East Asian Sexualities

Modernity, Gender and New Sexual Cultures

Stevi Jackson, Jieyu Liu, Juhyun Woo, Stevi Jackson, Jieyu Liu, Juhyun Woo

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781848136526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Part I

Sex and Work

1 Global Cinderellas: Sexuality, Power and Situational Practices across Borders

LAN PEI-CHIA

Migrant domestic workers are global Cinderellas. I use this metaphor to illuminate their experience of mobility as a paradoxical juxtaposition of emancipation and exploitation.¹ 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 transnationally

Studies 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 and gender frames’ (Schein 2000: 6, emphasis in original). Meanwhile, we have also witnessed the reconfiguration of local identities, desires and imaginaries in the globalized world, in which ‘sexuality is negotiated, constrained, expressed and made meaningful across disparate social locations’ (ibid.).

Elizabeth Povinelli and George Chauncey (1999: 446) have proposed the research agenda of ‘thinking sexuality transnationally’: we need to ‘map the movements of people, capital, and images across national boundaries; follow the desires, aspirations, and desperations that prompted these movements, and chronicle the effects of these movements on sexual subjectivities, identification and intimate practices’. I suggest that the experiences of migrant women constitute a critical site of negotiating sexuality transnationally. They cross borders to seek financial gain as well as to explore global modernity. They return home with foreign goods, exotic experiences and reconfigured subjectivities.

Although an expanding body of literature has examined the experience of female migrant workers in Asia, their sexuality – intimate behaviours, erotic desires and sexual identities – is still under-explored terrain. Most of the existing literature looks at sexuality as a site of labour control and discipline (Constable 1997), a marker of racialized differences and ethno-national boundaries (Cheng 2006, Lan 2008), or a discursive field in which migrants negotiate moral identities between the imposed images of prostitution and sainthood (Groves and Chang 2000). Martin Manalansan (2006) has therefore sharply criticized a tendency in migration studies to relate sexuality to control and violence and fail to see migrants as active agents who possess sexual desire and erotic practice.

Mobility, either cross-border or rural-to-urban, has reconfigured the sexual subjectivities of migrant women. However, as some studies have revealed, migration is not a linear process of modernization and sexual liberation. Instead, migrant women often experience competing sets of discourses about sex, love and marriage (Ma and Cheng 2005), and they continually negotiate sexuality and identities across social settings and cultural contexts. For example, migrant workers in China not only emigrate from the countryside to cities but also traverse the conflicting moral orders of rural tradition and urban modernity (Jacka and Gaetano 2004; Pun 2005). Their liminal status allows migrant women to experience sexuality in a transient condition, such as participating in casual urban sex while still subscribing to the moral codes of traditional marriage (Ma and Cheng 2005: 311).

A few researchers have also reported a wider range of sexual practices beyond heterosexual normalcy in the journey of migrant domestic workers to Hong Kong. According to Julian McAllister Groves and Kimberly Chang (2000: 80), some married Filipinas consider lesbianism a ‘safe’ and ‘moral’ alternative to extramarital affairs with men; tomboys are desirable in the community because they are ‘willing to serve’ and ‘protect’ Filipinas. Amy Sim (2006) also discovered that single Indonesian migrant women who participate in same-sex relationships attempt to avoid the risk of pregnancy and protect the moral code at home while satisfying their needs for physical and emotional intimacy; some also view homosexuality as a ‘fashionable practice’ associated with Western modernity.

To examine the sexual agency of migrant women in their transnational journey, I suggest that we look at sexualities not simply as practices situated in particular social locations and discursive contexts but also as situational performances in which migrant women reflexively engage themselves throughout their mobility across spatial and temporal settings. I found Erving Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical concepts ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ useful in describing the situational, context-bound performances of migrant women. These ‘stages’ refer to the dual societies involved in their transnational lives as well as the various locales that situate their multi-layered, translocal subjectivities. Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose (2000: 441) remind us that ‘these “stages” do not preexist their performances, rather, specific performances bring these spaces into being’. The lived experiences of migrant women turn places – either private home or public space – into performative stages of identities and sexuality and sites of labour control and power struggle.

