Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness

Transpacific Attachments: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Affective Histories of Chineseness

Wong, Lily

Paperback

Series: Global Chinese Culture

Literary CriticismFilm & Video ArtGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 0231183399
ISBN13: 9780231183390
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Apr 21 2020
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.80
Language: English

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.

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