In our discussion of global cities, there was a lot of back and forth on whether the women in HCMC who engaged in sex work were liberated in any way. On the one hand, the women were claiming agency as entrepreneurs offering up certain services. More specifically, the act of entertaining visitors of the bars and engaging in nuanced social interactions that bolstered Vietnam’s global reputation served as a form of social and emotional labor that surpassed the associated acts of prostitution. In this way, the sex work seemed to be simply a factor of the women’s job as important Vietnamese citizens. This was contrasted with ideas that regardless of the economic or social capital the women might gain through this work, it could never be seen as liberating because the women never truly gained enough capital to move beyond the realm of sex work. Even the women who acquired significant financial means often used it to open their own bar, thereby keeping them in the business to some extent. Moreover, it was suggested that even though these women might be doing a national service to some capacity, they were still constrained by the fact that the country is commodifying women’s bodies and claiming ownership of them.

For me, the fetishization of Asian women was what struck me as the least liberating aspect, as it reinforced racialized and gendered stereotypes that seemed like they would inherently limit the agency of the workers. I thought it was interesting to consider the similar scenario of Brazilian male sex workers, who also primarily cater to tourists. In this case, the male sex workers view their work solely as a job, and their actions are rationalized, rather than judged, based on their ability to provide an income to these men. While I agree with comments made in class about how the history of subordination and objectification of women changes some of the dynamics of sex work, I think these Brazilian men could potentially be subjected to similar levels of fetishization as the Vietnamese women. Their ability to manipulate the system to their benefit, in this case, could be seen as liberating. Likewise, in the Vietnamese bars that catered to Western men, the women darkened their skin and wore heavy makeup and inexpensive clothing to emphasize an identity as poor Vietnamese women in need of saving (49). These women seemed to perform less of the emotional labor described in the other bars, and made the majority of their money from direct sex-for-money exchanges (50). Interestingly, these women were subjected to the least fluctuations in economic status over time (160). In this way, the women who could best manipulate Western fetishes were the most economically stable, so perhaps fetishization plays a more complex role in my understanding of liberating practices in the city than I had originally thought.

As I started thinking more about the manipulation of fetishes, I began to consider creative class consumption more generally. In previous lectures, we talked extensively about the rise of the creative class commodifying certain cultures in the city. For example, I was thinking about the Boyle Heights community gentrification. One particular instance I was reminded of was white landowners rebranding an apartment complex as “Mariachi Crossing”. Mariachis already lived in and used these spaces for their own purposes, and the white ownership of the space and titles seemed to be threatening to the local identity. Is it possible that the local Mariachis could have capitalized on the appeal of this gentrifying area to white tourists, in the same way the Vietnamese women did? If so, and if it served an economic purpose, would we still consider the rebranding as threatening to local identity? Is this situation totally different because it is not in a global city, or is there significant cross-over in the ways that global cities and creative class cities function? Conversely, should we consider whether the sex work in Vietnam is a ‘disneyfication’ of both Vietnamese culture and women, in the same way that consumer culture has ‘disneyfied’ many U.S. neighborhoods? This discussion has left me with many questions about how we can consider these types of practices that occur within the city, and I think this speaks to the difficulties in articulating who has the right to claim agency or ownership in many of these placemaking situations.