Description
This paper interrogates how Thai women sex workers’ bodies are simultaneously central to the Thai state’s economic project and excluded from its health policy frameworks. As Thailand’s tourism economy thrives on the commodification of women’s bodies, their labour sustains national revenue and international image yet their health remains peripheral to state protection. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and Judith Butler’s work on the regulation of bodies, the paper explores how state power operates through both economic use and moral exclusion. Building on feminist political economy scholars such as Adrienne Roberts and critical medical anthropologists like Paul Farmer, it argues that sex workers’ health insecurity reflects broader global hierarchies of whose lives are deemed grievable or governable.
Through discourse analysis of tourism narratives, policy documents, and global health frameworks, the study shows how sex workers’ bodies are instrumentalized for economic resilience but disavowed within health governance. The paper calls for a reconceptualization of global health security that acknowledges bodily autonomy, economic justice, and the ethical imperative to protect those whose bodies sustain the state but are erased by it.
