Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context
Issue 4, September 2000


The Metropolitan Gaze:
Travellers, Bodies and Spaces

Vera Mackie


    Travel=Desire
     
  1. A newspaper advertisement for Garuda Airlines presents the scopophilic pleasures of a holiday in Indonesia as a parody of the Balinese paintings sold in tourist resorts. The illustration presents every possible variation on the tourist gaze. The naked eye is supplemented by spectacles, binoculars, telescopes, cameras, video cameras, and scuba diving goggles focused on natural and cultivated landscapes, wild and domesticated animals, exotic temples, and local people working, performing rituals or even dancing naked. Tourists scale mountains or survey the whole scene from a helicopter (See Figure 1).[1]


    Figure 1. Visit Indonesia.
    Figure 2. Fly Your Dreams

  2. A magazine advertisement for Lauda Air displays a naked woman, lying back on exotic silk drapery, eyes closed. Her dark, glossy skin merges with the drapery, suggesting an affinity between the woman's body and the silken commodity (Figure 2). The caption, 'Fly your dreams', is a more explicit version of the suggestiveness of the old 'Singapore Girl' advertisements.[2]
     
  3. Another advertising image gives verbal and visual expression to the equation of travel with sexuality: 'travel=desire' proclaims a postcard advertising a Lonely Planet Travel Guide, the words leading our eyes to the image of a reclining muscular male torso overlaid with the texture of the scenery of a tourist destination.[3]
     
  4. The producers of tourist industry advertising are thus conscious of the intimate connections between travel, scopophilia and sexual desire, but how would theories of tourism and sexuality look if we combined the advertising copywriter's knowledge of scopophilic desire with the social theorist's interest in the construction of class, gender, sexuality, 'race' and ethnicity?[4] Theorists of tourism have, until recently, been much more coy than the copywriters about these matters. Here, for example is Urry's early formulation of the tourist gaze:

      For the moment it is necessary to consider just what it is that produces a distinctive tourist gaze. Minimally there must be certain aspects of the place to be visited which distinguish it from what is conventionally encountered in everyday life. Tourism results from a basic binary division between the ordinary/everyday and the extraordinary. Tourist experiences involve some aspect or element which induces pleasurable experiences which are, by comparison with the everyday, out of the ordinary.... This is not to say that other elements of the production of the tourist experience will not make the typical tourist feel that he or she is 'home from home', not too much 'out of place'. But potential objects of the tourist gaze must be different in some way or other. They must be out of the ordinary. People must experience particularly distinct pleasures which involve different senses or are on a different scale from those typically encountered in everyday life.[5]

  5. Urry's tokenistic use of the phrase 'he or she' reveals that at this stage he had not fully theorised the possessor of the tourist gaze. More recent discussions of tourism have tried to tease out the sexed, gendered, classed and ethnicised dimensions of this gaze, and to expose the often implicitly masculine possessor of this gaze. A better understanding of the relationship between the tourist gaze and the masculine gaze is formulated by Urry and Rojek in a later work, when they state that:

      Travel and tourism can be thought of as a search for difference. From a male perspective, women are the embodiment of difference. [6]

    While this formulation captures the gendered dimensions of the tourist gaze, it leaves the production of ethnicised and racialised identities through the tourist gaze untheorised.
     
  6. Others have tried to bring the body itself into discussions of tourism and travel.[7] Indeed, Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijola invert conventional theorisations of the disembodied, disengaged, displaced traveller by placing the 'sextourist', the 'prostitute' and the 'babysitter' at the centre of their analysis, rather than the voyeuristic figure of the flâneur, so beloved of recent social theorists.[8] By placing these figures at the centre of their analysis, Jokinen and Veijola help us theorise two aspects of the travel experience: that the focus on the tourist gaze has obscured the discussion of the embodied politics of travel and sexuality; and that spatial displacement may be an integral part of the production of desire. I would like to take their analysis in a specific direction, by focusing more closely on the production of touristic desires in the Asia-Pacific region, focusing on the gendered, classed, racialised and ethnicised dimensions of the tourist gaze in the Asia-Pacific region, and by considering the embodied spatial practices of tourism.
     
