Abstract

This book paints a vivid picture of women's active involvement in reshaping intimate and public sexual life in East Asia. In bringing together exciting new feminist research on sexuality from East Asia and making it available to a wider audience, East Asian Sexualities unsettles stereotypes, rectifies lack of awareness and demonstrates that East Asia matters. The chapters address the diversity and variety of everyday sexual lives and sexual politics in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. They range from workplace sexual cultures, trans-national sexual relations, the conditions of sex-work and the emergence of new sexual desires, cultures and movements. The contributors highlight the gendered and sexual consequences of globalization and rapid social change. In doing so, they engage with western debates on late modernity while also exploring the contested understandings of modernization and westernization in the East. This is a collection which illuminates the local situations in which women's sexual lives are lived and offers fresh perspectives on global issues.
'East Asian Sexualities offers eleven fascinating studies of the interplay of sexuality and modernity in contemporary East Asian societies. This is a book which will spark new debate over the impact of modernity and globalisation on the traditional gender systems in Asian. The editors are to be congratulated for making this pioneering work available to a western audience.' Delia Davin, University of Leeds 'This highly accessible text will be much appreciated by readers committed to widening the global conversation about the meanings and tasks of a feminist sexual politics.' Harriet Evans, University of Westminster 'This collection is an enlightening read from cover to cover, recommended for anyone with an interest in gender, personal life, globalisation, 'modernisation' or the impact of Western cultural hegemony. The leading edge research of new and established scholars provides unique insight into social change in East Asia. The focus on sexualities is timely and an antidote to sexualising discourse of 'orientalism' and Western decadence.' Lynn Jamieson, University of Edinburgh
Stevi Jackson is Professor of Women's Studies and Director of the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of York, UK. She works on theories of gender and sexuality and is author of a number of books including Heterosexuality in Question (1999) and Theorizing Sexuality (2008). She has co-edited, with Sue Scott, Feminism and Sexuality (1997) and Gender: A Sociological Reader (2001). Liu Jieyu is Academic Fellow of the White Rose East Asian Centre based at the University of Leeds, having previously been Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation (2007) and of journal articles on women workers in China. Woo Juhyun has completed a PhD at the University of York on narratives of sexual citizenship and is pursuing further research on narratives of sexuality at the University of York.