Sex and Borders PDF Download

Author: Leslie Ann Jeffrey
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gender identity
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Author: Antonio Rappa
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315411326
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
The making of modern Thailand is grounded in specific political institutions, Brahmanical tropes, and sacred Buddhist traditions stylized with Hindu rituals. Over and above these mysterious practices and ancient customs, modern Thailand is a product of the late Great Rama IX Bhumibol Adulyadej. Most Thai people have only known one King. Born in Europe and educated during World War II, Bhumibol was the son of a Harvard medical doctor who had a penchant for jazz music and fast cars. When he returned to Thailand in 1951 to assume his royal duties, he could hardly speak Thai but his French and German were remarkable. Bhumibol had inherited an impoverished country with nothing but a symbolic role as a figurehead monarch. He was surrounded by envious courtiers and royals from other families now sidelined by the rise of the Chakri. Scheming generals and authoritarian field marshals were emptying the Kingdom’s coffers. Using guile and wit, Bhumibol had turned the tide by 1973. He became the most powerful modern warlord in the history of the Kingdom. He survived attempted murder, crafty politicians, corrupt generals, sycophantic courtiers and impoverished masses. When he died on October 13 2016, Bhumibol was already the longest standing monarch in the world. King Bhumibol was deeply respected and well-liked by farang and locals alike. Despite his massive social and economic achievements many problems continue to plague the Kingdom. These are prostitution, human rights issues, pollution, corruption, cronyism in Chinese businesses, border conflicts with Cambodia, and the refugee problem. This book examines the role of Rama IX and the variegated set of problems that persist in life under the great white elephant and mango trees. Rappa draws from his primary research that includes interviews, surveys and first-hand observations of a remarkable kingdom and a uniquely remarkable king to reveal the internal security threats to democracy and civil society in the oldest Southeast Asian kingdom in late modernity.

Author: Hastings Donnan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000183211
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Sex scholarship has a long history in anthropology, from the studies of voyeuristic Victorian gentlemen ethnographers, to more recent analyses of gay sex, transsexualism, and the newly visible forms of contemporary sexuality in the West. The Anthropology of Sex draws on the comparative field research of anthropologists to examine the relationship between sex as identity, practice and experience. Sexual cultures vary enormously and, while often the topic of tabloid titillation, they are more rarely subjected to strict cultural analysis. The Anthropology of Sex is the first work to critically synthesise over a century of comparative expertise, knowledge and understanding of diverse sexual forms. - Explores sexuality from diversity to perversity and asks how diverse sexual practices are linked. - Probes the cultural and comparative context of contemporary sexual practice and belief. - Examines the shaping of sex by global and globalizing forces. The Anthropology of Sex will be key reading for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in anthropology and related disciplines.

Author: Arnika Fuhrmann
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822374250
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.

Author: Lynda Mannik
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1554589916
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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The central focus of Reclaiming Canadian Bodies is the relationship between visual media, the construction of Canadian national identity, and notions of embodiment. It asks how particular representations of bodies are constructed and performed within the context of visual and discursive mediated content. The book emphasizes the ways individuals destabilize national mainstream visual tropes, which in turn have the potential to destabilize nationalist messages. Drawing upon rich empirical research and relevant theory, the contributors ask how and why particular bodies (of Estonian immigrants, sports stars, First Nations peoples, self-identified homosexuals, and women) are either promoted and upheld as “Canadian” bodies while others are marginalized in or excluded from media representations. Essays are grouped into three sections: Embodied Ideals, The Embodiment of “Others,” and Embodied Activism and Advocacy. Written in an accessible style for a broad audience of scholars and students, this volume is original within the field of visual media, affect theory, and embodiment due to its emphasis on detailed empirical and, in some cases, ethnographic research within a Canadian context.

Author: Penny Van Esterik
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000184420
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Thailand has become well known throughout the world for wonderful cuisine, great package holidays, sumptuous temples and textiles. Noticeably absent from glossy tourist brochures but equally well known throughout the Western world is Thailand's seedier side - the world of child exploitation, rampant prostitution and AIDS. Thailand maintains its appeal by slipping the ugly and painful out of sight and by promoting women as exotic visual icons through beauty contests, state rituals and the sex trade. This book explores the construction of gender in Thailand and in particular the role Bangkok plays in establishing gender relations for the whole of the country. It examines the historical and cultural processes underlying Thai public culture, including historical theme parks. The author demonstrates how the materiality of the Thai world shapes gender relations and how Buddhism discourages essentialisms, including fixed binary gender identities. Throughout the book, appearances are shown to be critically important, and the essentialism of gender is maintained through display, public presentations, and everyday material practices. Anyone wishing to understand the complexity of Thailand will find this book provides a highly readable and insightful analysis.