  7. It has been argued that tourist destinations, particularly in Southeast Asia, are constructed as 'illicit spaces'[9] quite analogous to the nineteenth century projections of the 'Orient'. At the tourist destination, in other words, illicit desires may be enacted, at a safe distance from everyday life. Such spatial displacement is a convention of a range of cultural products, including novels, films, advertisements, and journalistic representations of places like Manila and Bangkok. Articles about 'sex' and 'sin' are conventionally accompanied by photographs which reproduce the tropes of harem paintings: a profusion of undifferentiated female bodies, which exceed the frame of the photograph. Other tourist representations invite the viewer to enact the desire to cross a threshold, to open a door, or to look beyond the veil (Figures 3a & 3b).[10]


    Figure 3a. The West Magazine     		Figure 3b. Behind Closed Doors

  8. What of the relationships between tourists and their hosts? Relationships are never simply encounters between two individuals. Each individual brings a history shaped by the dimensions of gender, class, 'race', ethnicity and sexuality in a field of political and economic inequalities. In tourist encounters, travellers may expect a range of personalised, and often embodied, services: cooking, cleaning, serving of food and drinks, childcare, driving, entertainment, provision of information about the local area. Some tourists also travel in the expectation of sexual encounters - in the form of casual relationships, or in the form of payment for sexual services.
     
  9. Sexuality, as expressed through romanticised encounters or through the use of the services of prostitutes in tourist destinations, is not simply a matter of transactions between individuals. Rather, the link between sexuality and travel necessitates an analysis sensitive to the dynamics of classed, gendered and racialised relations, in the context of economic inequality between rich and poor countries. Even when the traveller does not literally exchange cash for sexual services, their ability to enjoy romantic relationships in the tourist site is determined by their relatively privileged position as a traveller from a richer country and the relatively disadvantaged situation of the local partner.
     
  10. The behaviour of the 'sextourist' can be understood in the context of international tourism supported by multinational capital and the construction of consumers' desires for exotic sexual experiences. While several writers have addressed the political economy of prostitution and tourism, we need further work on the cultural constructions of sexuality which produce the desire for such exoticised sexual experiences, an analysis of what we might call the political economy of representations.[11] Laurie Shrage suggests that 'the ethnic structure of the prostitute work force in our contemporary world may be conditioned by racial fantasies white people have about themselves and others;'[12] or, to be more precise, the fantasies those in the metropolitan centres have about themselves and others. As I explore in more detail below, we need to think through the material effects of such fantasies.[13]


    Butterfly in Bangkok
     
  11. Much of the commentary on the links between sexuality and tourism takes the form of sociological investigation into the factors which take women into the prostitution industry. It is less common to see attempts to theorise the sexuality of the male customers of the tourism prostitution industry. Recently, however, in Australia, Dennis O'Rourke's 'documentary fiction', The Good Woman of Bangkok, has prompted just such a discussion.[14]
     
  12. While many commentators have made passing reference to the similarities between The Good Woman of Bangkok and Puccini's 1904 opera Madama Butterfly, this genealogy deserves closer attention. The ur-text for Madama Butterfly and its derivative texts is Pierre Loti's late nineteenth century novel Madame Chrysanthème.[15] The Good Woman bears more than superficial similarity to Madame Chrysanthème. Both texts have a cyclical structure whereby the male protagonist enters and leaves an 'illicit space'. In Madame Chrysanthème the narrative is framed by two voyages, as the sailor enters and leaves the illicit space by sea, the narrative describing his purchase of, and relationship with, a temporary bride. In Madama Butterfly, it is an American officer who obtains Cio-Cio-san as a temporary bride.[16] 'The filmmaker' of The Good Woman of Bangkok purchases the services of Aoi, the Bangkok bar 'girl', long enough to complete his film. Neither Chrysanthemum, nor Butterfly, nor Aoi, are ever in danger of contaminating the home of the male protagonist. The male protagonist, be this Loti, Pinkerton, or 'the filmmaker', can come and go at will. Loti never returns; Pinkerton returns to find Butterfly has suicided; and 'the filmmaker' returns to find Aoi has returned to bar work.
     
  13. I would argue that these stories - of Madame Chrysanthème, Madama Butterfly, and the Good Woman of Bangkok - crystallise the tourist experience, whereby someone from a metropolitan space travels to a touristic space but returns, apparently uncontaminated. For reasons which will become clearer below, I prefer to refer to 'metropolitan space' and 'tourist space' rather than using labels like 'Europe', 'Occident', 'Orient', 'Asia', which are implicitly tied to actual geographical locations. Australia, for example, can function as 'metropolitan space' in the texts of an Australian traveller to Bangkok, but would become 'tourist space' in the eyes of a tourist from Japan.
     
