Congress Paper Abstract

(Han-)Chinese Buddhist Rhetoricization of Legal Politics: Postcolonial discourse on Law Controlling Sex Work in Hong Kong

DR. CHUI MAN-CHUNG, HONOURARY ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG, MS. YIM YUET-LIN, CO-ORDINATOR, ZITENG, HONG KONG

The law controlling sex work in Hong Kong follows the liberal philosophy advocated by Wolfenden Report and decriminalizes sex trade, although activities related with it (for example: living on the earnings of prostitution or keeping a vice establishment) are criminally sanctioned. As argued by the mainstream feminists in Hong Kong, the legal attitude towards sex work is in fact the reproduction of the dominated patriarchal sexual regulations. Under the system, female sex workers are marginalized and pathologized as they do not belong to any male master, but live like pieces of public commodity and thus become a subversion of the (supposed to be) stable marital-familial politics.

Adopting the Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the paper investigates the mechanism by which the male dominating legal system otherizes female sex workers, and reproduces heterosexual male subjectivities. The author would then study how such matrix limits / strengthens Foucauldian desexualization as a legal reform strategy in the socio-legal context of Hong Kong.

With the emphasis of Hong Kong’s particular cultural discourse, the author argues that the legal reform proposal should engage with the indigenous civilization, which is dominated by conventional Confucianism so as to achieve its aims. While Anglo-American common law puts the focus on individual rights, Confucianism stresses the importance of harmonic interpersonal relationship and prostitution was not discriminated or suppressed in Han-Chinese legal history. How this tradition affects the Lacanian psychoanalysis on prostitution and interacts with the reform strategies (for instance, desexualization of law) would be studied in detail.

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