As was foreshadowed in the introduction to this chapter, over the past two decades in the humanities and social sciences, there has emerged a strong tendency to critique essentialist understandings of Chineseness as a singular, ‘authentic’ and nation-based identity. For example, Lydia Liu proposes that the massive influx of neologisms from other languages into what […]

If there is a correlate in queer Chinese studies to a roots-based, centripetal, civilisationist view of ‘Chinese culture’ (see Tu 1991), it is found perhaps most clearly in queer responses to what Singaporean-American film scholar Kenneth Chan has called the ‘homophobic Chinese patri­archal system’ (2008: 142). Such responses foreground what is felt to be a […]

Fran Martin Introduction A certain tension frequently arises in attempts to think about queer Chinese cultures in a transnational frame. Broadly, this is a tension between emphasising the multiplicity and frag­mentation of Chinese identities today, versus emphasising the ‘deep structures’ of ethnicity and culture — especially the family — that are sometimes understood as a […]

In recent years the issue of cross-border migration to work in the sexual service industry has come in for much media, popular and academic attention, which typically manifests as a trans­national panic around sex trafficking (Cacciotolo 2012; Cizmar, Conklin and Hinman 2011; Kim 2011). The result of this panic has been increased surveillance of the […]

Many people in East Asia, as elsewhere, understand their experiences and identities within frameworks that may appear quite similar to globalised notions of sexual identity (Altman 1997: 417—36). The story of why some people in East Asia came to identify themselves with particular categories of sexual identity is, however, complex and historically contingent, as many […]

Mark Pendleton The politics of sex and sexuality in East Asia has a long history of crossing borders. We know, for example, that Japanese sex workers were migrating to the imperial borderlands of China from about the 1850s, attracting bureaucratic attention from policy makers and public intellectuals in the process (Driscoll 2010: 61—62; Mackie and […]

As can be seen in the abovementioned chapters and the suggested further reading, there is now a critical mass of sexuality studies on East Asian societies by scholars based in the region itself as well as working across institutions in the Anglophone world. It is particularly remarkable how, in the last two decades, studies on […]

The three chapters in this section look at issues surrounding pornography and censorship in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. As noted above, the rapid uptake of Internet technologies in the East Asian region has led to the ease of transmission of local, regional and international media content across borders. One area in which this […]

In this section, four chapters address the topic of sexual health in the region with particular emphases on HIV prevention and treatment, reproductive health and sexual health in relation to ageing. Kazuya Kawaguchi provides an overview of regional responses to the HIV-AIDS epidemic. Asia is the region with the second highest rate of HIV infection […]

The chapters in this section address the topic of sex work in selected sites in the region. Elaine Jeffreys traces the history of prostitution in post-revolutionary China. The Communist regime in China claimed to have eradicated prostitution. Indeed, it would have been difficult to undertake such a taboo activity in the early post-revolutionary years when […]