  14. What are brought back to the metropolitan centres are the cultural representations which circulate in metropolitan space. The fictional characters of Chrysanthemum and Butterfly are preserved in novel and song. Aoi, the pseudonym of the Bangkok bar 'girl', is fixed on celluloid, in a medium which shares much of the facticity of the tourist snapshot, slide, or home video. In these genres, the photograph, slide, or video provides proof of the reality and authenticity of the tourist experience. In some ways, however, O'Rourke's film transcends the conventions of these genres: by providing an opportunity to focus on the sexuality of the white, male tourist/customer, and by providing Aoi with a chance to speak back, albeit in a highly mediated fashion. Her speeches are staged with the assistance of mirrors, and only comprehended by the Anglophone viewer with the assistance of subtitles.
     
  15. The Good Woman of Bangkok also, however, highlights questions of consent which cross over from the discussion of sexual relationships, prostitution and marriage into the discussion of the responsibility of the holder of the camera, cinecamera or videocamera. Several legal cases in Australia and Japan have revolved around the limits of what is consented to in the prostitution contract.[17] The economic differentials between first world customers and third world workers bring the notion of consent into further question. In O'Rourke's film, questions of consent are repeatedly highlighted. One scene which has occasioned comment is the scene where the camera pans over Aoi's somnolent body, and she attempts to cover herself. We are prompted to ask whether, in entering into a contract with the film-maker, she has given up the right to refuse representation? Similar questions could be asked of the subjects of ethnographic films, tourist videos, or tourist snapshots.
     
  16. An analysis of such texts as The Good Woman of Bangkok can stimulate discussion of sexuality as part of the construction of white, masculine identities. If the gaze is turned back on the customers of such women as Aoi, we can challenge the equation of displacement and desire. We can consider the place of the 'Asian' other in the white Australian imaginary. Texts which refuse such displacement, which bring the desiring white subject and the exoticised Asian other into the same discursive frame and the same spatial universe can have important deconstructive potential.
     
  17. A text which provides a thoroughgoing deconstruction of the Chrysanthemum/Butterfly story is David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly, which portrays a French diplomat who falls in love with a transvestite Chinese opera star. Hwang's 'queering' of the Butterfly story is based on the actual case of a French diplomat's extraordinary relationship with a Chinese opera performer.[18] Marjorie Garber has focused on the politics of gender and nationalism in the play, and the ways in which the orientalised Chinese lover speaks back to the Frenchman. As Garber points out, the final scene where the Frenchman 'becomes' Butterfly, donning her robes and white make-up, reveals the fantasy structure of the Butterfly stories: the idealised 'oriental' can only exist in the mind of the European observer. I would argue, however, that conventions are further unsettled in this play because the oriental figure also comes back to contaminate the metropolitan centre of Paris.[19]


    Nationalism and Sexuality ... Down Under
     
  18. Chris Berry has used discussion of The Good Woman of Bangkok to destabilise the binaries of Western/non-Western; dominant/subordinate; heterosexual/homosexual; active/passive. His twin response to this text takes the form of a meditation on all of the 'others' who are expelled from a unitary view of national identity,[20] and a fictionalised account of an encounter between a Taiwanese married businessman and a white Australian writer - an encounter which upsets binary habits of thought.[21]
     
  19. By insistently bringing together the two figures of 'O'Rourke-in-Bangkok' (the sextourist) with 'O'Rourke-in-Australia' (the filmmaker), Berry shows us that O'Rourke's film is not simply the exposure of the actions of one self-indulgent filmmaker.[22] Rather, the film is part of a longer cultural history of representations of white Australian identity and orientalised otherness. White Australian masculine identity has been constructed through the denial and repression of a series of fetishised others:

      The nation-state is collective and the humanist subject individual, but both are comprehended as coherent and unified identities produced and maintained through an ongoing process of, on the one hand, identification with and internalisation of ideal images and, on the other, repression and projection onto others of that which does not fit and disturbs unification and coherence...[23]

  20. While the sexuality and identity of white heterosexual males has been constructed as active in opposition to the passive and receptive sexuality of the non-Western woman, non-Western men have been left out of this equation. Filmmaker Tony Ayres argues that the structure of the ideology of White Australia has left no space for the sexuality of non-Western, particularly Chinese, males: 'The same racial stereotype of passivity and compliance, which makes the Asian woman desirable in the West, makes the Asian man marginal'.[24]
     
