Sex and Emotion-Based Relations as a Resource en Migration :
Northen Chinese Women in Paris
Florence LEVY
Marylène LIEBER

Has Ethno-Racial segregation Increased in the Greater Paris Meropolitan Area ?
Edmond PRETECEILLE

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Mathieu CHAREST
Pierre TREMBLAY

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How Contemporary French Poets Attain Renown
Sébastien DUBOIS

The Genesis of the Medical Field :
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Patrice PIENELL

The Professional Ethos of Mathematiciens
Bernard ZARCA

Florence LÉVY
Marylène LIEBER

Sex and Emotion-Based Relations as a Resource in Migration : Northern Chinese Women in Paris

ABSTRACT

Faced with scarce employment opportunities in Paris, a number of the women who migrate from northern China to earn money and counter the effects of a status fall in their native country start looking for alternative solutions. Some turn to prostitution, while others try to find a Chinese intimate partner or a French husband. The article discusses the strategies open to these women for accomplishing the goals they set for themselves in migrating. It examines a heterogeneous set of sexual-economic exchanges that reveal the porosity of the boundary between prostitution and other intimate relationships and suggest that marriage and prostitution may be seen as the endpoints of a continuum, two different ways of making a sexual-economic "arrangement." In the precarious socio-economic situation these women migrants find themselves in once in Paris, sex and emotion-based relations become a genuine resource.

The relevance of the economic perspective for understanding and critiquing excessively rigid, stereotypical notions of prostitution has already been amply demonstrated. The economic approach, which allows for analyzing the phenomenon of prostitution as part of a process of "disaffiliation" (Castel 1995) implying exclusion from wage-earning society and its social protections (Mathieu 2002) is equally useful for studying processes of migration from Northern China. Since the late 1990s, the presence of Chinese prostitutes has gradually increased. These women say they decided to practice the activity because they were in dire socio-economic straits and had no other choice. Most are in their forties ; they are not dependent on organized crime networks or procurers. Living in France illegally, without a residence permit, they adopt the tactic of highly discreet behaviour. While their situation can be fully explained in economic terms, we nonetheless hypothesize that it would be reductive to focus the analysis exclusively on the reasons and practices of Chinese prostitutes. In fact, it is by comparing these women's reasons for deciding to practice prostitution with the aims of other Chinese women migrants with a similar sociological profile who have not opted for prostitution that we can best apprehend how porous the boundaries of prostitution are.