Kimberly Kay Hoang

Competing Technologies of Embodiment Pan-Asian Modernity and Third World Dependency in Vietnam’s Contemporary Sex Industry

This article illustrates how the circulation of capital and culture in Asia produces divergent embodied gendered ideals of national belonging through the case of Vietnam’s global sex industry. Introducing the concept of competing technologies of embodiment, I show how sex workers’ surgical and cosmetic bodily projects represent different perceptions of an emerging nation’s divergent trajectories in the global economy. In a high-end niche market that caters to local elite Vietnamese businessmen, sex workers project a new pan-Asian modernity highlighting emergent Asian ideals of beauty in a project of progress that signals the rise of Asia. Women who cater to Western men, in contrast, embody Third World dependency, portraying Vietnam as a poverty-stricken country in need of Western charity. By comparing multiple markets, I illustrate how individual agents in the developing world actively reimagine their nation’s place in the global economy through their embodied practices.

Protagonist‐Driven Urban Ethnography

Sociologists credit the University of Chicago as the birthplace of urban ethnography and view Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess as the field’s foundational scholars. Park and Burgess urged their students to leave the musty stacks of the library to conduct first-hand observations; the ideal ethnographer was a “disinterested researcher who assembled subjective findings without distortion” (Park and Burgess 1925 [1967]). Since its founding, urban ethnography has been an immersive exploration of the local yet unfamiliar. The field has evolved to systematically document the connections between individuals and organizations (Vargas Forthcoming), institutions (Lara-Millán 2014), and the broader social, political, and economic context of the urban environment (Carlson 2015; Hoang 2015). In the 1980s and 1990s, a Bourdieusian tradition of reflexivity developed alongside “standpoint theory,” a distinctly feminist epistemology. Ethnographers in both schools of thought questioned the consequences of sensationalizing “other” places and people in their research. These epistemological frameworks questioned the taken-for-granted relationship between the researcher and research participants where only the researcher was a legitimate “agent of knowledge” (Harding 1988:3). Conceptually, they opened ground for new ways of knowing based on a deep understanding of actors’ “symbolic templates for [their] practical activities” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:7) and on the structural location of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988). These concepts became slippery when applied to urban ethnography. Broadly, scholars recognized a relationship between personal standpoint and academic research: The researcher’s position affects site selection, data analysis, presentation, and interpretation of findings. They responded to this relationship with calls for embodied commitments to the research project and for clarity and transparency regarding the researcher’s position in the field. Yet in practice, the turn toward embodied, transparent ethnography seemed to defeat the purposes of analyzing subaltern knowledge and of tapping into the deep understandings of scholars who occupy a similar marginal position to their research subjects. Instead, contemporary urban ethnography too often fuses objectivity and subjectivity into a kind of scholar-centered ethnography. In this popular form, scholars establish their legitimacy by

Guest Editors' Introduction: Inter-Asian Capital Circulations, Cultural Transformations, and Methodological Positions

This issue, “Decentering ‘Globalized’ Asia,” highlights the work of rising scholars whose research provides new perspectives on the multidimensional transformations occurring in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from the Social Science Research Council’s 2008 call to take seriously interAsian connections, this issue crosses traditional area studies boundaries to create a new dialogue within Asian studies. The authors provide empirical evidence of crossborder exchanges that produce diverse forms of urban development, governance, modes of inclusion and exclusion, and social protest. The pieces shift Asia to the center of innovative scholarship on the changing geography of global culture, economy, and politics by describing how crossborder transformations play out at the regional, national, and local levels. Over the last two decades, Asian studies has worked to free itself from

Transnational Gender Vertigo

Sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang explores sex work and international migration, how sex workers-turned-wives become breadwinners.

Political Economy of Embodiment: Capitalizing on Globally Staged Bodies in Nigerian Beauty Pageants and Vietnamese Sex Work

How do various stakeholders capitalize off of display workers’ bodies? This article uses a comparative-case approach to examine two different sites—beauty pageants in Nigeria and high-end sex workers in Vietnam—where women’s bodies are differentially staged with varying degrees of visibility. Theoretically, this article develops the concept of political economy of embodiment to account for a network of people onstage, backstage, and offstage who capitalize off displayed bodies in qualitatively different ways. Beauty pageants in Nigeria take place on highly visible national and global stages. Contestants’ bodies signal African beauty as being fashion-forward, which propels and integrates Nigeria into international arenas of diplomacy and trade. High-end sex workers in Vietnam work on a stage that is hidden from the general public yet open for a select group of Vietnam’s elites. Sex workers’ bodies are on display to project an ideal of Asian ascendancy in Vietnam’s market.

Risky Investments: How Local and Foreign Investors Finesse Corruption-Rife Emerging Markets

How do investors enter and navigate markets where there is a general lack of access to information and where the law is open to interpretation? Drawing on interview data with 100 research subjects in Vietnam’s real estate market, this article makes contributions to the literatures of economic sociology and development. First, looking at a diverse set of local, regional, and global investors, I theorize how market actors pursue different strategies to manage risky investments based on their proximity to state officials. Investors’ proximity depends on four processes: legal/regulatory, social ties, cultural matching, and stage of investment. Second, I highlight how multiple state–market relations can coexist within the same state. Investors’ varying levels of proximity to government officials shape their relationship with the state as one of patronage (predatory), mutual destruction (mutual hostage), or transparency (developmental). Heterogeneous state–market relations help account for the persistence of foreign direct investment in markets that display both a great deal of corruption and a great deal of legality and transparency.

How to Do Ethnography Right

Selected essays from the Contexts forum on ethnographic best practices explore the practice of ethnographic “masking,” IRBs and legal counsel, and gaining access to vulnerable populations.

Refashioning Global Bodies

Women’s bodies are symbolic sites where debates about the development of a nation take place. Shifts in the global economy, cultural globalization, and postcolonial trajectories map onto women’s altered embodiments (Dewey 2008; Mani 1998; Otis 2012). These bodies represent a nation’s shift toward modernity (Rofel 1999) through economic progress and development. Bodily practices and markers of appearance such as dress, makeup, and grooming are vehicles of collective identity in which women’s bodies are often the terrain where national identities are produced, maintained, and resisted (Choo 2006; Gal and Kligman 2000; Huisman and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2005). The embodiment literature has established how cultural constructions of the body are shaped by the role of local and global media consumption (Casanova 2004), the quest for upward mobility (Edmonds 2010; Rahier 1998), and the tension ethnic and racial minorities face in establishing ethnic or racial authenticity while incorporating into multicultural societies (Craig 2002; King-O’Riain 2008; Rogers 1998).