Commodified romance in a Tokyo host club

My original paper title was “Queer Eyes for the Japanese Guy” but I changed it to “Commodified Romance in a Tokyo Host Club”. Based on 10 months of fieldwork in Tokyo host and hostess clubs that are currently doing for my doctoral dissertation, today I would like to talk a little bit about male hosts and their female clients, what kind of social context the female clients’ desires derive from, and finally what the host club phenomena means to the gender and heterosexual norms in Japan. Ultimately, I intend to demonstrate some aspects of how the Japanese host club simultaneously reinforces and destabilises prevailing gender norms, and by extension heterosexual norms in Japan.AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

Of transgender and sin in Asia

There are vibrant transgender communities in both Thailand and the Philippines (e.g. see Winter, 2006; Winter, Sasot and King, in prep). Yet the languages of Thailand and the Philippines lack single words that correspond to our words ‘transgender’/ ‘transsexual’. In Thailand the commonest word for transwomen is kathoey. Originally used to describe hermaphrodites, the word later broadened to embrace any male contravening gender role expectations (gays, effeminate males etc), only recently (with the word ‘gay’ entrenched in Thai) used more specifically to describe transwomen. The word kathoey can carry negative connotations; transwomen are not always comfortable with it. One reason may be that the word implies that one is a variant of male rather than female. Whether it is taken offensively depends a lot on how it is used. In this paper I use the word respectfully, seeking to reclaim it in the way that Western gays have done with the word ‘queer’AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

A short history of 'hentai'

"A Yahoo search for the Japanese loanword ‘hentai’ produces over 7 million hits ... evidence of the popularity of a genre of erotic manga and anime referred to as hentai or sometimes the abbreviation ‘H’ (pronounced etchi in Japanese) by western fans. ... [The] use of the term hentai to refer to erotic or sexual manga and anime in general is not a Japanese but an English innovation. In Japanese hentai can reference sexual material but only of an extreme, ‘abnormal’ or ‘perverse’ kind; it is not a general category... "AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

Brazil resolution on sexual orientation: challenges in articulating asexual rights framework from the viewpoint of the global south

In April, 2003 the Brazilian government introduced a historic resolution on ‘Human rights and sexual orientation’. The resolution itself did not go very far as it merely ‘expresses deep concern at the occurrence of violations of human rights in the world against persons on the grounds of their sexual orientation’ and ‘stresses that human rights and fundamental freedoms are the birth right of all human beings, that the universal nature of these rights and freedoms is beyond question and that the enjoyment of such rights and freedoms should not be hindered in any way on the grounds of sexual orientation’.AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

Lesbian identity and community projects in Beijing: notes from the field on studying and theorising same-sex cultures in the age of globalisation

"This paper is based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork for my PhD in Anthropology, and is a research project that investigates same-sex desire and cultures among women in Mainland urban China, mainly in Beijing and on the Internet. The ambitions with this project are for one to contribute knowledge about the variations and similarities in human sexuality and culture, by way of studying a rarely prioritised category of people (lesbian-identified women) in a relatively seldom studied locale (urban China). And second, I hope to connect ideologies about sexual identity to wider social and cultural economies of change and inter-exchange in this particular moment in history often referred to as an age of ‘globalisation’."AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

Transgender culture and Thai boxing

Through exposing a few keys of understanding of the national success of transvestites as Muay Thai boxers in Thailand, I shall lay down a few perspectives that stand as many tracks to be followed during a future fieldwork that the ethnologic methodology requires. I draw my data from a daily life experience in Thailand between 1999 and 2001 when I was carrying out fieldwork about Thai Boxing, and the reading of Thai newspaper (general interest ones as well as specialised in boxing). As a matter of fact, the Muay Thai’s image elaborated daily through its media coverage makes it a truly gendered activity. Definitely, it draws on masculine behaviour. Peter Vail (1998) sees Thai Boxing as the womb if hyper-masculinity. Considering this, I wish to question the confusing success of two cross-dressing boxers, Nong Tum and his recent emulator Nong Tim who is yet to be as famous as the former. I shall make use of the recent developments of gender analysis in Thailand embedded within the contemporary critical theory.AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