  21. Ayres' documentary film China Dolls explores the exclusions built into the gay community in Australia; or, to be more precise, places the gay community in the larger history of White Australian identities. 'Eventually,' explains Ayres, 'I realised, that when most Caucasian men in the gay scene look at Asian men, they don't see a tall or short man, an attractive or unattractive man. They don't see a Chinese, a Filipino, a Cambodian. They see a category, which absolutely defines us, yet describes nothing: the Asian'. Ayres seeks to transcend the dichotomies of 'rice queen' (a white man who has relationships with Asian men) and 'potato queen' (an Asian man who has relationships with white men), and presents Chinese-Australian men as actively desiring subjects. Rarely have so many Asian-Australian men been seen on an Australian film or television screen:[25] let alone gay men who narrate coming-out stories for the camera, or transvestites who mime arias from Madama Butterfly. Ayres also parodies both the terminology of the gay community and the conventional alignment of ethnic cultures with food, with his playful captions to sections of the documentary: 'Banana', 'Forbidden Fruit', 'Rice Queen', 'Potato Queen', 'Sticky Rice', 'Fruit Salad'.[26]
     
  22. In a pivotal sequence, Ayres, too performs the role of the metropolitan tourist when he travels to mainland China, gazing at the Chinese through the lens of his camera. He is, however, an ambivalent possessor of the metropolitan gaze. In this scene, Ayres moves from disembodied tourist, gazing through the camera lens, to embodied tourist, in his relationship with a Chinese man. To some extent, Ayres' relationship with the Chinese man repeats some familiar tropes of travel literature. His trip to China is presumably a function of his relatively privileged position in the relationship between Australia and China. The sexual encounter is a further convention of the travel literature, as is the traveller's search for an identity. However, in many ways, Ayres' text performs an important deconstructive function, in refusing the equation of displacement and desire found in such texts as The Good Woman of Bangkok.
     
  23. Ayres performs the ambivalence of Chinese Australian identities in repeated scenes of him first applying, and finally removing, thick white stage make-up.[27] The final scene of China Dolls reverses the resolution of David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly. Gallimard, the main character of M. Butterfly, applies white make-up in order to become the oriental 'other'. Ayres removes the white make-up in a symbolic gesture which rejects the pressure to assimilate to White Australia. Ayres refuses what Gupta and Ferguson have called 'the assumed isomorphism of space, place and culture'.[28] His Chinese identity is firmly anchored in Australian space.
     
  24. The photomontages of Asian-Australian artist Hou Leong also place Chinese identities firmly in Australian space by parodying assumptions about White Australian identities. Leong replaces his own image for that of Crocodile Dundee embracing Linda Koslowski, or places himself at the barbeque or in sporting activities.[29] Berry, Ayres and Leong reveal that the national identity of white male Australians has been constructed in opposition to a complex range of others: women, non-whites, and non-heterosexuals. This is one step towards a realisation that we need more complex models of spectatorship and desire, which recognise that both spectators and their objects are positioned according to multiple axes of gender, class, 'race', ethnicity and sexuality. While recognising that cultural representations of white Australians and their 'others' often draw on the history of European representations of the non-Western, we also need to be sensitive to the specifics of analysing representations addressed to Australian viewers.
     
  25. Such a theory of representation should also be able to deal with those recent cultural products where a white female achieves agency through the objectification of Asian others, possible because her ethnicity over-rides her gender. A sub-genre of Australian films and novels describes romances between Australian women and Asian men, while a feature of the tourist industry in Bali are the 'Kuta cowboys', the local gigolos who form relationships with Australian women.[30]
     
  26. In the film Turtle Beach (based on Blanche D'Alpuget's novel of the same name), it is a white Australian woman who enacts the role of investigative journalist in Malaysia, exposing the barbarism of the locals, gazing on the spectacle of exotic religious festivals, and enjoying a temporary relationship with an Indian man.[31] At first sight she seems to be repeating the familiar masculine pattern of flight from domesticity,[32] but she eventually returns to Australia to be reunited with her children. When the traveller is a woman, sexual relationships which cross racialised boundaries carry an added anxiety about children of mixed parentage. A woman who returned to the metropolis with the child produced from such a liaison would disturb expectations of racial homogeneity. In Turtle Beach, however, order is restored when the female journalist returns to look after her white Australian children in Sydney.[33]


