Week 7_Miguel Flores_ASA 114

In an in-depth investigation in the intersection of diaspora, the Asian diaspora, author Louisa Schein engages in a discourse that tackles “Homeland Erotics.” As a reader I don’t quite get the main message it is trying to convey or maybe I missed the point, but through the author’s showcasing Hmong as a community that has many conceived homeland I think it is trying to point across a message that through the emergence of their ethnic enclaves throughout the United States – throughout the world, new hybrid cultures reiterates the preservation of Hmong practices and roles. However, the interconnectedness of such ethnic enclaves in relation to its environment and existing gender roles and practices, it gets intertwined with traditional gender roles and practices. A conflict reemerges as people who migrated out of their homeland try renegotiating their beliefs while preserving their cultural identity and emotional connection to the homeland. Schein complicates these intersections by exploring the dynamics of sexuality and gender “as desires and structured opportunities intersect (723).” Politicizing the body in Western culture versus the body in a cultural conception contrastingly outlines an exploitative materialization of the body as a source of pleasure and desire. The author highlighted many discourses that center the conversation around the body as an economic mechanism to produce money. Conversations about pedophilia, prostitution, and Third World sex tours emphasize the desecration of a body to combat poverty. It tackles the role of the West and a different take on “dominating” and “emasculating” males in the East – it criticizes another mode of imperialism by means of having full access and control to bodies for sexual desires.

Capitalism around sex has been around for quite some time, but the influx of clientele is often from the West. It perpetuates the objectification of Asian bodies and the serious money that goes behind sex tourism. The video below explores the booming economy behind Asia’s sex industry, the promotion and exotification of Asian bodies complicate the meaning of bodies within its cultural context. Through sex tourism ads, bodies are valued as an object that has a price that put bodies at risk. These complications address a serious question if there are international jurisdictions that can intervene in these third world countries that participate in sex tourism?

Citations:

“Asia’s sex industry” YouTube. uploaded by FRANCE 24 English, 17 June 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu_K5wvdMAY

Louisa Schein. “Diaspora Politics, Homeland Erotics and the Materializing of Memory.” Displacements.