University of California Press Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

Review "A valuable contribution to our understanding of the sex industry . . . The praise that Hoang's research has received is well deserved, and Dealing in Desire is a must-read."--Jack David Eller "Anthropology Review Database" (10/2/2015 12:00:00 AM) "The topic of Dealing in Desire is arresting and the book is destined to gain a wide readership. Furthermore, not only is the fieldwork impressive, but the arguments are provocative and well substantiated."--Erik Harms "Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review" (6/1/2015 12:00:00 AM) This book is ethnographically rich and is an intriguing and gripping read.--Jack David Eller "American Journal of Sociology" (3/1/2016 12:00:00 AM) Product Description This captivating ethnography explores Vietnam's sex industry as the country ascends the global and regional stage. Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget - tourists. Dealing in Desire takes an in-depth and often personal look at both the sex workers and their clients to show how Vietnamese high finance and benevolent giving are connected to the intimate spheres of the informal economy. For the domestic super-elite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption is a means of projecting an image of Asian ascendancy to potential investors. For Viet Kieus and Westerners who bring remittances into the local economy, personal relationships with local sex workers reinforce their ideas of Asia's rise and Western decline, while simultaneously bolstering their diminished masculinity. Dealing in Desire illuminates Ho Chi Minh City's sex industry as not just a microcosm of the global economy, but a critical space where dreams and deals are traded. From the Inside Flap "This extraordinary work is pathbreaking, substantively, theoretically, and methodologically. It powerfully explores the socially co-constitutive and critical cultural role of Vietnam's multi-tiered sex industry in its bourgeoning global economic sector. Hoang simultaneously dissects competing hierarchies of race, gender, and nation in the pursuit of multinational deals and masculine desires. It upends traditional trafficking studies of Asian sex workers as victims, presenting them instead as shrewd entrepreneurs and creative agents of their own lives. A methodological tour de force. Malinowskian in scope, depth, daring, and technical virtuosity, this will remain the standard by which sociological fieldwork in other societies will be judged for years to come."--Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology, Harvard University, and coeditor of The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth "Eye-opening and ground-breaking. Kimberly Kay Hoang's tour-de-force ethnography inhabits and crosses multiple domains of desire-making to showcase the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. Through the innovative frame of desire as a force of production, this work dismantles the problematic analytic binaries of "culture" and "economy." Specifically, by viscerally analyzing the role of confidence, the production of hierarchical status, and the buttressing of failure - which are all premised on particular performances of feminine submission -in creating the conditions of possibility for investment (and individual) potentials, Hoang delivers what many works have only promised. That is, that embodiment, inequality, and intimacy construct social economies. Differential masculinities and women's roles in brokering these differences while making space for their own life projects are the currencies of market development and action. Rarely ever has the relationship between desire, work, capital, an