    From Tourist Gaze to Tourist Grasp
     

    27. Figure 4. Advertisement for Singapore Airlines Raffles Class.       		The genealogy of such texts as The Good Woman of Bangkok reminds us that current conventions of representing relationships across ethnicised and racialised boundaries draw on a history of colonialist representations. Indeed, there is a further link between the colonial gaze and the tourist gaze in the use of colonial nostalgia in tourist sites such as Singapore, with the constant invocation of names such as Raffles (Figure 4).[34]


  28. The colonial gaze shares many features with the tourist gaze. Spatial displacement from the metropolitan centre is an important feature of the production of colonial desire. As in tourist discourse, however, we need to go beyond the theorization of the gaze, in order to come to terms with the embodied politics of relationships forged in colonial situations. John D. Kelly has recently focused on the 'grasp' as well as the 'gaze':

      I also want to test whether we might be better served by supplementing theorized 'gaze' powers with other metaphors of power. The gaze might be the phallic, leering, vital vehicle for the ramification of desire, or the vehicle of a claim to transcendence and virtual omniscience, but in all modes it flies through space, too ambiguous in its attachments to handle all the transactions and transcursions of real power. I suggest then that grasps are at least as well worth thinking about as gazes, as we try to write about power. Equally and more viscerally embodied than gazing, grasp is nevertheless neither more nor less intrinsically material. It is, like gaze, yet in a different way, another vehicle for inscription, embodiment and objectification, for realization of representations in self and world.[35]

  29. Our theorisation of the colonial gaze can be traced from Fanon, Memmi, and Said, and through to Sander Gilman and Homi Bhabha.[36] Ann Laura Stoler has advocated a more thoroughgoing application of Foucauldian theory to representations of 'race', and to the analysis of the management of sentiment, emotion, and sexuality by colonial states.[37] By bringing the state into discussions of sexuality, she demonstrates that sexual desire in colonial situations is never 'natural', but produced in specific contexts of domination and subordination, and actively managed by colonial states, backed up by violence wielded in official and unofficial ways.
     
  30. In colonial situations, spatial displacement from the metropolitan centre may allow inter-racial relationships which would be unthinkable in the metropolis. Even in the colonies, however, relationships are strictly regulated in ways which preserve boundaries and hierarchies of class, 'race', ethnicity and gender.[38] Similar theoretical perspectives can also be brought to bear on tourist encounters and tourist representations, suggesting that we need to theorise - to borrow from Kelly's phrase - not only the 'tourist gaze', but also the 'tourist grasp'. In writing about the 'tourist grasp', I am suggesting that 'grasp' is more than a mere metaphor for power. Rather, we need to focus on the embodied and spatialised practices of tourism in the unequal relationships between guests and hosts - between prosperous first world tourists and less prosperous third world workers. The embodied practices of the tourism industry reinforce inequalities, through the daily repetition of encounters which enact racialised and gendered hierarchies. It is first world tourists who receive, and third world workers who provide, personalised, and often embodied, services such as cooking, cleaning, serving of food and drinks, childcare, entertainment, and sexual services.


    Other Centres and Margins
     
  31. So far, we have looked at situations where the white male or female is at the centre of a discursive universe. There are other universes, however, where the processes of othering take place from different centres. Any discussion of the globalization of culture needs to take account of these multiple centres.
     
  32. The participation of Japanese males as clients of the prostitution tourism industry of Southeast Asia suggests that a process of 'othering' is taking place, whereby Japan functions as a metropolitan centre, whose national identity is constructed in opposition to a series of exoticised 'others'. In addition, controversy has recently been generated by young Japanese women who engage in relationships in tourist destinations which cross racialised boundaries. These relationships, too, are only thinkable as long as they are transient, commodified, and geographically displaced; as long as the threat of the crossing of racialised boundaries and the possibility of the production of hybrid children are not made apparent within the boundaries of the Japanese nation-state.[39]
     
  33. While a Japanese man or woman may certainly be constructed as 'other' in the gaze of the Western observer, they may also at times stand in the position of powerful observer. One way to describe this powerful viewing position would be to adapt the terminology of Orientalism, by describing Japanese viewers as possessing an 'orientalising' gaze on their Southeast Asian neighbours. In Japanese history, we can trace the orientalising gaze back to the late nineteenth century, when China was constructed as 'Japan's Orient'.[40] What we might call the 'orientalisation' of women from other Asian countries has a similar history, in the sexualisation and sexual exploitation of women from colonized countries in the early twentieth century. In Japanese cultural history, too, the orientalising gaze has often been a feminising gaze.[41]
     
