Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

In China today, sex work cannot be untangled from the phenomenon of ruralOCourban 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 hostessesOCoa 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. "
Country USA
Brand University of Minnesota Press
Manufacturer Univ Of Minnesota Press
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9780816659036
ReleaseDate 2009-04-16
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780816659036

Country	USA
Brand	University of Minnesota Press
Manufacturer	Univ Of Minnesota Press
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9780816659036
ReleaseDate	2009-04-16
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780816659036

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

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