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Lily Wong studies the transpacific mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures.
Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media from the early twentieth century to the present.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
A Note on Translation
Introduction: Sex Work, Media Networks, and Transpacific Histories of Affect
Part I. Pacific Crossings in the Early Twentieth Century
1. Desiring Across the Pacific: Transnational Contact in Early Twentieth-Century Asian/American Literature
2. Over My Dead Body: Melodramatic Crossings of Anna May Wong and Ruan Lingyu
Part II. Sinophonic Liaisons During the Cold War
3. Erotic Liaisons: Sinophonic Queering of the Shaw Brothers’ Chinese Dream
4. Offense to the Ear: Hearing the Sinophonic in Wang Zhenhe’s Rose, Rose, I Love You
Part III. Dwelling Desires and the Neoliberal Order
5. Dwelling: Affective Labor and Reordered Kinships in The Fourth Portrait and Seeking Asian Female
Coda: What Dwells
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Lily Wong is associate professor of literature at American University.
Summary
Lily Wong studies the transpacific mobility and mobilization of the sex worker figure, illuminating the intersectional politics of racial, sexual, and class structures. Transpacific Attachments examines shifting depictions of Chinese sex workers in popular media from the early twentieth century to the present.
Additional text
Transpacific Attachments elegantly and deftly traces structures of affect and sociality across the Pacific through the figure of the “Chinese” sex worker throughout the twentieth century. It offers one of the most nuanced discussions of “Chineseness” in English-language scholarship to date, registering its permutations and transformations by linking the two sides of the Pacific in their affective entanglements and disentanglements. It makes an important contribution to the interrelated fields of Sinophone studies, Chinese studies, queer studies, and Asian American studies.
