INTRODUCTION: EAST ASIAN SEXUALITIES.

What does it mean to talk about East Asian sexualities? What it means for the purpose of this issue is that sexualities are situated; they appear and are always lived within national, political, racial-ethnic and gender frames. It means that sexuality exceeds, or supercedes, any facile universalism that would reduce sex to biology and remove it from the domains of culture and politics. And yet it does not simply imply a ready-made proliferation of sexualities by national context--Chinese sex, Japanese sex, Korean sex, Taiwanese sex. Rather, this issue presents scholars deeply engaged with the sites about which they write, who are sorting out the specificities of how sexuality is negotiated, constrained, expressed, and made meaningful across disparate social locations. Taken together the pieces comprise a sustained treatment of what Gayatri Gopinath has called for: "a more nuanced understanding of the traffic and travel of competing systems of desire in a transnational frame" (1998: 117).

The term sexuality here encompasses many facets. It refers both to erotic practices and to practices of identity, as well as to the interplay between the two. Authors pose questions about how sex might make or challenge one's identity as a man, a woman, gay, or Korean. Sex here is consequential to the social and political process, not limited to private pleasures and bedroom encounters. Sex is reproductive, pleasurable, and dangerous, as well as a site for the conveyance of infection. Sex is an object of representation, in modalities as diverse as advertisements, village gossip, high literature, and state reproductive and medical policies. Sex emerges as polymorphous, embracing hetero and homoerotics, sadomasochism, commercial, and commodified forms of exchange. And at the same time, these restless sexualities are ever in dialogue with powerful normativities that marginalize some and incite other desires. Siting these sexualities within East Asia for the purpose of this issue, strives to foreground what Rosalind Morris has sketched as "not only the heterogeneity `within' the traditions of Western Europe, but also the heterogeneity that emerges in other cultures and in the interstitial spaces and mutually encompassing relations between them" (1994: 39).

Several themes emerge from the broad range of approaches represented in these five essays. One of the most salient is the attempt to complicate the link between sexuality and gender by showing how it is elaborated and modified through the practices and discourses of myriad sexual subjects. In other words, the authors do not ask questions about female or male sexuality per se, but rather ask how sexuality interfaces with and addresses gender politics. Sea-ling Cheng explores the complex of signification around Korean men's use of prostitutes, arguing that it is not simply individualized urges for sexual gratification that propel these practices, but rather a much larger impulse toward the remasculinization of the Korean nation that weights these encounters with meaning. Gretchen Jones delves into feminine masochistic fantasy as represented in a female-authored Japanese short story, interpreting it as a narrative strategy that "serves to comment on and deconstruct the dynamics of power and submission in modern Japan." She reads an eroticization of a child's beating, and the shifting identifications of a woman in relation to it, as an interruption of the lockstep gender norms for motherhood within which Japanese women make their lives. Sara Friedman suggests that the outspokenness with which a young woman in a Chinese village publicly recounts her intimate erotic desires serves to recast normative, relatively desexualized femininity into a new form that can embrace sexual agency. In each instance, we see the imbrication of sexuality with the ongoing process of constructing and challenging dominant canons of womanhood and manhood.

The theme of narration, of sex as spoken, and of the social import of such speech, is also salient in many of these essays. Attuned to the Foucauldian insight that discourse in effect produces sex, to the ways in which sex comes to exist through representation, and to the dynamic by which desire can be incited through speech, these authors give us fine-grained accounts of the contents of some of these discourses, of their national and cultural locatedness. John Wiggins offers an ethnographic sensibility as a vehicle to examine the verbal and embodied interchanges in a Taipei park where men are cruising to arrange sex with other men. He intertwines the spoken encounter of the ethnographic interview with the intimations of a more bodily encounter, asking questions about how the two relate. What is revealed is that men talking to each other in the park are also fashioning themselves in terms of style, sexual preferences, class, nationality, and race, and that these exchanges themselves produce certain forms of desire. Speaking is far less socially legitimate in Friedman's instance, in which it is precisely a young woman's statements of her longing for the sexual pleasure her deceased boyfriend gave her that is transgressive. The social force of speaking sex appears through its villification, through the censure that the woman incurs from naming her desires in ways that threaten social mores. In Jones, we are looking at a more literary voice, but one in which self-fashioning is also at stake. In her argument, writer Kono Taeko boldly narrates the unspeakable, in gruesome but strangely aestheticized accounts of a woman and a child being beaten by a man, and of a woman's desires for these acts. What makes this narrative subversive rather than unambiguously horrific is its location within what the author calls a masochistic aesthetic, a poetics, the close reading of which exposes subtexts that question hierarchy and power relations. Such a critique is accomplished through the not-sometaphoric figure of the dominated who exercises control from the position of "the bottom."

Subversions are also evident in Sandra Hyde's investigation into the politics of sex work, condoms, and HIV/AIDS in southwest China. Sketching sexuality politics in the tourist destination of Jinghong, Hyde describes a Chinese state that has marginalized condom use as constituting a less desirable form of birth control, hence inadvertently facilitating the transmission of the HIV virus, especially in areas of heavy prostitution. Ironically, it is in the sex-friendly market that condoms end up being distributed, thus supporting the official economic policy of liberalization while subverting the state's attempts to regulate health and reproduction. Hyde calls this "sidestepping," but the effect of the popular practices she documents is to destabilize the state's biopolitical power. By contrast, the sex trade in Korea, as chronicled by Cheng, rather than being presented as a subterranean domain outside the state where preventive commodities are distributed, becomes a site for the nation, a place for the recuperation of collective virility--especially when it is in relation to white prostitutes.

Such boundary-crossing sexual encounters are the subject of several of the pieces, in which authors interrogate the nuances and contours of cross-ethnic and interracial desires. These authors take seriously the ...