Prostitution in Thailand has been the subject of media sensationalism for decades. Bangkok’s brothels have become international icons of third world women’s exploitations in the global sex trade. Recently, however, sex workers have become to demand not pity, but rights as workers in the global economy. This work explores how Thai national identity in such an economy is linked to prostitution and gender. Jeffrey asserts that certain images of The Prostitute have silenced discourses of prostitution as work, while fostering the idea of the peasant woman as the embodiment of national culture. This idea, coupled with a will to shape the modern state through the behaviour of middle-class men, has been the main concern of Thai prostitution policy. Gender, Jeffrey argues, has become the mechanism through which states respond to the contradictory pressures of globalization and nation-building.