Zed Books East Asian Sexualities: Modernity, Gender and New Sexual Cultures

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. East Asian SexualitiesModernity, Gender and New Sexual CulturesBy Stevi Jackson, Liu Jieyu, Woo JuhyunZed Books LtdCopyright © 2008 Stevi Jackson, Liu Jieyu and Woo JuhyunAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-1-84277-888-3ContentsNote on Asian Names, vii, Acknowledgements, viii, Notes on Contributors, ix, Introduction Reflections on Gender, Modernity and East Asian Sexualities Stevi Jackson, Liu Jieyu and Woo Juhyun, 1, Part I • Sex and Work, 1 • Global Cinderellas: Sexuality, Power and Situational Practices across Borders Lan Pei-Chia, 33, 2 • The Making of Sekuhara: Sexual Harassment in Japanese Culture Muta Kazue, 52, 3 • The Office Party: Corporate Sexual Culture and Sexual Harassment in the South Korean Workplace Lee Sung-Eun, 69, 4 • Sexualized Labour? 'White-Collar Beauties' in Provincial China Liu Jieyu, 85, 5 • Sex and Work in Sex Work: Negotiating Sex and Work among Taiwanese Sex Workers Chen Mei-Hua, 104, 6 • Beyond Sex Work: An Analysis of Xiaojies' Understandings of Work in the Pearl River Delta Area, China Ding Yu and Ho Sik-Ying, 123, Part II • The Politics and Practice of Intimate Relationships, 7 • The Sexual Politics of Difference in Post-IMF Korea: Challenges of the Lesbian Rights and Sex Workers' Movements Cho Joo-hyun, 141, 8 • 'How Did You Two Meet?' Lesbian Partnerships in Present-day Japan Saori Kamano and Diana Khor, 161, 9 • Chinese Women's Stories of Love, Marriage and Sexuality Li Yinhe, 178, 10 • Talking about 'Good Sex': Hong Kong Women's Sexuality in the Twenty-first Century Annie Hau-nung Chan, 195, 11 • Becoming 'the First Wives': Gender, Intimacy and the Regional Economy across the Taiwan Strait Shen Hsiu-hua, 216, Index, 236, CHAPTER 1Global Cinderellas: Sexuality, Power and Situational Practices across BordersLAN PEI-CHIAMigrant domestic workers are global Cinderellas. I use this metaphor to illuminate their experience of mobility as a paradoxical juxtaposition of emancipation and exploitation. Migrant women work overseas to escape poverty and stress at home; they also embark on the journey to expand life horizons and to explore global modernity. After crossing geographical borders, they are nevertheless confined within the four walls of their employers' households and the often oppressive policy regulation of the host state. Although migrant women may improve their material lives (and those of their families at home), Cinderella's happy ending remains a fairy tale for many trapped in the diaspora.In this chapter, I focus on two stories of migrant women, one Filipina and the other Indonesian, one divorced and the other single, to illustrate how they situate identities and negotiate sexualities in their cross-border journey. Although these women are not East Asians by origin, they emigrate to and work in East Asia. Echoing recent scholars who have criticized the territorialized social science imaginary as 'methodological nationalism' (Wimmer and Schiller 2002), I adopt a transnational framework to look at the experience of migrant women as an essential contribution to our understanding of East Asian sexualities.These global Cinderellas do not merely leave glass slippers, awaiting the coming of a prince as their saviour. Yet neither is their story a linear transformation of embracing modernity and sexual liberation. Through the lens of sexualities, I demonstrate how migrant women in East Asia bargain with power constraints from both home and host societies and manage to improve their life chances across borders.Negotiating sexuality transnationallyStudies of sexualities and queer theory have recently experienced a small but discernible 'transnational turn' (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999). Scholars have paid increased attention to historical and geographical particularities of sexuality as contextualized embodiments. As Luisa Schein put it, 'sexualities are situated; they appear and are always lived within national, political, racial-ethnic an