Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2016. ix, 229 pp. (Figures.) US$69.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5296-2.
This edited volume provides an interesting addition to the understanding of Asian gender and sexuality for ethnographic studies audiences. I appreciate that a substantial portion of the collection includes contributions by scholars from relatively marginalized locations, in terms of their affiliations with smaller-scale or teaching-centred academic institutions in the United States or scholars living and working outside of North America, such as Hong Kong and Cambodia.
Some chapters truly highlight the collection’s foci on agency and social institutions through their nuanced meaning making and engaged discussions with well-established arguments in the literature. For example, John Osburg’s chapter argues that elite nightlife is not simply a practice of hypermasculinity that utilizes the women involved as objects lacking agency, despite its appearance as “trafficking in women” among Chinese businessmen. Osburg’s chapter asserts, instead, that nightlife is a process of forming networks governed by codes of honour that consider the women involved as subjects, and that their own desires and motivations matter. In other words, the elite businessmen’s sense of status is not necessarily identified with the price paid for the “purchase” of the women’s services, but by subtle forms of value, such as fame, connections, and reputation that are confirmed by the depth of authentic affection from high-class girlfriends. While building on the work of anthropologists of gender and sexuality in China, the chapter’s reference point in analyzing nightlife is Anne Allison’s esteemed work on Japanese nightlife. Osburg departs from Allison’s analysis, however, on the measure of status and value through price by emphasizing the subtler forms outlined above. It also reveals the reflexive positionality of the author that the North American context is not used as a reference point for contextualizing the Chinese businessmen’s nightlife, as many Anglophone audience-centred ethnographies tend to do.
Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo and Tracy Royce’s chapter also deals with the issue of nightclubs, labelled BoySpace, in the context of a Thai society that allows both men and women to contest mainstream views of Thai masculinities and femininities. As with Osburg’s chapter, Hildago and Royce’s contribution highlights the agency of sex workers and clubbers in contesting Western media’s stereotyped representations of them, as coerced sexual labourers and exploitative patrons. Building on the well-established literature on Thai queer sexualities from both anthropology and queer studies, they put forward the particular nightclub contexts as another platform to deconstruct normative genders and sexualities.
Following the line of research that contests dominant media and social norms through the agency of gendered subjects, Heidi Hoefinger’s chapter features Khmer women who migrate from their hometowns to urban locations for work in the Cambodian entertainment industry. The chapter demonstrates that these women maneuver the material resources of men whom they are dating, rather than unilaterally being exploited by those men, and resist patriarchal social codes that require them to remain submissive. Grounded in the relevant literature on media and gender in Asia that points out the contradiction between an authoritarian regime and economic liberalism, the chapter concludes that the new female subjectivities in Cambodia are both complicit with those contradictory regimes and transgressive of them.
Aligned with the urge to deconstruct stereotypes of gendered and sexualized subjects, Xia Zhang’s chapter brilliantly reveals dimensions of stratifications of class and rural-urban division that intersect with formations of masculine identity. With a firm grasp of the enriched ethnography of China that deals with migrating subjects, urbanization, and notions implicit to class identification, such as suzhi (quality), the chapter steers away from simplistic understandings of male migrant manual workers as perpetual victims of an unprivileged economic and social status due to their displacement. It accomplishes this by illuminating the ways in which these workers construct a sense of self by reasserting their masculinity through pride in manual labour.
Other interesting chapters include the following. Despite the claimed focus of the volume, Kevin Carrico’s chapter on Chinese neotraditionalist desire and practices to attribute contemporary social problems to women—which he labels “misogynistic fantasy”—does not seem to center on a discussion of the agency of the women subjected to neotraditionalism. Perhaps Carrico’s point is rather to warn the reader of the danger of relying too much on “agency” for marginalized people who are subjected to social norms, especially in the discourse of balance in the yin-yang tradition where the neotraditionalist claims that tradition exerts value on women equally regardless of misogynistic practices. Ahmed Afzal’s chapter on Pakistani same-sex male relationships is well grounded in the ethnographic literature of South Asian sexualities and accurately points out the significance of adding Pakistani sexualities to the literature on South Asian sexualities.
Despite the contributions outlined above, there are some shortcomings in the volume. The length of each chapter is a bit too short to fully flesh out the contexts and problematics of the respective research issues. The importance of the state and political economy, emphasized in the introduction, is not given as much attention in most chapters, which focus rather on the agency of subjects. Most of all, the volume begs the question of how it conceives and represents “Asia.” Despite its claim to address gender and sexuality in Asia, the collection predominantly centres on Chinese societies.
These drawbacks aside, the more nuanced chapters, reviewed above, are informative and useful for teaching about gender and sexuality in the discussed Asian societies, particularly for students at the undergraduate level.
Jesook Song
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
pp. 130-132