociality influenced both the pace and form of this sexual transformation. Among the greatest changes was the expansion of female agency and sexual autonomy, and personal decision‐making vis‐à‐vis especially marriage and also romance, courtship, and sex. Notably, oral sex, once universal and mandatory, largely disappeared from Sambia intimate relations. Today, spousal intimacy reveals a different set of more ‘modern’ meanings and behaviors compared to two generations ago, e.g., more mutualistic and companionate. Intimate consumption remains a worry for certain Sambia young men and women today however, influenced in part by the rise of the HIV pandemic, mobility, and the absence of normative narratives of sexuality in villages and town settlements. This creates public spaces wherein new sexual subjects have emerged in the villages and urban settlements within the Sambia Valley and in settlements throughout PNG.     

Sexual citizenship in Latvia: geographies of the Latvian closet

This study examines sexual citizenship in Latvia. It investigates the process by which political narratives have heterosexed the nation since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. My aim in exploring this process is to develop a deeper understanding of non-heteronormative identities and counter-hegemonic spaces in this heterosexist society. Drawing on discourse analysis of political media statements I argue that despite the legalizing of homosexuality, political narratives have continued to sex the nation as heterosexual, forging the national closet. I then explore how these narratives become experienced in lives of sexual minorities through the state's failure to prevent sexual discrimination. Drawing on participant observation and a decoding of the urban landscape, I investigate how the Latvian closet is materialized in the bodies and places of the everyday lives of ‘gay’ men living in the capital, Riga. Examined in this way insights are given to the spatial forms of political resistance to heterosexism in Latvia and how it differs from western models.     

COITAL EXPERIENCE AMONG ADOLESCENTS IN THREE SOCIAL-EDUCATIONAL GROUPS IN URBAN CHIANG MAI,THAILAND

This article compares coital experience of Chiang Mai 17–20-year-olds who were: (1) out-of-school; (2) studying at vocational schools; and (3) studying at general schools or university. Four-fifths, two-thirds and one-third, respectively, of males in these groups had had intercourse, compared to 53, 62 and 15 per cent of females. The gender difference for general school/university students, but not vocational school students, probably reflects HIV/AIDS refocusing male sexual initiation away from commercial sex workers. Vocational school females may have been disproportionately affected. Loss of virginity was associated, for both sexes, with social-educational background and lifestyle, and was less likely in certain minority ethnic groups. Among males, it was also associated with age and parental marital dissolution, and among females, with independent living and parental disharmony. Within social-educational groups, lifestyle variables dominated, but among general school/university students, parental marital dissolution (for males) and disharmony (for females) were also important, and Chinese ethnicity deterred male sexual experimentation.     

Sex assessment of medieval Norwegian skeletons based on permanent tooth crown size

The excavation of the Library site in Trondheim uncovered the medieval cemetry of St. Olav's church containing 388 skeletons, of which 248 had skulls with teeth. Sex assessment was based on osteological criteria, and for 145 skeletons sex classification was performed with a high degree of certainty. The remaining 103 were classified as uncertain male, uncertain female and sex undetermined. Mesio-distal and facio-lingual crown widths of permanent teeth in the group of reliably assessed males and females were used in sex-discriminant analyses. A combination of two or more teeth was less effective in discrimination than using one tooth alone. This was due to missing data in the combined variable sets and thereby loss of cases. Missing variables were due to post-mortem tooth loss, attrition or large deposits of calculus. The teeth were ranked according to their power in sex discrimination. The left maxillary first molar (26) represented by its facio-lingual dimension was the best sex discriminator (classified 85 per cent of the cases correctly), followed by the right maxillary first molar (16) also represented by its facio-lingual dimension (classified 77 per cent correctly). With only one variable in the discriminant function, a critical value could be calculated and tabulated for each tooth. This was used in sex assessment of the osteologically undetermined and uncertain groups. Only variables that could sex classify correctly at least 70 per cent of the cases with the Jack-knife procedure were used. Sex assessment could be made for 16 of 24 (66.7 per cent) of the osteologically sex-undetermined adult individuals and for 21 of 44 (47.7 per cent) of the children. Of 35 osteologically uncertainly sex-assessed skulls, only nine (six men and three women) corresponded with dental classification.     

