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The Lives Of Sex Workers In Postsocialist China
University of Minnesota Press
April 2009
On Sale: March 23, 2009
304 pages
ISBN: 0816659036
EAN: 9780816659036
Paperback
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Non-Fiction
In China today, sex work cannot be untangled from the
phenomenon of rural-urban migration, the entertainment
industry, and state power. In Red Lights, Tiantian
Zheng highlights the urban karaoke bar as the locus at which
these three factors intersect and provides a rich account of
the lives of karaoke hostesses—a career whose name disguises
the sex work and minimizes the surprising influence these
women often have as power brokers.
Zheng embarked on
two years of intensely embedded ethnographic fieldwork in
her birthplace, Dalian, a large northeastern Chinese seaport
of over six million people. During this time, Zheng lived
and worked with a group of hostesses in a karaoke bar,
facing many of the same dangers that they did and forming
strong, intimate bonds with them. The result is an
especially engaging, moving story of young, rural women
struggling to find meaning, develop a modern and autonomous
identity, and, ultimately, survive within an oppressively
patriarchal state system.
Moving from her case
studies to broader theories of sex, gender, and power, Zheng
connects a growth in capitalist entrepreneurialism to the
emergence of an urban sex industry, brilliantly illuminating
the ways in which hostesses, their clients, and the state
are mutually created in postsocialist China.
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