Goffman’s theory has been criticized for its insufficient sensitivity to power inequality. The concept of ‘power geometry’ introduced by Doreen Massey (1999) sheds insight on the reality that people in distinct social locations have unequal access to and power over flows and connections facilitated by time-space compression. Professional migrants with labour market advantages can enjoy a metropolitan life on the basis of flexible citizenship (Ong 1999). Lower-end migrants, however, suffer from limited life chances circumvented by labour subordination and residency regulation in host countries. In addition, the patterns of recruitment and incorporation often differ for specific categories of women and men. Gender, in articulation with class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and so on, enables and constrains people’s ability to move.² Patricia R. Pessar and Sarah J. Mahler (2003: 817), proposing the framework of ‘gendered geographies of power’, suggest that we study ‘not only how people’s social locations affect their access to resources and mobility across transnational spaces, but also their agency as initiators, refiners and transformers of these locations’. They also emphasize that ‘social agency’ should include corporeal agency such as migration as well as cognitive processes like imagination and mind work.

In sum, this chapter will examine the sexual agency of migrant women without losing sight of the various kinds of structural constraints they face while crossing borders and stretching life horizons. I will demonstrate how sexualities serve as a structural mechanism that contributes to the feminization of migration and a medium of power enforcing class subordination and ethnic ‘otherization’. I will also explore how the social imagery of sexuality shapes the ways people think about and act toward migration and how they assert sexual agency as situational practices across social settings and geographical territories.

Female migrant workers in East Asia

The increasing prosperity of East Asia since the 1980s has stimulated substantial international migration within this region. It is estimated that the stock of temporary migrant workers in Asia, with or without legal documents, reached 6.1 million by 2000 (Battistella 2002). About one third of this migrant labour force is feminized (Yamanaka and Piper 2003). The two million women are concentrated in particular occupations, including the entertainment industry, health services, and especially domestic service. Their destinations are widely located in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan.

Since the early 1990s, Taiwan has become a popular destination for Asian migrant workers. The majority of migrant women are employed as domestic helpers and caretakers. In spite of stringent government controls on employer qualifications, the presence of migrant domestic workers in Taiwanese upper-class and middle-class households has rapidly expanded.³ Of the 160,000 migrant domestic helpers and caretakers registered by the end of August 2007, nearly 60 per cent are from Indonesia, 24 per cent from Vietnam, and 16 per cent from the Philippines.⁴

This chapter is based on ethnographic research conducted in two phases. From August 1998 to July 1999 I conducted observa tion in a church-based non-governmental organization that provided services for migrant workers in Taipei, and interviewed 58 Filipina domestic workers. The fieldwork with Indonesian migrants was conducted from September 2002 to October 2003. I approached informants while they ‘hung out’ in Taipei Railway Station on Sundays and 35 in-depth interviews were conducted. I communicated with Filipinas in English and with Indonesians in Mandarin Chinese. I also took two short-term field trips in the Philippines in 1999 and 2002 and one in Indonesia in 2003.

Luisa’s story

Luisa was born on the outskirts of Manila in the early 1960s. She studied in college for one year and dropped out after her father’s sudden death. As the eldest of the six children in her family, she became the extension of her mother and felt compelled to support her siblings. She worked as a secretary in Manila but found the salary too meagre. She decided to apply for an entertainer’s job in Japan. What appealed to her was not just the high salary but also the glamour of femininity associated with the job. ‘Not everyone can go there. You need to have a pretty face, a nice body, and a beautiful smile.’ She was trained to sing and dance by the recruitment agency for six months in order to receive a certificate authorized by the Philippine government. She failed the exam once and finally made it after another six months of training. She left Manila for Tokyo at the age of twenty-one.

Luisa, along with thousands of Filipinas, falls into the category of Japayuki-san, a term coined in Japan to describe South-East Asian women who have come to work in the ‘entertainment’ industry, which denotes a wide range of occupations from singing in karaoke bars, go-go dancing and hostessing, to the sale of sex services (Mackie 1998). As James A. Tyner (1996) has pointed out, the growth of ‘entertain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Asian Names
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I • Sex and Work
• Part II • The Politics and Practice of Intimate Relationships
• Index