여성교환으로 본 성매매: 폭력과 노동의 이분법을 넘어

This study is a theoretical attempt to reinterpret Lévi-Strauss’s concept of the ‘exchange of women’ and apply it to the analysis of commercial sex in order to understand the complex sexual economy of contemporary capitalism. Through this approach, the research aims to move beyond the dichotomy of ‘violence versus labor’ that has dominated existing commercial sex studies and illuminate commercial sex as a site where complex and multilayered exchanges of women take place. The theory of ‘exchange of women’ serves as a useful framework for analyzing contemporary commercial sex in three key dimensions. First, it enables a comprehensive understanding of the processes through which women are fragmented and exchanged in various forms—bodies, images, performances, and so on—within the digitalized and globalized sexual economy. Second, it facilitates the analysis of the multilayered agency that women engaged in commercial sex exercise as both objects and subjects of exchange, as they withdraw from or diverge within exchange circuits and sometimes engage in the practices of ‘commodity-becoming’. Third, it illuminates the formation process of ‘male homosociality’ mediated by exchanging women, as well as the constitution of individual men as desiring consumer subjects. Through this analysis, the study argues that commercial sex can be understood as a ‘symptom’ that reveals the operational logic of today’s digitalized and globalized capitalist sexual economy. Consequently, the concept of ‘exchange of women’ provides an alternative theoretical framework that enables a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary sexual economy as it expands across the boundaries of normal/abnormal, legal/illegal, and market/gift.