Book Review Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia - Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, Vol 2 Issue 1 (original) (raw)

As the book title, Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia, suggests, this edited volume provides not only a guide to gender and sexuality studies in Asia but also arguments that centre sexuality in Asian cultural politics. The book presents a collective effort to ethnographically examine recent changes within the political economy in Asia through the lenses of gender and sexuality. Moreover, across the twelve chapters, the authors address various methodological and theoretical issues that extend beyond Asia as a regional case and sex/gender as a sole analytical dimension. Such a volume would benefit not only students and scholars who are already interested in Asia, political economy, and sex and gender studies, but also those who primarily study social changes in first-world countries. Like other excellent ethnographic studies, the essays in this book constantly ask readers to be mindful of specific cultural and historical contexts that may be different from and yet connected to other parts of the world. This volume manifests a critical theoretical position between strong cultural relativism and universalism in anthropology. In other words, the authors simultaneously present their studies as unique in specific contexts and claim broader implications of the cases in relation to studies done elsewhere. For instance, Ahmed Afzal (chapter 11) argues against a universal assumption of premodern or Western gay identity in understanding male-male sexual relationships in Pakistan. Instead, he says that the selfhood and 'homosociality' of these relationships should be understood in the context of localised adulthood, gender roles, familial expectations, and religious beliefs. Danning Wang (chapter 5) stresses the historical situation as an important aspect within discourses of the family planning campaign in China as it simultaneously 'desexualiz[ed] working-class women's family life' (94) and reoriented the notion of family to state interests. Afzal, Wang, and many other chapter authors highlight the importance of specific social and historical conditions in ethnographical analyses, but at the same time, their cases speak to various theoretical and methodological issues beyond particular regions and populations. While essays in this book focus on cultural politics in Asia, the human subjects in the studies are in the process of migration, and so are materials and ideologies. The authors demonstrate that Asia is never in a closed, homogeneous, or stable state. Rather, it is highly diversified with movements of people, wealth, and ideas in both global and local scales. Furthermore, by focusing on humans experiencing relocation or displacement, the authors identify the constant changes of political economy that shape migrations from rural to urban areas and international movement. In these cases, humans are not confined to a region, and their migrations suggest layers of social changes. In Heidi Hoefinger's (chapter 10) research of Cambodian women engaging in transactional sex with Western foreigners as a means of class mobility, she identifies a series of contradictions and negotiations regarding