Transpacific Attachments : Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness / Lily Wong.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wong, Lily, Author.

Series:

Global Chinese culture.

Global Chinese Culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prostitutes in motion pictures.

Prostitutes in literature.

Chinese in motion pictures.

Chinese in literature.

National characteristics, Chinese.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (248 pages) : illustrations, photographs.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

text file

PDF

Summary:

The figure of the Chinese sex worker-who provokes both disdain and desire-has become a trope for both Asian American sexuality and Asian modernity. Lingering in the cultural imagination, sex workers link sexual and cultural marginality, and their tales clarify the boundaries of citizenship, nationalism, and internationalism. In Transpacific Attachments, Lily Wong studies the mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure through transpacific media networks, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures.Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media-from literature to film to new media-that have circulated within the United States, China, and Sinophone communities from the early twentieth century to the present. Wong explores Asian American writers' articulation of transnational belonging; early Hollywood's depiction of Chinese women as parasitic prostitutes and Chinese cinema's reframing the figure as a call for reform; Cold War-era use of prostitute and courtesan metaphors to question nationalist narratives and heteronormativity; and images of immigrant brides against the backdrop of neoliberalism and the flows of transnational capital. She focuses on the transpacific networks that reconfigure Chineseness, complicating a diasporic framework of cultural authenticity. While imaginations of a global community have long been mobilized through romantic, erotic, and gendered representations, Wong stresses the significant role sex work plays in the constant restructuring of social relations. "Chineseness," the figure of the sex worker shows, is an affective product as much as an ethnic or cultural signifier.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Note on Translation

Introduction: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Transpacific Histories of Affect

PART I: PACIFIC CROSSINGS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

PART II: SINOPHONIC LIAISONS DURING THE COLD WAR

PART III: DWELLING DESIRES AND THE NEOLIBERAL ORDER

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780231544887

023154488X

OCLC:

1083616952