East Asian Sexualities

This book paints a vivid picture of women's active involvement in reshaping intimate and public sexual life in East Asia. In bringing together exciting new feminist research on sexuality from East Asia and making it available to a wider audience, East Asian Sexualities unsettles stereotypes, rectifies lack of awareness and demonstrates that East Asia matters.

The chapters address the diversity and variety of everyday sexual lives and sexual politics in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. They range from workplace sexual cultures, trans-national sexual relations, the conditions of sex-work and the emergence of new sexual desires, cultures and movements. The contributors highlight the gendered and sexual consequences of globalization and rapid social change. In doing so, they engage with western debates on late modernity while also exploring the contested understandings of modernization and westernization in the East. This is a collection which illuminates the local situations in which women's sexual lives are lived and offers fresh perspectives on global issues.

Table of Contents

Note on Asian Names

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Introduction - Reflections on Gender, Modernity and East Asian Sexualities
Stevi Jackson, Liu Jieyu and Woo Juhyun

Part I - Sex and Work
1. Global Cinderellas: Sexuality, Power and Situational Practices across Borders - Lan Pei-Chia
2. The Making of Sekuhara: Sexual Harassment in Japanese Culture - Muta Kazue
3. The Office Party: Corporate sexual culture and sexual harassment in the South Korean workplace - Lee Sung-eun
4. Sexualized Labour? The 'White Collar Beauty' in Provincial China - Liu Jieyu
5. Sex and Work in Sex Work: Negotiating Sex and Work among Taiwanese Sex Workers - Chen Mei-Hua
6. Beyond sex work: An Analysis of Xioajies' Understandings of Work in the Pearl River Delta Area, China - Ding Yu and Ho Sik-ying

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 - Jing Yu and Ho Sik-ying
8. 'How did you two meet?' Lesbian Partnerships in Present-day Japan - Saori Kamano and Diana Khor
9. Chinese Women's Stories of Love, Marriage and Sex - Li Yinhe
10. Talking about 'Good Sex': Hong Kong Women's Sexuality in the 21st Century - Annie H-N Chan
11. Becoming 'the First Wives': Gender Intimacy and Global Economy across the Taiwan Strait. - Shen Hsiu-hua

Index

About the Authors:

Stevi Jackson is Professor of Women's Studies and Director of the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of York, UK. She works on theories of gender and sexuality and is author of a number of books including Childhood and Sexuality (1982; 1996), Heterosexuality in Question (1999) and Theorizing Sexuality, with Sue Scott (2008). She has co-edited, with Sue Scott, Feminism and Sexuality (1997) and Gender: A Sociological Reader (2001). She has a long-standing personal interest in east Asia, having spent formative years in Hong-Kong as a teenager and has recently developed an academic interest in the area through her research students and through contacts with East Asian feminist scholars.

Liu Jieyu is Academic Fellow of the White Rose East Asian Centre based at the University of Leeds, having previously been Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation (2007) and of journal articles on women workers in China. She is currently researching the aestheticisation of white collar work in China and the aspirations of young women employed in such work.

Woo Juhyun has completed a PhD at the University of York on narratives of sexual citizenship and is pursuing further research on narratives of sexuality at the University of York. She undertook her undergraduate and graduate education in the UK, but was born and raised in Korea and worked as a sociological researcher in her native country before returning to the UK to work on her PhD.