Primary sources in this study are largely archival documents created by French and indigenous authors, including correspondence, reports, newspapers, law, maps, and fiction. These are supplemented with ethnographic observations. Collectively, the sources indicate how a colonial humanitarian culture, fixated on indigenous women’s bodies, produced aporetic regimes of women’s possession and dispossession, because while the culture of humanitarianism in Cambodia was attendant to save and improve women’s lives, that culture was structured by racism, sexism, classism, and nationalism. The pattern of paradox provokes questioning: What knowledge did French and indigenous people produce about women’s social and sexual lives? How did this knowledge shape humanitarian culture? To what extent did humanitarianism affect women, and how did they receive, reject, and reinvent in return?

In following these inquiries, this project reflects on deconstructions of hospitality, read in dialogue with decolonizing and feminist histories of race, gender, and empire. The historical, theoretical, and ethical framework exposes hospitality’s paradoxes—it empowered women as hosts of their guests, while it disempowered women into hostages, when guests entered their homes and imposed their rules. Women dwelled in aporia—the impasse of hospitality engendered: their bodies beget acts of humanitarianism’s hospitality, which beget them into subjects and objects of power. This problematization of “Third World” women in the “developing” world advances present conversations on how humanitarianism engenders violence through compassion. How to think with and work through the aporia is a critical question for research, governance, and advocacy to contend with, as they tend to women across the post-decolonization Global South.