The Ironies of Freedom: Sex, Culture, and Neoliberal Governance in Vietnam

2 Hierarchy and Geography: Class and National Identity in Sex Consumption

CHAPTER 2 Hierarchy and Geography Class and National Identity in Sex Consumption JEAN AND JOHN COMAROFF have pointed out the “neoliberal stress on consumptionastheprimesourceof value”thatenvisionspersonsas“consumers in a planetary marketplace: persons as ensembles of identity.”1 Buying sex not only facilitated business connections for entrepreneurial men, but it was also a way for them to mark their class and national identity. I examine here the forms of the consumption of sexual pleasure and its commodification. Building on the identity theories of class distinction, and performative subjectivity, I argue that these forms of consumption constituted performances of class and national identity, predicatedonagenderdifference.2 Consumingsexualpleasurethrough women and their bodies allowed men to construct themselves, not just as men, but as Vietnamese men of a certain class. HIERARCHY: CLASS DISTINCTION IN THE CONSUMPTION OF SEX Inthepreviouschapter,Inotedthatentrepreneurialconsumptiondrove commercialsex.Here,Iarguethatthroughtheentrepreneurs’consumptionof thispleasure,twothingshappenedsimultaneously:theconsumer exhibitedhisstatusbyparticipatinginaclassifyingactivity,andthisclassification and differentiation in turn evoked the perception in society of the social and cultural presence of this class. I discuss the entrepreneurialclass ,ananalyticallyidentifiablegroup,usingNicosPoulantzas’s reworkingof theMarxist“class”inrelationsof production.Butthetransformation from such an analytically identifiable group to a social and cultural class presence demanded a more Weberian perspective on 25 group status, as well as more recent theories on identity-producing processes. I make clear my usage of class in relation to the Marxist and Weberian traditions and discuss the adaptation of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of class distinction through consumption. The sale and consumption of women were used as tools of status by both the men who were consumers and the women sex service workers in a society undergoing a rapid process of socioeconomic stratification. In the murky beginnings of the formation of classes brought on by economic liberalization, men and women incessantly marked their class with the signs of spending power, asserting the presence of these nascentclasses . Assuch,thestatusof class,tobereadinitsenactment,went to differentiate and construct the presence of certain classes even in the face(ormoreearnestlysobecause)of theirrecentlyacquiredwealth.But whether this pleasure trade evenly distributed the signs of class and status among the consumers and the sex service workers is a matter that must be explored. I argue that one class in particular stood to benefit the most in this process of class differentiation via status: Vietnamese men who are the state and private entrepreneurs in the new economy. Class The use of class in social and political analysis relies on two main traditions : the Marxist and the Weberian. Simply put, the former sees society (in the last instance according to Engels) organized around the prevailing mode of production. Classes are the results of the organization or relations of production. Classes are thus identifiable in relation to the ownership of the means of production and exchange.3 Capitalist society boasts two main classes: the bourgeois, who own the means of production , and the proletarians, from whose labor a surplus value is extracted. The growth of the middle class in advanced industrialized countries complicates this picture since significant numbers of this class do not own the means of production, yet neither do they seem to fall increasingly into the ranks of the proletarians. Neo-Marxist attempts to deal withthisproblemincludetheworkof Poulantzas,whopointedoutthat the legal ownership of the means of production should not be the sole 26 Part I. Sex for Sale criterion in the determination of class. There is also the access to or the control of these means of production.4 The managerial middle class (managers,bureaucrats,supervisors,orthosewithaccesstoandcontrol of the means of production) then could be classified among the bourgeois in the social division of labor. It is this access to the means of productionthatisof concernhere,sincemuchof themeansof production inVietnaminthe1990swasstilllegallyownedbythe“people”and“managedbythestate ,”aswasland.Itwasnotuntilthemid-2000sthatproperty began to pass legally into private hands. This reworked notion of adominantclassbasedonaccesstothemeansof productionworkswell in my analysis of an economy where such direct and indirect access was necessaryforthefunctioningof thiseconomy,ashasbeenshown.Itwas the economic operators’ access to the mostly state-held means of production and exchange that required the personal “hooking” underlying muchof thebuyingof sex.UsingPoulantzas’snotionof accessandcontrolratherthanlegalownership ,Icanidentifythestateandprivateentrepreneurs as joined in an emerging class. If the Marxist literature has dealt at length with “production” in relation to class, the notion of “exchange” in relation to class is elaborated by Max Weber. For Weber, classes have to do with “differential market situations.”5 Thus,itisthepositionintherelationsof exchangethatclassifies classes for Weberians. Barry Hindess has pointed out that the emphases on production for Karl Marx and on exchange for Weber...