Intimate Itinerancy: Sex, Work, and Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya's Brothel Economy, 1870s–1930s

Abstract

This article examines the rise and destruction of Chinese women's intimate labor networks in colonial brothels across British Malaya in the early twentieth century. Drawing on police files, travel documents, petitions, temple inscriptions, and the League of Nations' trafficking reports, it situates women's cooperative economies within the global history of Chinese migration. It shows how migrant women's myriad roles in the brothel economy—as sex workers, seamstresses, servants, and coffeehouse owners—served as crucial linchpins that sustained the Chinese overseas community in colonial Southeast Asia. Chinese diaspora studies seldom include women who engaged in migratory prostitution in their purview, emphasizing instead the circulation of capital, merchants, and contract laborers during Asia's "mobility revolution" (1840s–1940s). Yet, these women's experiences of sexual commerce, serial migration, and alternative socialities complicate existing migration narratives by illuminating how gender shaped border-crossing experiences and livelihood opportunities in unexpected ways.