Queering Migrations Towards, From, and Beyond Asia

Hugo Córdova Quero, Michael Sepidoza Campos, J. Goh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137447739
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

The book explores migration and queerness as they relate to ethnic/racial identity constructions, immigration processes and legal status, the formation of trans/national and trans/cultural partnerships, and friendships. It explores the roles that religious identities/values/worldviews play in the fortification/critique of queer migrant identities.

PART I

TOWARDS ASIA

CHAPTER 1

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO? RACIAL SEXUAL PREFERENCES AND MIGRATION IN JAPAN

Jamie Paquin

Every year, scores of Japanese holiday, study, work, or settle abroad, while thousands of non-Japanese enter the country for the same purposes (Fujita 2009; Kelsky 2001). On the surface, the motives for such migrations seem self-evident—to relax or take in the novelty of a different place, get an education, or pursue career opportunities. Yet, when the intimate dimensions of people’s lives are taken into account, migrations often reveal a different character, for such flows often stem from, or result in, racial sexual preferences that shape or even determine a migrant’s decision to go, stay, or leave. In other words, migratory desires and actions may depend, in part or in whole, on the assessment of place as either “sexual paradises” or “romantic wastelands” in relation to migrants’ racial demographics.

This chapter both “queers” migration and explores “queer migrations” by identifying some ways in which sexuality—particularly racial sexual preferences—are intertwined with migratory decisions and experiences. Through the use of primary interview data along with secondary sources, I illustrate how sexual preferences influence decisions related to work, study, and residence prior to or after migration. Concurrently, this chapter considers the broader forces that shape these desires as well as some of the outcomes associated with both the realization and frustration of racially and geographically based sexual preferences.

This inquiry contributes to a number of questions related to sexuality and migration. First, by highlighting some ways in which sexual preferences and migration intertwine, this inquiry expands the literature concerned with the subjective dimensions of migration (see Knowles and Harper 2010; Ossman 2007). Second, by taking racial preferences as the axis of investigation, this inquiry demonstrates the relevance of additional factors, beyond gender, to racial sexual preferences and the potentially significant relationship between certain types of preferences and specific geographies. Finally, it lends credibility to theories of late modern subjectivity, highlighting the greater focus on global imaginaries, self-fulfillment, and choice as engines of desire and conduct (Appadurai 1996; Bauman 2008; Giddens 1993; Simon 1996). Thus, by focusing on how racial sexual preferences figure into the migratory patterns of people, this chapter indicates a need to consider more broadly how sexuality and other desires underpin movements otherwise narrated as work, lifestyle, or adventure related, while also drawing attention to the salience of race as a potentially defining feature for some forms of sexuality. In doing so, the chapter also indicates some ways in which the pursuit of personal fulfillment increasingly takes on transnational dimensions.

Theorizing Migration: Structural and Subjective Factors

Migration is a defining feature of modernity—and indeed human history—that shows no signs of abating in the coming century (Castles and Miller 2008; Solimano 2010). In the study of migratory flows and motives, scholars have commonly distinguished between voluntary and involuntary movements and emphasized push/pull factors (economic, political, environmental), mobility and citizenship rights (state and international governance), issues related to adjustment, community formation, identity, and incorporation (Brettell and Hollifield 2007; Portes and DeWind 2008), and more recently postcolonial and transnational connections (Appadurai 1996; Ong 1999; Vertovec 2009). Addressing more voluntary forms of migration, Solimano (2010, 23–24) identifies the attractiveness of desirable personal and economic conditions and living standards and/or desirable cosmopolitan, academic, or professional conditions abroad as key motives. Accordingly, he argues that migration is a good barometer of the differentials among the social, economic, and political conditions of sending and receiving places.

Though this list encompasses a significant number of factors and motives of migratory flows, there remains much more to understand regarding the subjective dimensions of human flows. In particular, the relationship between structural factors and migratory decisions is an open and ongoing question, given that there is a relatively weak correlation between push/pull factors such as poverty or wealth and migration (Sassen 2008). Explorations of subjective dimensions of migration are, thus, an essential component to the field as a whole.

