This study started from the awareness of the problem that the absence of social norms, parental rights, normal family ideology, labor rights, and sexual rights for teenagers intersect in an adult-male-heterosexual-non-disabled-natives-centered ‘norm...
This study started from the awareness of the problem that the absence of social norms, parental rights, normal family ideology, labor rights, and sexual rights for teenagers intersect in an adult-male-heterosexual-non-disabled-natives-centered ‘normality’ society, and it causes instability in teenage females’ life. Therefore, this study paid attention to the phenomenon that social conditions intersecting the context of teenage females’ life act as power, resulting in residential movement, and it attempted to reveal the behavioral personality and desire of teenage female subjects by positioning their prostitution experience in the life-course positionality formed in such dynamics.
The results of this study are as follows.
First, familialist discourse and the laws, institutions, and perceptions derived from it constitute social conditions that make it difficult for teenage females to secure a place to settle in other than ‘family-home’. This led to the loss of the right to control life as a subject of survival. Teenagers have been the objects of protection and management as ‘minors’, and the social reality formed by familialist discourse has given ‘family’ the power to control the lives of teenage children who are ‘minors’. The resulting hierarchy in the ‘family’ has caused teenage females to fail to establish horizontal ties with persons who have parental rights or caregivers inside ‘home’ or to be exposed to violent experiences. In this context, even if a teenage female negates her existence and leaves home where the family does not accept, access to resources that allow her to secure a place to live on her own was not socially guaranteed.
Second, teenage females experienced places different from the representation of society depending on the relationship and how they were influenced. For example, when their identity was not accepted or threatened within a relationship with a ‘family’ represented as a safe community, teenage females left ‘home’ and moved to an ‘out-of-home’ relationship. They desired and formed various types of relationships: there were teenage females expanding their network by utilizing the situation of traveling between streets-jjimjilbangs (Korean dry sauna)-friends’ houses, while there were also those who had a relationship with uncertainty, as their place to stay continued to change. Even if the relationship formed, while losing the place to settle, was unexpectedly broken up or an exploitative attribute coexisted within the relationship, teenage females were meeting the needs for ‘affection’, ‘a sense of security’, and ‘a sense of closeness’ through the relationships they formed by themselves.
Third, teenage females experienced prostitution in the context that social conditions depriving them of civil rights are overlapping. The operation of parental rights does not formally allow them to have any choices that they make as subjects of life, including labor and housing, and for ‘minors’ derived from protectionist discourse, only a dichotomous housing alternative of home or facility exists as an option. These social conditions made it difficult for teenage females as subjects of survival to secure resources for ‘where to sleep’ and ‘what to eat’.
Fourth, teenage females had empirical resources for the point where society should change, as they passed wholly through unstable lives formed by overlapping hierarchies such as gender, age, class, and sexuality. These teenage females’ experiences were not simply included in the experience of temporal deviance or the damage-unhappiness narrative as ‘objects to be protected’.
Therefore, the significance of this study is as follows. Existing discussions on prostitution focused on power relations, discrimination, and structure in prostitution sites, omitting the life-course positionality of teenage females, thereby reducing the context of their relational practice or behavioral personality. However, for teenage females to become a person with civil rights, the mechanism of power that works closely in combination with the relationship between teenagers and families, issues of parental rights, and the way facilities work, and their behavioral personality as a ‘living’ social being negotiated in the mechanism, must be captured at the same time. To be done, this study contextualized the forced experience of ‘displacements’ that constitutes the life-course positionality of teenage females.