  34. In contemporary Japanese popular culture, for example, Thai and Filipino women are constructed as body rather than mind, as sexualised others, and are often aligned with the abject: with sexuality, bodily functions, and disease.[42] Dorinne Kondo has also analysed journalism and advertising where a 'masculinised Japan ... dominates a feminised, sexualised Southeast Asia'.[43] In some popular texts which I have analysed elsewhere, narratives of romantic love are used as an allegory for the unequal relationships between Japan and Southeast Asia.[44] The feminisation of Asia is also reflected in activist literature which collapses different forms of marginality. One book about the so-called 'Japayuki-san', the immigrant workers from Southeast Asia, bears the subtitle 'Asia is a woman' [Ajia wa onna da]. Another travel book bears the title, 'The temptation of Asia', [Ajia no Yûwaku], which adds a further element of sexualisation of the travel experience.[45]
     
  35. Popular texts in Japan, as in Australia, demonstrate a reluctance to come to terms with inter-racial relationships, and a horror of hybridity.[46] Images of otherness in popular texts 'help construct and perpetuate an imagined Japanese self-identity'.[47] However, because of recent patterns of labour migration and marriage migration, these 'others' are no longer safely displaced, but are within the boundaries of the Japanese nation-state. Whereas tourists formerly travelled to Bangkok, Seoul and Manila to buy the services of the sexualised entertainment industry, bars and brothels in the major Japanese cities are now staffed by women from these countries. It could be said that these bars and brothels function as a 'tourist space' within the metropolis. It thus becomes necessary to displace these 'others' - the workers in the bars and brothels of the major cities - through discursive means. Ghassan Hage has referred to this process as the 'dialectic of inclusion and exclusion'. Members of subordinate groups may be included to the extent that their labour can be used, but will often be excluded from full participation in the national community.[48]
     
  36. In Australia, the unmarked centre is the white anglo-saxon male: all others are defined by their difference from this figure. In the Japanese case the unmarked centre of representations is the middle-class Japanese male, against whom female, working-class, and non-Japanese others are defined. The besuited male, working long hours at an office several hours away from his family may be thought of as the model worker and citizen. He also provides the model for members of parliament and the bureaucracy, is the addressee of public policy, and is valorised in television dramas and 'salaryman' novels. This figure is also interpellated as the desiring customer of the sexualised entertainment industry and tourist industry.
     
  37. Anne Allison's work on the culture of the salaryman can help us to theorise the relationship between commodified sexuality and the working life of the salaryman. The prostitution industry provides the archetypal white-collar citizen with a temporary sexual outlet which does not interfere with his ability to commit to his daily work. Indeed, Allison argues that desire is 'produced in forms that co-ordinate with the habits demanded of productive subjects'. These desires 'make the habitual desirable as well as making escape from the habits of labour seem possible through everyday practices of consumptive pleasure'.[49] While agreeing with Allison's diagnosis of the relationship between working life and commodified sexuality, I argue that we also need to theorise the production of desire in the context of the eroticisation of ethnicised difference. The desires of the salaryman may be even more effectively managed if the exoticised objects of his fantasies are geographically and conceptually displaced.[50]
     
  38. The 'orientalising' gaze, then, is not purely the privilege of the Western male observer. Rather, the gaze of powerful observers on those less powerful is structured in specific and localised relationships of domination and subordination.[51] Given that these relationships can no longer be assumed to fit the pattern of powerful 'Western' observers gazing on less-powerful 'non-Western' objects of the gaze, we may wish to modify the terminology of Orientalism, to refer, perhaps, to the 'metropolitan gaze' on colonial, tourist, or other specific spaces and bodies.


    The Morning After
     
  39. Several commentators have made links between contemporary forms of tourism and the so-called 'rest and recreation' industry connected with the stationing of troops in Southeast Asia. Activists engaged in outreach and educational activities among sex workers, in particular, have attempted to understand the similarities and differences between militarised prostitution and tourism-related prostitution.
     
