Feminist debates regarding prostitution, both in the West and in Taiwan, have been polarized. Som... more Feminist debates regarding prostitution, both in the West and in Taiwan, have been polarized. Some radical feminists tend to think of prostitution as emboding male-dominated sexuality, in which women's bodies and sexuality are appropriated by men, while some pro-sex-work feminists argue that engaging in commercial sex is performing sexual services. Accordingly, sex workers are just like ordinary workers in other economic sectors. The debates thus generate a series of polarized oppositions: e.g. prostitutes are either 'sexual victims' or 'sexual agents', prostitution is either sex or work, and prostitution becomes a gender or a sexual issue. Based on in-depth interviews with eighteen female Taiwanese sex workers and six Taiwanese male clients, the thesis seeks to break this stalemate. Locating commercial sex in Taiwanese working women's daily lives, I show that prostitution is not only firmly supported by the ideology of the 'male sexual urge', but hig...
As a rising economic power in East Asia, Taiwan once served as a destination of sex tourism, now ... more As a rising economic power in East Asia, Taiwan once served as a destination of sex tourism, now gradually it is becoming a country of buyers seeking sex abroad. Currently, China appears to be one of the most popular destinations. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 40 Taiwanese male sex buyers and ethnographic data collected by traveling with a group of five men, this article aims to explore how buying sex abroad appears to be the complicated site of power struggles where sexu-ality intersects with gender, nationality, and global economic hierarchy. By conceptualizing men's buying of sex abroad as sexual migration, I illustrate the ways in which men's border crossings for buying sex are complexly embedded in the gender, sexuality, and class relations in Taiwan, and how their sexual encounters with Chinese women are always contaminated by the politics of nationalism which derive from the unsettled political atmospheres across the Taiwan Strait. I argue that sexual migration is made attractive mainly because of the sexual discontent caused by the stratification of the Taiwanese sex industry and the sexual constraints and routineness of heterosexual monogamy. Buying sex abroad therefore appears as a temporary escape from this mundaneness and banality. Conceptualizing men's buying sex abroad in dynamic trans-national contexts, we could illustrate how men actively negotiate sexual desires at both ends of the Taiwan Strait, and go further to analyse how sexuality serves to shape regional migration, and how it interweaves with gender, class and nationality.
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Papers by Mei-Hua Chen