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Discussions of sexuality in Asia and the Pacific have long been tinged with conceptions of the exotic Orient. Examining a world of erotic encounter between European, Asian, and Pacific people, these essays explore how sexual practices and sexual meanings have been constructed across cultural borders in Thailand, the Philippines, Burma/Myanmar, Japan, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Polynesian islands. Considering sexuality as embedded in a complex social and political world structured and saturated by gender, race, and class relations, these scholars challenge the categories with which sex and gender have been named and studied. They examine these sites of desire through specific historic and cultural circumstances, from the first explorations of Europeans, through colonial power, to the contemporary issues of sexual tourism, prostitution, and the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
A unique and important contribution to the study of sexuality, this book also suggests that the history of sexuality in the West was shaped by myths of the legendary Orient and the exotic “Other.”
Introduction: Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure in Asia and the Pacific
Lenore Manderson, Margaret Jolly.
Ch. 1: Educating Desire in Colonial Southeast Asia: Foucault, Freud and Imperial Sexualities
Ann Staler
Ch. 2: Contested Images and Common Strategies: Early Colonial Sexual Politics in the Massim
Adam Reed
Ch. 3: Gaze and Grasp: Plantations, Desires, Indentured Indians, and Colonial Law in Fiji
John D. Kelly
Ch. 4: From Point Venus to Bali Ha’i: Eroticism and Exoticism in Representations of the Pacific
Margaret Jolly
Ch. 5: Parables of Imperialism and Fantasies of the Exotic: Western Representations and Thailand – Place and Sex
Lenore Manderson
Ch. 6: Primal Dream: Masculinism, Sin and Salvation in Thailand’s Sex Trade
Annette Hamilton
Ch. 7: Kathoey < Gay < Man: The Historical Emergence of Gay Male Identity in Thailand
Peter A. Jackson
Ch. 8: State of Desire: Transformations in Huli Sexuality
Jeffrey Clark
Ch. 9: A Plague on the Borders: HIV, Development, and Traveling Identities in the Golden Triangle
Doug Porter
Ch. 10: A Matter of “Choice”: Discourses on Prostitution in the Philippines
Lisa Law
Ch. 11: The Foreign Devil Returns: Packaging Sexual Practice and Risk in Contemporary Japan
Sandra Buckley