Cold War sex work : the sexual and political economy of Taiwan cross-strait relations

Feminist scholar Naifei Ding (2015) coined the term “cold sex war” to delineate how the US and UN’s programme of gender equality has served as a cultural programme to reeducate women away from “enemy patriarchal-cum-socialist influences” (Ding, 2015, p.58). Building on Ding’s work, I propose the term “cold war sex work” to highlight the ways in which crossstrait sex work has been identified as the Other of cold war feminism: only by devaluing the labour of sex workers as sexual exploitation, slavery, and human trafficking can the concepts of US modernity such as neoliberalism, freedom of speech, and democracy become valuable. I adopt an ethnographic approach in looking at cross-strait sex workers—those who migrate between the two Chinas (the People's Republic of China, PRC, and the Republic of China, ROC). I examine their affective practices in the teahouses in urban areas in Taiwan to see not only how their stories are interpreted through feminist vocabularies but, more importantly, how the feminist interpretations of their stories reproduce the cold sex war narrative. Extending this analysis, I will investigate how the cold war is prolonged in the context of cross-strait sex work in Taiwan.