ABSTRACT
Tanjung Balai Karimun is a town of approximately 95,000 people in the Riau
Archipelago.1 Together with the islands of Batam and Bintan, Karimun has became
part of a Special Economic Zone proposed in 2006 with the aim of enhancing eco-
Karimun’s development has not been limited to the export of raw materials such as
tin, rubber, timber and copra, and more recently sand and granite; like Batam and
Bintan, it has an extensive sex industry which caters predominantly to working-
class Singaporeans and Malaysians. This chapter examines the place of ‘sex as
work’ for women in the town of Tanjung Balai Karimun, and the impact of
women’s engagement in the sex industry on other parts of their lives.3 In particular,
it focuses on the life histories of Lia and Ani,4 two former commercial sex workers
who have since left the industry as a result of their marriages to foreign men. Like
many of their peers in the Riau Islands, these women have managed to mencari
kesempatan dalam kesempitan (to find opportunities in hardship), and turn their
exposure to foreign clients in the brothels of Tanjung Balai Karimun into a chance
The Riau Islands’ location just kilometres from the much wealthier Singapore
and Malaysia provides sex workers like Lia and Ani with access to social and eco-
nomic capital (cf. Bourdieu 1977) not available to their counterparts in other places
in Indonesia. We argue that the opportunities available to these women are the
product of the Riau Islands’ particular spatiality, and a pattern of migration which
has seen large numbers of temporary and long-term migrants from throughout the
Indonesian archipelago move in and out of the islands in search of work. Our analy-
sis draws on the writings of Kamala Kempadoo (1999), who argues that the struc-
ture and significance of sex work is locally and historically specific and is
determined by patterns of economic development, histories of colonialism, and
normative constructions of sexuality and gender. Attention to these specificities
allows us to see that neither ‘sex workers’ nor ‘clients’ are fixed, universal or tran-
shistorical; in other words, ‘prostitution is not a single thing’ (Nussbaum cited in
Schotten 2005: 212). Such an approach allows us to pay attention to the culturally
embedded meanings associated with commercialized sexual behaviour in particu-
lar local settings, and to recognize that not all sex workers are ‘the same’. Many
women succeed in making the transition from brothel-based sex worker to Batam
wife, but the different modalities of sex work in the islands demonstrate that not
all women are able to take full advantage of opportunities for social and economic
advancement presented by the particular socio-economic conditions found
there.6 The incompleteness of these strategies suggests that framing sex work
within either an empowered or coerced model overlooks the complex realities of
women’s lives.