Subjectivity and Migration

As relevant as economic improvement from hardship may be for many migratory patterns, there is an array of other motives for resettlement. One such dimension is captured in the notion of “lifestyle migration” (Benson and O’Reilly 2009; also Hamano 2010; Sato 2001), a concept that addresses the forms of travel and resettlement instigated and/or sustained by a desire for a more fulfilling life. Predicated on at least modest degrees of affluence and mobility, but by no means simply a choice reserved for the wealthy, Benson and O’Reilly (2009) categorized a few forms of lifestyle migration as the “rural idyll,” the “coastal retreat,” and the “cultural/spiritual attraction” (6). These forms of migration are predicated on subjects’ critiques of Western individualism, alienation, and urbanism, which they seek to replace with simpler, “truer,” more communal, and nonalienated forms of existence. In other words, these patterns often go against the sorts of economic motives considered central to most accounts of migratory behavior. Fujita (2009) contributes to this line of inquiry by adding the notion of cultural migration—or migration related to the acquisition of cultural capital or expanded opportunities for cultural production—characteristic of the flows of many Japanese to places like New York and London who seek to participate in local art, music, and dance scenes.

An increasing number of scholars have begun to look at specifically sexual dimensions of migration, both unearthing neglected aspects of erotic and intimate past lives of migrants (Eng 2001; Liu-Farrer 2010) and also looking at ways in which contemporary migrations have various sexual implications or are even characterized by sexual motives (see Gorman-Murray 2007; Luibheid and Cantú Jr 2005).

Queering/Eroticizing Migration

Undoubtedly, most migrants throughout history have had other priorities besides the satisfaction of their sexual or romantic ideals, although this by no means indicates that migration and intimacy are unrelated; for whether or not sexuality figures explicitly into migratory decisions, it is invariably affected. Relocation may involve dealing with the strains of long-distance intimacy, break-ups, or undergoing relationship strains while dealing with the challenges of a new life. Resettlements can also involve entering into new sexual-romantic contexts characterized by different demographics and norms that may present novel sexual and romantic possibilities and sensibilities, the rise or fall of one’s sexual value, and the potential for lesser or greater feelings of desire toward locals than the people in one’s place of origin.

The sexual and intimate implications of migrations driven by other priorities are easily revealed if we turn our attention to migrants’ intimate lives. Early Chinese male migrants to North America may have gone to improve their family’s economic conditions, though, given that they also faced severe racist obstacles when attempting to resettle their spouses and families or engage in romantic or sexual relationships with local women (see Chan 1991; Eng 2001), their intimate lives were severely diminished. Compensatory institutions such as prostitution, but also other forms of mediated intimacy such as the taxi-dance hall (Cressey 2007),¹ further illustrate the sexual and romantic needs that accompany migration. Sexuality is relevant even to the migration of entire families, as intergenerational tensions can emerge when children reject the sexual values of their parents in addition to adults’ shifting views on sexuality (Ahmadi 2003). Relative social isolation in new locales can, moreover, lead to an increased reliance on sexual relationships for human contact and assistance (Farrer 2010), and pragmatic migrations involving marriage to foreign nationals can generate romantic and sexual deficits dealt with through extramarital affairs (Liu-Farrer 2010). Sexuality is also directly intertwined with citizenship rights and legal systems that variously validate, ignore, or even punish sexual difference (Luibheid 2002). The queer migrant may, in other words, face obstacles to entry or undergo persecution in ways directly tied to their sexualities and in ways that constrain their realization of intimate or other ambitions (Luibheid and Cantú Jr 2005).

