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Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work QUOTES

Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work QUOTES

1 " Can you go back to America and tell all your friends that I do NOT want to be rescued? All these Americans and Viet Kieus who come here thinking that they need to save us are so stupid. If you had to choose between working in a factory for twelve hours a day with bosses who don't let you rest and [who] look at you like they are raping you with their eyes, or working in a bar where you have a few drinks and sometimes spread you legs for a man, which would you choose? Why don't people go rescue factory workers? We are the ones who were not scared to leave factory work for sex work. We are smart hustlers [*nguoi chen lan*], not dumb, scared factory workers!
—Trinh, twenty-four-year-old hostess in Lavender "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

2 " But while women were able to capitalize on Vietnam's rapid development, it is important to situate their mobility as constrained within structures of patriarchy. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

3 " Western men hear about girls who are sold and forced to sell their bodies, but no one here is forced to do anything. I come to the bar to work, …and if I want to have sex with a client, I have sex with him. If I don't, then I won't. No one forces me to do anything I don't want to do. [NGO workers} come here trying to give us condoms or save us, [but] how can they help me when I make more money than them?'
—Vy, twenty-two-year-old hostess in Naughty Girls "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

4 " Therefore, while changes in the global economy structure relations of intimacy between clients and sex workers, intimacy also serves as a vital form of currency that shapes economic and political relations. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

5 " Although the four niche markets rarely came into contact with one another, the very existence of these separate niche markets enabled the clients and workers in the them to construct competing masculinities and technologies of embodiment that simultaneously projected pan-Asian modernity, nostalgic cosmopolitanism, ad Third World dependency. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

6 " Within their distinct niche markets, sex workers employ competing technologies of embodiment that in turn reveal how desire reflects and constructs different national formations in the global imaginary. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

7 " Dealing in Desire takes seriously the labor of the women I studied. This book views women as, in the words of Caitrin Lynch, 'creative agents in their own lives, not simply as pieces in some global monopoly played by capitalists and state representatives. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

8 " In these spaces of leisure, powerful local elites, Viet Kieus from the diaspora, business executives, and marginal tourists enter into niche markets that never overlap. Instead, each niche market operates with a unique logic of desire that has important implications for how we think about that place of sex work in the global economy. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

9 " All these women were, however, careful to distinguish *sexual commerce*, in which women view sex work as skilled labor and their chosen occupation, from *sex trafficking*, described by governments, NGOs, and activists as forced sexual labor. Key to this distinction is a labor process that depends heavily on workers' consent and the establishment of trust in relation to both the clients and the madams/bar owners who regulate the workers' labor. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

10 " In fact, this is not a book about sex or sexual relations; rather, men's and women's participation in HCMC's sex industry involves much more than the purchase of sex. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

11 " The multiple niche markets in Vietnam's global sex industry offer insight into some of the larger macroeconomic shifts that reframe our understanding of the coproduction of gender and global capital. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

12 " But the truth of Asian ascendancy or Western decline is not central to the argument of this book; instead, this book shows that importance of how people reimagine the global order through their desires to assert a superior masculinity and reconfigure hierarchies of race and nation. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

13 " The niche markets that catered to Western men were not about establishing relations of trust among men that would lead to business deals. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

14 " multiple hierarchies of masculinities. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

15 " their meanings were expressed through interactions of race, class, and especially gender in each bar, a space charged with desire. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

16 " masculinities are indeed mobilized to privilege an international hegemonic masculinity that affirms Western superiority. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

17 " However, I take this analysis one step further by illuminating a simultaneous process wherein local Vietnamese elites and Viet Kieus articulate their desire to imagine a new global order that no longer privileges a white, First World masculinity. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

18 " two simultaneous processes are at work in HCMC’s niche markets—a recuperation of Western power and a contestation of that very power by those with aspirations for Asian ascendancy. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

19 " As such, different configurations of racialized desires, social status, business success, and hope for upward mobility all play out differently in the four niche markets in which I conducted fieldwork. "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

20 " East/West or global/local binaries "

― , Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work