Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2012. xi, 374 pp. (Tables, B&W illus.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4577-0.
Asia’s transnational mediascape has increasingly attracted academic attention, as exemplified by the growing number of recent publications on trans-Asian media culture. The academic craze of media flows in Asia seems to have been largely accompanied by macro-level analyses of (inter)national cultural economies with rhetoric such as “soft power,” “Bollywood,” “Cool Japan,” and the “Korean Wave,” while affective dimensions of the changing Asian mediascape have, to a great extent, remained under-researched. In this respect, Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asiamarks a novel approach to transnational Asia and its media culture. This book comprises 10 engaging essays on mediated erotics in transnational Asia, along with an original introduction by the editors. The essays present not only a wide geographic scope across Asia and Asian diasporas, but also an empirically grounded understanding of the transnational mediation of erotics.
The mediated erotic is a topical lens through which the contributors of the book explore Asia as an assemblage of heterogeneous cultural histories in the process of globalization. In the introduction, the editors, Purnima Mankekar and Louisa Schein, elucidate the book’s perspective, which is to challenge the simplistic approach to Asia as a homogeneous entity while exploring cultural identities in the mediated flows of erotics. Following the editors’ introduction, Martin F. Manalansan examines an emerging insubordinate form of erotics that challenges the hegemonic imagination of homelands. Manalansan’s analysis of the Filipino film Miguel/Michelle investigates the way in which queers’ return migration is represented in the media and interpreted by queer viewers in Manila and New York. Judith Farquhar’s essay on the pleasure of reading health magazines explores mediated erotics as a process of forming a new subjectivity in post-socialist China. The question of erotics in the process of reading is also addressed in the following essay, in which Tom Boellstorff explores the interplay between homosexual desire and citizenship in Indonesian gayzines.
Nicole Constable inquires into the Internet media by means of which virtual communities debate the stereotype of correspondence marriages between American men and Filipino women. Everett Yuehong Zhang’s essay discusses the emerging individuals’ desires for and interests in the body in China by analyzing the media appearance of a popular biomedical doctor in post-socialist Beijing. Purnima Mankekar’s essay discusses how nationalist belonging and erotic desires are represented in the 1990s’ transnationalizing Indian television by exploring the alliances between the nation-state, national industry and global capital. Louisa Schein looks at the reconfiguration of transnational erotics in her analysis of migrant subjectivities constructed in the diasporic circulation of Mmong video texts. Sara L. Friedman examines how film viewers in China, Taiwan and the US interpret mediated erotics through their own cultural contexts by analyzing the reception of the Taiwan–Hong Kong-produced film The Twin Bracelets.
The last two essays focus on the topic of Orientalist gazes on Asian women, which is also addressed, to some extent, by most essays in the book. Heather Dell’s study of the award- winning documentary Born into Brothels explores the tension between the dominant Western narrative of “rescuing Asian sex workers” and Asian sex-worker activists’ discourse that challenges the Western stereotype of Asian women as victims. Anne Allison examines the best-selling novel Memoirs of a Geisha, which facilitates Western fans’ engagement with erotics of a distant foreign place and enables them to masquerade as different subjects.
Engaging with various aspects of mediated erotics across Asia and Asian diasporas, the collected essays constitute an organic whole of solid research. As the editors note in their introduction, Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia is more than a compilation of case studies. It presents the leading Asianist anthropologists’ collaborative effort to initiate a transnational framework for analyzing an affective dimension of the trans-Asian mediascape. Theoretically, it attempts to develop cultural theories to explore how media globalization and (gendered and national) identity intersect. In addition, its engagement with the diaspora as a significant research area in transnational Asian studies is noteworthy. The authors’ theoretical effort is enhanced by their reflexive discussions of ethnographic methodology for media analysis in transnational contexts. The contributors utilize an “ethno-textual approach”—Louisa Schein’s term—so that a close reading of the media is interwoven with ethnographic engagement with media text and its context. This methodological effort situates media texts in their particular cultural histories and thus leads readers toward an engaging understanding of transnational cultural flows as lived cultural processes.
While the cultural histories of the trans-Asian mediascape and its affective dimension are perceptively addressed by ethnographic readings of a wide range of media forms, including films, television, radio, novels, magazines and the Internet, most essays in this collection tend to focus on a form of medium. A further examination of cross-media environments would have made this rich collection even more suggestive for the emerging mediascape of the Web 2.0 era; yet, this is still a highly inspiring collection. In particular, its critically and empirically grounded approach makes Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia a welcome addition to cultural research on transnational Asia. This book can be recommended to any scholars and students interested in the cultural aspects of contemporary Asia.
Kyong Yoon
The University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada
pp. 303-305