Flirting with Capital

Abstract

This study highlights how two developments in global finance-the 2008 financial crisis centered in the United States and Central Europe and the expansion of East Asian economies-created new openings for us to rethink the multiply inflected hierarchies woven through racialized, national, and class-based relations, which produce competing hierarchies of global masculinities. Drawing on 23 months of participant observation and ethnographic research from 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 in four niche markets of Vietnam's global sex industry catering to Western budget tourists, Western transnational businessmen, Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) men, and wealthy local Vietnamese entrepreneurs, I strategically bring together multiple performances of masculinities that simultaneously affirm and contest Western superiority. In lower-paying niche markets that cater to Western businessmen and Western budget travelers, sex bars provide men with the space to project their status anxieties onto women's bodies, affirming Western superiority. In contrast, more expensive bars catering to Viet Kieu and local elite Vietnamese businessmen provide men with the stage to contest Western superiority by capitalizing on this particular moment of economic flux and engaging in acts of conspicuous consumption to display their financial dominance. Together, these four niche markets of Vietnam's global sex industry provide a unique window to examine how multiple performances of masculinity unfold in relation to each other in the context of rapid economic change.

Close encounters: Migrant bodies, workplace, and intimate labor in Asia

“…A numerically important form of female labor migration is linked to reproductive activities, such as low‐paid domestic work, care work, hospitality services, entertainment, and sex industries. The expanding demand for women's paid reproductive work in the globalizing cities of Asia is due to a combination of factors, including an increase in women's labor force participation in the more advanced economies in the region leading to care deficits on the domestic front; growing eldercare needs resulting from plummeting fertility rates, increasing dependency ratios, rapid aging and major gaps in state support for the care of the elderly and infirm; and the expansion of hospitality and sexual services as both male executives and entrepreneurs as well as sex or entertainment workers become more mobile (Elias & Gunawardana, 2013; Hoang, 2014b; Kajimura, 2020). These trends mean that women migrating within labor contract systems are no longer tracing pathways just to advanced industrialized nations in the West or wealthy oil‐producing countries; many are also seeking overseas employment in the rapidly industrializing economies in Asia such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, and Thailand (Yeoh & Ramdas, 2014).…”

Developmental idealism and migration: theorizing their relationship and an empirical example from Nepal

“…There is also a substantial ethnographic literature showing that many DI worldviews, values, and beliefs have spread to the grassroots in many places around the world (Ahearn, 2001;Dahl & Rabo, 1992;Hoang, 2014;James Ferguson, 1999;Jayakody, 2019;Osella & Osella, 2006;Stacy Leigh Pigg, 1992). Similarly, recent survey research and investigation of internet searches have documented widespread shared beliefs in a similar hierarchy of nations by their level of development (Binstock & Thornton, 2007;Dorius, 2016;Dorius & Swindle, 2019;Melegh, 2012;Melegh et al, 2013;Thornton et al, 2012a;Xie et al, 2012).…”