Purnima Mankekar

Media, erotics, and transnational Asia

Drawing on methods and approaches from anthropology, media studies, film theory, and cultural studies, the contributors to Media, Erotics, and Transnational Asia examine how mediated eroticism and sexuality circulating across Asia and Asian diasporas both reflect and shape the social practices of their producers and consumers. The essays in this volume cover a wide geographic and thematic range, and combine rigorous textual analysis with empirical research into the production, circulation, and consumption of various forms of media. Judith Farquhar examines how health magazines serve as sources of both medical information and erotic titillation to readers in urban China. Tom Boellstorff analyzes how queer zines produced in Indonesia construct the relationship between same-sex desire and citizenship. Purnima Mankekar examines the rearticulation of commodity affect, erotics, and nation on Indian television. Louisa Schein describes how portrayals of Hmong women in videos shot in Laos create desires for the homeland among viewers in the diaspora. Taken together, the essays offer fresh insights into research on gender, erotics, media, and Asia transnationally conceived. Contributors . Anne Allison, Tom Boellstorff, Nicole Constable, Heather Dell, Judith Farquhar, Sarah L. Friedman, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Purnima Mankekar, Louisa Schein, Everett Yuehong Zhang

Introduction: Mediated Transnationalism and Social Erotics

MOVING AWAY FROM THE COLONIAL TROPE of a feminized Orient that is remote and suffused with erotic alterity (Said 1978; Alloula 1986; Kabbani 1986), this collection presents three ethnographic treatments of the cultural productivity of Asian men and women around issues of sexuality-zines in gay Indonesia (Tom Boellstorff), transnational television programs produced in India (Purnima Mankekar), and the production and consumption of video in the Hmong diaspora (Louisa Schein). We begin from the premise that Asia has historically been a transnational crossroads of cultures. Our position, therefore, is that, despite some continuities and enduring patterns, there are no regionally specific Asian sexualities that can be considered in isolation from global processes (Manderson and Jolly 1997). Our analyses of the erotic in different sites and media texts crosscut scales from the local, to the subnational, and to the national and the transnational. Yet at the same time that we track the differential production, circulation, and reception of media texts in particular sites, we demonstrate the difficulty of keeping these scales apart and point to the mutual imbrication of the local and the translocal.

Future tense: Capital, labor, and technology in a service industry (The 2017 Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture)

Since its beginning in 2000, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry has grown to employ 700,000 young people in India. These workers spend their nights interacting by phone and online with customers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. In this article, we focus on the affective dimensions of work in this industry. BPOs have led to contradictory outcomes such as upward mobility accompanied by precarity. Our research explores the complex interplay between work, personal aspirations, social futures, and transformations in global capitalism. Our informants’ experiences with affective labor performed at a distance provide us with critical insights into capital, labor, and technology in our rapidly changing world. Movement characterizes the industry and its workers as they communicate across spatial, linguistic, and cultural distance, while simultaneously being emplaced by regimes of racialized labor. We draw on long-term fieldwork to analyze the complexity and density of interactions between imagination, aspiration, technology, and work for upwardly mobile classes in the Global South.

Intimate Encounters: Affective Labor in Call Centers

By examining the affective regimes generated by call center workers in Bangalore, the authors argue that the forms of alienation and intimacy they generate are coimplicated, rather than in opposition, to each other. In contesting the presumption that the intimate is in contradistinction to the public, the authors join scholarly conversations that trace how relations of intimacy are constructed through processes of labor. This analysis of intimate encounters and affective labor draws upon several years of intensive ethnographic field research in call centers in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. The authors argue that the affective labor of call center agents is service work but that it takes the form of intimate labor provided at a distance. While intimacy implies a proximity that may be physical, corporeal, emotional, and/or geographical, the affective labor of the informants underscored the ways in which it reconstituted their very experience of time and space, proximity and distance. On the one hand, their success at work was contingent on their construction of a relationship of proximity with their clients, eliciting and producing affects that generated intimate encounters. However, although these workers did not engage in physical travel, their virtual and imaginative travel was generative of new modalities of proximity that compel the authors to review existing assumptions about intimacy and distance, and about the relation between intimacy and capital.

Television and embodiment: a speculative essay

This essay brings insights from classic scholarship on television (for instance, Raymond Williams) and moving image culture (Vivian Sobchack) into conversation with recent studies of affect to trace how lifestyle programming on Indian television might have recast consumption in contemporary India. In particular, I am concerned with how theories of affect enable us to understand the creation of aspirational subjects in post-liberalization India. I argue that lifestyle programming compels us to go beyond prevalent emphases on ideological interpellation to examine the sensuous knowledges created by television. Extrapolating from my speculations on the synaesthetic and kinaesthetic dimensions of our engagement with these programmes, I posit that television has extended our senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and movement such that it is no longer possible to conceive of television (the medium as well as the message) as distinct from sociality and, indeed, from our subjectivities.