The creature of asexual love in 'My Name is Shingo'

This article discusses the story of Kazuo Umezu’s book, Watashi wa Shingo (My name is Shingo) (1982-1986) within the context of asexuality. Readers see how two elementary school pupils, a girl named Marine and a boy named Satoru, fall in love and are blessed with a rather unorthodox child which happens to be a robot. This robot is called Shingo and the story recounts how its mind develops and how it travels the world in pursuit of its ‘parents’ whom it has never had the chance to meet. The reason why I would like to discuss the comic book, My Name is Shingo, is because it hints at children’s asexual reproduction, as well as child asexuality, which, I think, contributes significantly to the intensity and uniqueness of the story. In this article I would like to consider the meaning of ‘asexuality’ and whether there exists any similarities between asexuality of children and that of adults.AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

Queering the culture: how does the gay discourse change if we take cross cultural communication seriously?

Body theory has been an area of growth, ambivalence, and politics in the last twenty years, yet the graft with ‘Asianness' remains unstable. Beyond generalised tropes of Orientalism, close textual analysis is required to understand the sexualised context of the non-Western gay male body. This essay works through the multiple readings of gay foreign bodies represented within both Thai and Australian popular culture and academic texts. Through relevant textual analysis, an examination into cultural meanings, readership practices, and appropriation by and from Western media culture probes the relationship between images of ‘gayness’ and Thai ‘gay’ identity. This essay investigates the semiotic construction of ‘gay’ discourses in both Thai and Western popular images for both the Thai and Western reader. A critique of how ‘gay’ is translated, embodied, and defined within representations and images in Thai popular culture demonstrates that Thai ‘queer’ communities resist neo-colonialist discourses by selectively appropriating particular Western gay terminology and identities in order to create distinctly Thai discourses of ‘gayness’.AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

Schoolgirl romance and female same-sex love in Eileen Chang’s Tongxue shaonian dou bujian: toward a tortured and tortuous Po’s narrative

"Eileen Chang's autobiographical Tongxue shaonian dou bujian, which was published in Taiwan and China in 2004, has aroused debates about whether the work is authentic or not; it has also aroused the “Chang-fever” revealed in various cultural products. One reason readers suspect that this is not actually written by Chang is the obvious homoerotic description. This is in direct contrast to the fact that readers’ voyeuristic interest has mostly centered on Eileen Chang’s two heterosexual romances and has neglected the possibility of her representation of same-sex love relationship in the subsequent “Chang-fever”. Many scholars in Chang studies have even written articles from seemingly objective positions to prove that the heterosexual anecdotes in her novels did occur in her life, so that it has become a convention in Chang studies to connect her real life and her novels primarily through her heterosexual experience. However, not surprisingly, the homosexual description in Tongxue shaonian dou bujian has rarely been discussed in Chang studies either in Taiwan or China"AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit

Excavating desire: queer heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region

"How might we define the term ‘queer heritage’? We could choose to define it as encompassing the whole culture of ‘queerness’ that we have in a sense ‘inherited’ from the past. And that would include everything from our politics to our language to our literature. In other words, it would constitute the passing on of a tradition of what it has meant to be queer in this part of the world. What I am concerned with here, however, is restricted to the physical places and landscapes created or inhabited by homosexuals in the Asia-Pacific region in the past. These would include the buildings or outdoor spaces that we have lived in, danced in, or had sex in. The places where we have created gardens, painted, written novels, or fallen in love. It would include gay beaches and gay beach resorts, the sites of lesbian music camps, famous cruising areas in public parks or shopping malls, saunas and sex clubs, gay hairdressers, drag clubs, gay and lesbian discos. It would also, of course, include sites of discrimination and physical violence against us."AsiaPacifiQueer Network, Australian National Universit