Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Console-ing Passions) Review

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(More customer reviews)The most enlightening thing that this book has done for me was to get me to recognise how the term "Queer" can be just as hegemonic and oppressive as compulsory heterosexuality. The essays written about queer sexualities in Asia reveal an even more complex understanding of the workings of human sexuality than Western Queer discourse would be inclined to argue for.
As we enter an age of a new colonialism with the spread of Western culturally subversive attitudes and ideologies through various forms of mass media such as the internet, magazines and television, sexuality in Asia is changing its shape in response. I loved Tom Boellstroff's essay "I Knew It Was Me: Mass Media, "Globalization," and Lesbian and Gay Indonesians," on the 'gay' and 'lesbi' communities in Asia that came to occupy their subject-positions through an appropriation of the English terms 'Gay' and 'Lesbian' within the Indonesian cultural context, with a different set of definitions.
The essays on Japan were extremely thought provoking for me, as they bring up discussions on Japanese women's "Yaoi" (homoerotic boy-love stories and depictions), "Nyuhafu" (the Japanese transgendered, who occupy unique socio-economic positions in Japanese culture), the aesthetics of Japanese fiction when viewed and commodified by the Western gaze, "Kawaii" (or 'cute') as a possible form of subversive female identity by the masochistic embrace of child-like femininity to the extreme, and the adoption of a Japanese aesthetic in order to make an extreme genderqueer porn by Taiwanese-American filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang.
I enjoyed the essays on Singapore and Malaysia as well, having come from the region myself, as they discuss a unique embrace of a new hegemonic "Asian values" as a defensive response to the growing cosmopolitanism of the country which those in power feel brings in countercultural Western sexual values.
My only disappointment was the essay "Syncretism and Synchronicity: Queer'n'Asian Cyberspace in 1990s Taiwan and Korea" by Chris Berry and Fran Martin, because of the fact that it was primarily a list of statistics to showcase broad points, when in fact the actual number of people covered in these statistics was too small to make any generalised comment on the queerscape of these two very different countries. It became less of a comparison of these two nations more than it became a tedious and unsuccessful attempt at compare and contrast.
All in all, however, it is an incredible read, and a very well-researched book that I had difficulty putting down once I picked it up.

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Mobile Cultures provides much-needed, empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, the globalization of sexual cultures, and the rise of queer Asia. The availability and use of new media—fax machines, mobile phones, the Internet, electronic message boards, pagers, and global television—have grown exponentially in Asia over the past decade. This explosion of information technology has sparked a revolution, transforming lives and lifestyles, enabling the creation of communities and the expression of sexual identities in a region notorious for the regulation of both information and sexual conduct. Whether looking at the hanging of toy cartoon characters like "Hello Kitty" from mobile phones to signify queer identity in Japan or at the development of queer identities in Indonesia or Singapore, the essays collected here emphasize the enormous variance in the appeal and uses of new media from one locale to another.Scholars, artists, and activists from a range of countries, the contributors chronicle the different ways new media galvanize Asian queer communities in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and around the world. They consider phenomena such as the uses of the Internet among gay, lesbian, or queer individuals in Taiwan and South Korea; the international popularization of Japanese queer pop culture products such as Yaoi manga; and a Thai website's reading of a scientific tract on gay genetics in light of Buddhist beliefs. Essays also explore the politically subversive possibilities opened up by the proliferation of media technologies, examining, for instance, the use of Cyberjaya—Malaysia's government-backed online portal—to form online communities in the face of strict antigay laws.Contributors. Chris Berry, Tom Boellstorff, Larissa Hjorth, Katrien Jacobs, Olivia Khoo, Fran Martin, Mark McLelland, David Mullaly, Baden Offord, Sandip Roy, Veruska Sabucco, Audrey Yue

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Body Work: Beauty and Self-Image in American Culture Review

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(More customer reviews)Gimlin achieves her purpose of sharing information on the justification behind body work through the format of her book. First, she presents her research then she provides a conclusion. Gimlin does this for each chapter, which changes as she looks at the different forms of body work. This allows the reader to assess the work and come to their own conclusion before reading her thoughts. This directly incorporates the reader into the book, which maintains their interest. The format is a major strength of the work.
Another strength of the book is the quotes from interviews that Gimlin conducts with the subjects and her field research. The interviews add reality to
the work and also encourage the interest of the reader. In Sociology, field research involves the researcher actually being in the environment of the subjects and even participating in their activities. This also adds to the element of realism and gives an everyday perspective of what women go through. These elements combine together to add personality to the work.
A weakness of the book would be the author's focus on only female body work. For comparison purposes, including males in the study would open up interpretations for the double standards placed, or shed light on whether men have the same stigmas to overcome. Gimlin answers the question on her exclusion of males by stating, "While contemporary men must undoubtedly work to negotiate the relationship between body and self, women, more than men, face social pressures that make the negotiation difficult and complicated" (Gimlin, 12).
An aspect of the book that I truly enjoyed was its feminist sociological viewpoint. So often we only see situations from a male viewpoint, even if the literature is geared towards women. Gimlin takes a whole new look at the beauty industry and its relationship to women and comes up with a perspective of the self-empowerment of women. We are not forced to conform by society, but we choose. As a young woman on my way out on my own, I value this book. It gives women a new outlook so that instead of feeling helpless and pressured to look a certain way in order to succeed and be happy, they can change or not change their body based on one thing: their own happiness. Gimlin's stress on
empowerment is something every woman can take away from this book. Her message is reinforced by her format and the purpose of the book is accomplished.

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Today women are lifting weights to build muscle, wrapping their bodies in seaweed to reduce unwanted water retention, attending weigh-ins at diet centers, and devoting themselves to many other types of "body work." Filled with the voices of real women, this book unravels the complicated emotional and intellectual motivations that drive them as they confront American culture's unreachable beauty ideals. This powerful feminist study lucidly and compellingly argues against the idea that the popularity of body work means that women are enslaved to a male-fashioned "beauty myth." Essential reading for understanding current debates on beauty, Body Work demonstrates that women actually use body work to escape that beauty myth.Debra Gimlin focuses on four sites where she conducted in-depth research--a beauty salon, aerobics classes, a plastic surgery clinic, and a social and political organization for overweight women. The honest and provocative interviews included in this book uncover these women's feelings about their bodies, their reasons for attempting to change or come to terms with them, and the reactions of others in their lives. These interviews show that women are redefining their identities through their participation in body work, that they are working on their self-images as much as on their bodies. Plastic surgery, for example, ultimately is an empowering life experience for many women who choose it, while hairstyling becomes an arena for laying claim to professional and social class identities.This book develops a convincing picture of how women use body work to negotiate the relationship between body and self, a process that inevitably involves coming to terms with our bodies' deviation from cultural ideals. One of the few studies that includes empirical evidence of women's own interpretations of body work, this important project is also based firmly in cultural studies, symbolic interactionism, and feminism. With this book, Debra Gimlin adds her voice to those of scholars who are now looking beyond the surface of the beauty myth to the complex reality of women's lives.

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