Author: Kathy E. Ferguson
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824831594
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
What is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in Asia and the Pacific? The authors of the sixteen original and innovative essays presented here take fresh stock of globalization’s complexities. They pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities and produce original insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. Each essay puts the lives and struggles of women at the center of its examination while weaving examples of global circuits in Asian and Pacific societies into a world frame of analysis. The work is generated from within Asian and Pacific spaces, bringing to the fore local voices and claims to knowledge. The geographic emphasis on Asia/Pacific highlights the complexity of globalizing practices among specific people whose dilemmas come alive on these pages. Although the book focuses on global, gendered flows, it expands its investigation to include the media and the arts, intellectual resources, activist agendas, and individual life stories. First-rate ethnographies and interviews reach beyond generalizations and bring Pacific and Asian women and men alive in their struggles against globalization. Globalization cannot be summed up in a neat political agenda but must be actively contested and creatively negotiated. Taking feminist political thinking beyond simple oppositions, the authors ask specific questions about how global practices work, how they come to be, who benefits, and what is at stake. Contributors: Nancie Caraway, Steve Derné, Cynthia Enloe, Kathy Ferguson, Maria Ibarra, Gwyn Kirk, Sally Merry, Virginia Metaxas, Min Dongchao, Monique Mironesco, Rhacel Parrenas, Lucinda Peach, Vivian Price, Jyoti Puri, Judith Raiskin, Nancy Riley, Saskia Sassen, Teresia Teaiwa, Chris Yano, Yau Ching.

Author: Elizabeth Bernstein
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022657380X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Brokered Subjects digs deep into the accepted narratives of sex trafficking to reveal the troubling assumptions that have shaped both right- and left-wing agendas around sexual violence. Drawing on years of in-depth fieldwork, Elizabeth Bernstein sheds light not only on trafficking but also on the broader structures that meld the ostensible pursuit of liberation with contemporary techniques of power. Rather than any meaningful commitment to the safety of sex workers, Bernstein argues, what lies behind our current vision of trafficking victims is a transnational mix of putatively humanitarian militaristic interventions, feel-good capitalism, and what she terms carceral feminism: a feminism compatible with police batons.

Author: James A. Warren
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135909008
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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During the nineteenth century there was a huge increase in the level and types of gambling in Thailand. Taxes on gambling became a major source of state revenue, with the government establishing state-run lotteries and casinos in the first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, over the same period, a strong anti-gambling discourse emerged within the Thai elite, which sought to regulate gambling through a series of increasingly restrictive and punitive laws. By the mid-twentieth century, most forms of gambling had been made illegal, a situation that persists until today. This historical study, based on a wide variety of Thai- and English-language archival sources including government reports, legal cases and newspapers, places the criminalization of gambling in Thailand in the broader context of the country’s socio-economic transformation and the modernization of the Thai state. Particular attention is paid to how state institutions, such as the police and judiciary, and different sections of Thai society shaped and subverted the law to advance their own interests. Finally, the book compares the Thai government’s policies on gambling with those on opium use and prostitution, placing the latter in the context of an international clampdown on vice in the early twentieth century.

Author: Wan-Chen Yen
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443883018
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Governing Sex, Building the Nation explores the sexual politics of Chinese nationalism in Taiwan between 1945 and 1979, focusing on the politicisation of prostitution and its role in the reproduction of postcolonial nationhood. This book examines the political struggle over prostitution policy that was framed within and through contested knowledge, rationales and tactics underpinning the nationalist project, constructing and policing prostitution as a social/national problem, yet also creating a market for prostitution and turning it into political opportunities that served a variety of nationalistic interests. Locating this in the larger Asian struggle with colonial influence on prostitution, the author provides interesting and rare accounts of official perspectives and tactics regarding prostitution in the Taiwanese context, in order to explore the interlinkages between post/colonialism, prostitution and nationalism. Featuring insights into Japanese and Chinese colonialism and the Eastern Asian experience of postcolonialism, this book shifts academic attention from mainstream postcolonial studies, which highlight Western colonialism and Indian and African postcolonialism. It thereby discovers more diverse approaches to postcolonial nation-building and a more intricate interaction between colonial powers and the colonised society, and, as such, adds new depth to postcolonial studies. Bringing the politics of nationalism and postcolonialism into the study of prostitution policies, this book also provides an understanding of prostitution in a once-colonised society in contrast to the broadly recognised gender and sexual politics of prostitution in the Western context.