Analyses of measurements taken from adult femurs of a British population

The femur remains an important bone in palaeoanthropology and this paper reports various analyses of measurements taken from long-cassette radiographs of adult femurs of a reference population from the south of England (n=81, males 33, females 48). Discriminant analysis confirmed that the male femur is usually larger than the female femur, and that a femur may be sexed with some confidence. Discriminant scores have been derived to permit estimates to be made, from the whole or a part of a femur, of the probability of the male gender. Outcomes from a principal component analysis suggest: that the female proximal femur is a morphological unit; that neck length and shaft length are dissociated and there is no common factor representing linearity; and that the male bicondylar width is anomalous, a finding that is confirmed by other analyses. An estimate of the robusticity of the complete female, but not male, bone may sometimes be made from a proximal fragment. The robusticity of the complete bone may be made confidently from the shaft for both genders. The two width variables relating to a distal fragment cannot be used to predict the robusticity of the complete bone for either gender. A method of defining the position of the waist in terms of displacement in deciles down the shaft is described. The position of the waist seems to have a bimodal distribution. The positive association between age and distal displacement may be due to remoulding of the shaft with age or to a cohort (generational) effect. There is a weak correlation between a small neck–shaft angle and the distal displacement of the waist, two archaic phenotypic traits. Ten statements in the literature relating to the femur have been examined and tested; six are confirmed and four are unconfirmed, and it is suggested that there is a need for further studies relating to the morphology of the femur.     

Alister E. McGrath,A Scientific Theology

Abstract

One of the more interesting points of contention between Slavoj ?i?ek and John Milbank in their recent debate, The Monstrosity of Christ, is over the nature and status of belief in the supernatural. For ?i?ek belief in the supernatural is an ultimate symptom of capitalist domination; for Milbank it is a sign of the reality of the elusive promise of a world whose beneficence exceeds both the imagination and the administrative powers of empire and capital. I contend that even without Milbank's orthodox perspective, ?i?ek's reduction of magic to fantasy obscures the black magic of capitalism itself and so arbitrarily and unnecessarily forecloses on modes of resistance that are allied to liturgical, theurgical, and spiritual practices.     

Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates,the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman

Abstract

Japan’s 1990s financial crisis proved psychically traumatic for many men, their trauma exacerbated by decades of falling fertility rates and related sociospatial attenuation. The crisis disrupted a range of heteronormative practices that had stabilized post-war gendered identities, especially marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Some men consequently began seeking comfort in the company of youthful-looking, large-format, hyper-feminized commodity-dolls of which there are two psychical kinds: ‘infantile’ dolls used largely by precariously positioned young men for comfort and play; and expensive ‘Oedipal’ silicone sex dolls associated with Japanese salarymen whose jobs had become less secure. Both have worked emotionally for two reasons: dolls are evocative of the maternal – the basis of intersubjective (be) longing/Eros; and the dolls are owned, ownership allowing pleasure and control more securely to intertwine. Following the oil crisis and the de-industrialization that followed, men in racially and economically privileged terrain across the US and Europe turned to similar kinds of commodity dolls for comfort, if for differently sexed and racialized reasons. Japanese men’s doll markets therefore speak to certain particular and general conditions of masculinity and geopolitical economic trauma.     

Cranial suture closure and its implications for age estimation

Three age estimation techniques using ectocranial and/or endocranial suture closure are tested on a sample of known age from Spitalfields, London in order to determine the value of cranial suture closure as an indicator of age at death. The three techniques are those proposed by Acsádi and Nemeskéri, Meindl and Lovejoy and Perizonius. Results indicate that the Acsádi and Nemeskéri technique, which is based on endocranial sutures, can be used to distinguish young and middle-aged individuals in the Spitalfields sample but gives no information for crania over the age of 50 years. Age estimation using the Meindl and Lovejoy and Perizonius (Old system) techniques, which use ectocranial sutures, was found to be subject to a number of complicating factors, of which sexual dimorphism in the rate and pattern of closure is the most significant. A method of estimating age at death based on both endocranial and ectocranial suture closure is developed on the basis of the Spitalfields sample. The technique attempts to overcome some of the problems associated with both intra- and interpopulation variation in cranial suture closure. For a truly accurate age-estimation technique based on cranial suture closure we would need to know more about the causes and functions of suture closure in human populations.