Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia

In globalizing Asia, sexual mores and gender roles are in constant flux. How have economic shifts and social changes altered and reconfigured the cultural meanings of gender and sexuality in the region? How have the changing political economy and social milieu influenced and shaped the inner workings and micro-politics of family structure, gender relationships, intimate romance, transactional sex, and sexual behaviors?

This volume offers up-to-date, grounded, critical analysis of the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, and political economy across a diverse array of Asian societies: China, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. Based on intense ethnographic fieldwork, the chapters disentangle the ways in which gendered and sexual experiences are impinged upon by state policies, economic realities, cultural ideologies, and social hierarchies. Whether highlighting intimate relationships between elite businessmen and their mistresses in China; nightclub performances by Thai men in Bangkok; single women’s views of romance, motherhood, and marriage in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo; or male same-sex relationships in Pakistan—each chapter centers around the stories of the gendered subjects themselves and how they are shaped by outside forces. Taken together they provide a provocative entrée into the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Asia.

By foregrounding cross-cultural ethnographic research, this volume sheds light on how configurations of gender and sexuality are constituted, negotiated, contested, transformed, and at times, perpetuated and reproduced in private, intimate experiences. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, and women’s and LGBTQ studies.

• Tiantian Zheng, Editor

  Tiantian Zheng is professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Cortland.

Contributors

• Tiantian Zheng
• Kevin Carrico
• Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo
• Tracy Royce
• Nana Okura Gagné
• Danning Wang
• John Osburg
• Xia Zhang
• Madhura Lohokare
• Lynne Y. Nakano
• Heidi Hoefinger
• Ahmed Afzal
• Hsunhui Tseng

• As the book title, Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia, suggests, this edited volume provides not only a guide to gender and sexuality studies in Asia but also arguments that centre sexuality in Asian cultural politics. The book presents a collective effort to ethnographically examine recent changes within the political economy in Asia through the lenses of gender and sexuality.
  —Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics
• Twelve well-done essays, with a strong focus on China, explore the diversity of modern sexuality and gender in Asia today . . . it is a fine and fascinating set of ethnographies of gender and sexual diversity. . . . the book is an intriguing examination of an ever-shifting field of concepts and relationships.
  —Anthropology Review Database