6 - 7 JULY 2000
AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS
Health, Sexuality, and Civil Society in East Asia
The conference brought together scholars who presented and discussed papers on sexual cultures, commercial sex work, and sexual risk in the AIDS era in the context of East Asian societies and tentative comparative lines with Southeast Asia. The conference agenda emphasized a dialectical process in the analysis of sexuality in the context of culture: a transition undergone by sexual cultures through a set of norms and values re-evaluated according to social and economic changes, and a revival of traditional patterns. Nearly fifteen people presented papers. The scholars hailed from China (3), Korea (1), Taiwan (1), France (2), Germany (1), and the Netherlands (4). The workshop included young researchers as well as senior scholars. They brought out new findings in the field of sex and gender research in this specific cultural area. Running through the papers, a proximity comparison and a multidisciplinary perspective offered a whole range of material, working hypotheses, and tentative concluding remarks which were extensively discussed during the seminar.
By EVELYNE MICOLLIER
The workshop was opened by Prof. Wim Stokhof, director of the IIAS, and by the convenor, Dr Evelyne Micollier, who reviewed the research agenda. The seminar was organized into three panels and in each panel tentative comparative lines between East and Southeast Asian cultural contexts were drawn.Three papers on Korea, China, and East/Southeast Asia compared were presented in the panel 'Sexual Cultures'. This first panel clarified issues related to sexuality: the roles of commercial sex work, of the kinship system, of matrimonial strategies, of gender in the family, and of gendered power relations in society were emphasized to offer a multi-layered understanding of the building up of such sexual cultures in transition. This panel also raised some questions about sexual identity and about the dialectical relationship between traditional and new elements in the ideological and behavioural configuration of sexual cultures.
E. Micollier discussed the role of sex work in the social construction of sexuality using data and references drawn mainly from the context of Chinese culture, with secondary information from the Vietnamese or the Korean context. Her approach to sex work was constructed upon one main working hypothesis, namely the relevance of cultural constraints by such as those laid by Confucian ideas or Taoist lore, for the analysis of sexual cultures. However, the aim was not to overestimate cultural factors at the expense of social and economic ones, but rather to identify a whole range of factors involved in the social construction of sexuality. Finally, sex work was shown to have a main structural function, that of being at the core of the ideological and behavioural configuration shaping sexual cultures.
H. ten Brummelhuis engaged in the difficult task of drawing comparative lines between sexualities in East and Southeast Asia, a task he handled with deep insight, drawing on his broad and deep knowledge of sexuality in the context of culture. He has been working with material from Thailand for the past ten years. For the purposes of the conference he identified a few relevant questions for comparisons in Asia, and in concentrating on the themes of prostitution, marriage, and transgender, he presented some structural and cultural explanations.
The second panel was about commercial sex work: patterns and methods of working and of commercial sex work as a social phenomenon were closely related to drastic socio-economic changes occurring in Asia. A whole range of cultural, social, economic, and environmental factors were identified and discussed throughout the paper presentations.
The first three papers of the panel were based on recent case studies at the local level in China that documented the situation mainly in South China in both the rural and urban contexts. Liao Susu gathered data on sex work in rural communities in Hainan and Guangxi, two provinces of China where the incidence of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs), including AIDS, is alarming, and where sex work has now been clearly identified as the main risk factor in propagating these diseases.
Zhao Pengfei discussed the issue of sex trading in entertainment settings in Shanghai. His main finding, based on fieldwork data, was that women in such establishments often resort to sex work and by doing so make themselves vulnerable to STDs, and that intravenous drug use is increasing among sex workers an important fact considering that drug use and sex work had not previously been linked in reports of the Chinese context.
Pan Suiming tackled the difficult task of evaluating the scale of the sex industry in China using official figures, sociological surveys, and ethnographic data for the purpose of his unique study. He suggested that for a better understanding of the social structure of the sex industry one should look at the vertical stratification of sex workers and the various layers of sexual services built upon the client's social class and status. Two other papers documented sex work one in the context of Japanese culture and the other of Cambodia.
W. Lunsing investigated the actual situation of Japanese sex workers with regard to their occupation in relation to their agency, showing how they are caught between choice and coercion. His study was based upon an anthropological methodology using interviews, participant observation, and written vernacular sources. A. Derks discussed commercial sex work in Cambodia in relation to the related historical, juridical, structural, social, and cultural factors. She examined the working and living conditions of prostitutes, as well as the personal and broader implications of sex work within society.
The third panel was concerned with specific matters related to the HIV/AIDS issue and the social construction of sexual risk. The issues of sex education, and State/NGOs collaboration or tensions were approached through the analysis of local AIDS campaigns. Hsu Mei-Ling's paper was based on local news discourses about the AIDS epidemic. Her study aimed to examine how the 'Us/Others' groups have been constructed in the Taiwanese news media addressing the HIV/AIDS-related issues. She thus offered an original contribution to the study of the social construction of disease as a social stigma in Taiwan.M.E. Blanc focused on the issue of sex education for young Vietnamese in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic analysing the structural relations at work between different local social spheres like NGOs, schools, and families.
I. Wollfers offered a broader perspective on sex work in the AIDS era, and emphasized how and which negotiations were at work between official and unofficial spheres (focusing on 'official discourses and policies' and 'unofficial realities'). He drew comparative lines between East and Southeast Asia.
Finally, in the closing session, a recent documentary film on the topic of gender in Chinese cinema (directed by S. Kwan, Hongkong, 1996) was shown to the audience, followed by a plenary discussion aimed at drawing together the main descriptive and theoretical lines emphasized during the seminar. Most of the papers will be revised and put together for a book. In addition to the conference papers, a few new papers will be integrated into the volume. *
Dr Evelyne Micollier was, until 1 July 2000, an ESF / Alliance Fellow stationed at the IIAS Amsterdam branch office.
E-mail: micollier@pscw.uva.nl
Fax: +31-20-525 3658