At other times, however, sexuality is not simply affected by migration but is partially or entirely responsible for migration itself. Aside from complicated and contentious forms of sexual tourism and sexual trafficking (Aoyama 2009; Cabezas 2009; Hall and Ryan 2001; Sung Chong, Bauer, and McKercher 2003) or transnational movements triggered by sexual persecution (Cantú Jr 2009; Luiebheid and Cantú Jr 2005), there is a range of movements motivated by a desire for greater congruence between sexual ideals and the demographics of a given place (see Kong 2010). Gay and lesbian flows from rural to urban communities have most explicitly brought forth the potential relationship between sexual preferences and migration, showing that some forms of sexuality are thoroughly tied to particular sociospatial contexts that provide the demographic and sociospatial grounds for their actualization (Abraham 2009; Bech 1997). Weston (1998) documents this relationship in looking at the “great migration” of gays and lesbians to urban centers across the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, fuelled by a “sexual imaginary” related to cities like San Francisco that promised community, but also the opportunity to actualize desires that were unrequited or dangerous elsewhere. Consequently, like many other observers, Binnie (2004, 91) argues that homosexuality and gay/lesbian identities are a fundamentally urban phenomena (see also Bech 1997).

Gorman-Murray (2007) acknowledges that the city has been important to the formation and actualization of homosexualities—particularly where the sociospatial divides between urban and rural have been stark—though he also argues that the focus on rural to urban flows has concealed the diversity and “peripatetic” nature of queer migrations that reflect ongoing identity constructions and quests for the realization of sexual desires. As a corrective, he stresses the need to explore queer migrations at the level of the body and to follow these diverse trajectories to better account for the relationships between migrations and sexualities. This is an important observation, yet the value of this insight is constrained because Gorman-Murray (and many others) restrictively equate queer/dissident sexualities with homosexualities, a move that deviates from the initial intent of queer theory to move beyond gay and lesbian studies toward deconstructing binaries and normativities of all kinds (see Hall 2003; Seidman 2008). To conflate hetero-sexuality and hetero-normativity is thus to neglect a wider range of sexual differences with migratory implications,² for, as Rubin (1984) argues, the division between normative and deviant desires includes an array of elements beside gender (sex), including race, nonmonogamy, sadomasochism, ageplay,³ and other unconventional dynamics and practices, types of preferences that cut across or surpass gender preferences for many people. This distinction between the heterosexual and heteronormative is especially obvious when we consider relationship dynamics such as polyamory, open relationships, “hot wife” relationships, and consensual cuckoldry (Ley 2009), all of which are generally heterocentric though hardly heteronormative.

Racial preferences are an additional facet of sexual desire with a precarious normative status and a number of potential migratory implications similar to same-sex desires when they are interracial in form. Like same-sex preferences, interracial preferences can have a determining influence on sexual arousal and have the potential to generate hostility and stigma when declared or actualized. Their actualization is also tied to particular demographic and sociopolitical conditions (see Mumford 1997). In addition, racial and gender preferences often intertwine, making racial preferences an interesting way to consider sexualities along a different axis from that of hetero/homo-classifications.

Taking interracial preferences seriously as forms of sexuality is thus warranted for two reasons. First, they constitute a defining feature of sexuality for many people, and second because queer theories seek to identify the complexities of sexual desire beyond simple binaries of heterosexual and homosexual. Valocchi (2005) stresses these points when observing that

sex of object choice may be irrelevant to an individual’s identity formation: racial, ethnic, and class differences may be more important . . . and understanding of sexual identity may be inflected in unique ways depending on racial, ethnic, or class affiliations, thus, the practices, expressions, and interests emergent from this intersection of differences cannot be captured by the dominant categories of homosexual or heterosexual or any other single identity category (752–3).

For these reasons, in what follows, race is explored as a defining feature of some sexualities that in turn has implications for migration as well as for the way in which we conceive of “sexuality” generally. Operationally, the term “race” is used here in line with how it is commonly used when people discuss their preferences, namely a shorthand for a set of physical traits that may coincide with particular culturally generated sensibilities or preferences, but which are not presumed to be synonymous with characterological traits at any physiological level.⁴

With an expanded conceptualization of queer sexualities and migrations in mind that includes forms of atypical or dissident desires beyond (though including) homosexual forms, we can follow Gorman-Murray (2007, 111) in defining queer migra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction:  Trans/Pacific Affairs: Queer-Journeyers in Search of New Liaisons
• Part I   Towards Asia
• Part II   From and Around Asia
• Part III   Being and Believing: Asian Diaspora
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index