Sites of desire, economies of pleasure : sexualities in Asia and the Pacific

This is an examination of erotic encounters between European, Asian and Pacific people. These essays explore how sexual practice and sexual meanings have been constructed across cultural borders in Thailand, the Philippines, Burma/Myanmar, Japan, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and the Polynesian islands. Regarding sexuality as embedded in a complex social and political world structured and saturated by gender, race and class relations, these scholars challenge the categories with which sex and gender have been named and studied. They examine these sites of desire through specific historic and cultural circumstances, from the first explorations of Europeans, through colonial power, to the contemporary issues of sexual tourism, prostitution and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The book also suggests that the history of sexuality in the West was shaped by myths of the legendary Orient and the exotic "other".