This is the true story of a young Cambodian woman who has challenged her country's social and cultural norms throughout her life and as a consequence has become an ambassador for female empowerment. Growing up on an island in the Bassac River, removed from many of the conveniences of modern life and surrounded by traditional customs and thought, Thavry's story is one of inspiration to females around the world. As Cambodia slowly recovers from the great turmoil and destruction of civil war and the Khmer Rouge, rural life largely returned to familiar, century-old ways. For women, this meant marrying young, bearing children and working on the family farm, with little say in anything. But with support from her parents, whose own childhood experiences had been greatly shaped by the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, Thavry was taught to value education as a means of breaking from the confines of the village and to forge her own independent future. Her inspiring story shows that encouraging young women to believe in their dreams - and supporting them to do so - can lead to a freedom to learn and grow unknown to earlier generations.
Dealing with the complex and discomforting ‘grey ‘area where sex, love and money collide, this book highlights the general materiality of everyday sex that takes place in all relationships. In doing so, it draws attention to and destigmatizes the transactional elements within many ‘normative’ partnerships – be they transnational, inter-ethnic or otherwise. Focusing on Cambodia, and on a subculture of young women employed in the tourist bar scene referred to as ‘professional girlfriends’, the book shows that the resulting transnational relationships between Cambodian women and their foreign partners are complex and multi-layered. It argues that the sex-for-cash prostitution framework is no longer an appropriate model of analysis. Instead, a new vocabulary of ‘professional girlfriends’ and ‘transactional sex’ is used, with which the nuanced complexities of these transnational partnerships are analysed. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book inspires new understandings of gender, power, sex, love, desire, political economy and materiality within everyday relationships around the globe. It is a useful contribution for students and scholars of Anthropology, Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Cultural Studies.
Prostitution is strongly embedded in local cultural practices in Cambodia. Based on extensive original research, this book explores the nature of prostitution in Cambodia, providing explanations of why the phenomenon is so widely tolerated. It outlines the background of the French colonial period, with its filles malades, considers the contemporary legal framework, and analyses the motivations for sex work, examining in particular how women become locked into debt bondage. Overall the book provides significant contributions to wider debates about sex work, sex trafficking and the constrained nature of women’s choices.
In prehistoric times, Southeast Asian women enjoyed high status. When, how and why did that change? This book explores the history of gender relations through economics, politics, art and literature. This title is a narrative and visual tour de force, of interest to scholars and the general public.
Soul Survivors gives voice to women and children in Cambodia who survived the genocide (1975 - 1979), when nearly two million people died from execution, starvation, or disease. Through their detailed personal stories, fourteen people reveal the brutality of Pol Pot's regime, how they managed to survive, and what it took to rebuild their lives afterward. Although the survivors lives are fraught with suffering and times of despair, there is an under current of hope, courage, and resilience that comforts and inspires. Their stories are a testimony to the strength and goodness of the human spirit. Twelve of the fourteen survivors who tell their stories in Soul Survivors stayed in Cambodia after the genocide and worked against the odds to bring their family fragments back together and reclaim their culture. The fascinating details about life and traditions in Cambodia are revealed through their tales as the survivors come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including a medical doctor, classical dancer, landmine survivor, Buddhist nun, Muslim fisherwoman, Christian farmer, orphan, high school teacher, prostitute, silk weaver, social worker, and women's leader. Two survivors came to the United States of America as orphans, graduated from college, and returned to Cambodia as young adults to help rebuild their country. Sixty-four captivating photographs draw the reader into contemporary Cambodia to witness the survivors' courageous work to recover from three decades of war, genocide and poverty. Soul Survivors creates a comprehensive picture of Cambodia yesterday and today. In addition to the survivors stories, there are chapters on how the Khmer Rouge came to power, the role of the US, thelandmine situation, the Buddhist peace movement, and how to help people in Cambodia. It includes a chronology of Cambodian history, a map of Cambodia, and an index. This second edition of Soul Survivors was published as Cambodia's genocide trial began in 2008. The perpetrators, top leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime, are being held accountable for mass murder and crimes against humanity 30 years after the tragedy. This new edition is updated and contains recent historical events and an epilog telling what happened to the survivors since the first edition was published in 2002. It also includes information about the two charitable humanitarian organizations the author and photographer were inspired to create to help the poor in Cambodia. "The book effectively demonstrates the political, economic, and psychological links between the destruction of Cambodian society carried out in the 1970s and the suffering experienced by so many Cambodians today," stated Susan Cook, Director of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University. "These are stories that have to be told, that have to be held up to the light of humanity. For the sorrows of Cambodia have not ended. They have been repeated in greater or lesser forms in Rwanda and Bosnia, in Colombia, and continue even now in our history. Hatred never ceases by hatred but by love alone is healed," stated Jack Kornfield, a Buddhist teacher who worked in the Cambodian refugee camps.
Publisher Fact Sheet This extraordinary collection of eyewitness accounts by Cambodian survivors of Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s offers searing testimony to an era of brutality, brainwashing, betrayals, starvation, & gruesome executions.
Taking a theoretical and multidisciplinary perspective, the essays in this collection provide compelling insight into contemporary Cambodian culture at home and abroad. The book represents the first sustained exploration of the relationship between cultural productions and practices, the changing urban landscape and the construction of identity and nation building twenty-five years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. As such, the team of international contributors address the politics of development and conservation, tradition and modernity within the global economy, and transmigratory movements of the twenty-first century. Expressions of Cambodia presents a new dimension to the Cambodian studies by engaging the country in current debates about globalization and the commodification of culture, post-colonial politics and identity constructions. Timely and much-needed, this volume brings Cambodia back into dialogue with its neighbours, and in so doing, valuably contributes to the growing field of Southeast Asian cultural studies.
In Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh, writer and independent publisher Anne Elizabeth Moore brings her experience in the American cultural underground to Cambodia, a country known mostly for the savage extermination of around 2 million of its own under the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge. Following the publication of her critically acclaimed book Unmarketable and the demise of the magazine she co-published, Punk Planet, and armed with the knowledge that the second generation of genocide survivors in Cambodia had little knowledge of their country’s brutal history, Moore disembarked to Southeast Asia hoping to teach young women how to make zines. What she learned instead were brutal truths about women’s rights, the politics of corruption, the failures of democracy, the mechanism of globalization, and a profound emotional connection that can only be called love. Moore’s fascinating story from the cusp of the global economic meltdown is a look at her time with the first all-women’s dormitory in the history of the country, just kilometers away from the notorious Killing Fields. Her tale is a noble one, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious; staunchly ethical yet conflicted and human.