  40. An understanding of the link between prostitution and the tourist industry has necessitated an analysis sensitive to the inter-relationship of class, gender and 'race' relations, in the context of economic inequality between rich and poor countries. These insights have helped prepare the way for a feminist analysis of the issue of military prostitution, insofar as this also involves relationships across perceived boundaries of class, 'race' and gender, although further reflection is necessary in order to come to terms with the specificities of militarised sexualities. 'Sex tours' can be understood in the context of international tourism supported by multinational capital and the construction of first world consumers' desires for exotic sexual experiences, while the use of sexualised services and the practices of sexualised violence by military personnel necessitate an analysis of the deployment of sexuality in military institutions.[52]
     
  41. Militarised sexualities also function according to a system of displacement. There is a rigid separation between 'the home' and 'the battlefront', and a rigid distinction between the objects of emotional attachment 'at home', and the objects of aggressive sexual behaviour at or near the 'battlefront'. Once again, these distinctions are reinforced through the naturalisation of racialised, ethnicised and gendered hierarchies. This spatial displacement has meant that the sexual behaviour of soldiers has, until recently, remained unexamined and unquestioned in their home countries.
     
  42. Cynthia Enloe argues that an examination of the behaviour of, for example, United States' soldiers in East and Southeast Asia was made harder by the exigencies of Cold War politics and international relations. She argues that we have now 'woken up' from the Cold War, and should be ready to re-examine the gendered, sexed, ethnicised and racialised dimensions of international relations.[53]
     
  43. Recent events in Okinawa (the Southernmost prefecture of Japan) have focused attention on the connections between militarised masculinities and sexual violence. In 1995, a young Okinawan adolescent girl was sexually assaulted by three U.S. soldiers. This was not a unique occurrence: such assaults had been prevalent throughout the post-war period. However, the response of Okinawan residents ensured that this incident would become a matter of international relations. First of all, the local authorities chose to prosecute the offenders in local courts, rather than delegating this responsibility to the U.S. military. Secondly, there was a network of feminist activists, attuned to the political significance of such incidents, through their campaigns for compensation for women forced into military prostitution in the Second World War, and through their participation in the United Nations International Women's Conference in Beijing. Finally, the then Governor of Okinawa, Ôta Masahide, was willing to challenge the governments of both Japan and the United States by delaying, for as long as possible, local government ratification of an extension to the agreement to house U.S. bases on Okinawan soil. These events resulted in the extraordinary spectacle of representatives of the Japanese and United States' governments discussing the sexual behaviour of soldiers. Questions have also been raised in international forums about the sexual behaviour of military personnel in Peace Keeping Operations in Cambodia and East Timor.
     
  44. In this context, Enloe's phrase 'The Morning After', to describe post-Cold War gender and sexual relations seems particularly apposite. Not only did the Cold War provide the rationale for the stationing of troops throughout Southeast Asia, but the subordination of several nations to US military policy prevented a discussion of the social consequences of the stationing of a largely male workforce which had learned a particularly aggressive form of masculine sexuality. Much of the contemporary tourist industry in Southeast Asia has developed on the sites of the former 'rest and recreation' industry in Seoul, Manila and Bangkok. Now we can ask, with Enloe:

      without myths of Asian or Latina women's compliant sexuality, would many American men be able to sustain their own identities, their visions of themselves as manly enough to act as soldiers?[54]

  45. Military masculinities, however, are more than matters of individual identity. Military masculinities are an important element of nationalist identities, in systems where the soldier is metonym for the nation.[55] As in nationalist discourse, military discourse works through the denial and repression of a series of fetishised others: the feminine, the homosexual, the 'foreigner'.
     
  46. These mechanisms of denial and repression are at times revealed in cultural products such as the American musical Miss Saigon, which restages the Butterfly story in the context of the Vietnam war, those Australian novels which reveal symptoms of Australian difficulties in coming to terms with a feminised and sexualised Vietnam, and an extraordinary variation on the themes of Orientalist cross-dressing, in an Australian play which depicts an Australian prisoner-of-war forced to dress up as a geisha by his Japanese captors. This is perhaps the most graphic illustration of the military horror of feminisation, passivisation, and orientalisation.[56]


    Sexing the Globe, Globalising Sex
     
  47. In Okinawa, Korea, the Philippines and Thailand, on the 'morning after' the Cold War, local people have 'woken up' to the consequences of economies dependent on military prostitution and the international tourist industry. Activists have overcome spatial displacement by attempting to forge links between communities in Thailand, the Philippines, South Korea and Okinawa, where local women have suffered from the displacement of military sexualities on to the exoticised figures of Asian women. International relations are thus based on an embodied politics. To quote Enloe again:
      Sexual practice is one of the sites of masculinity's - and femininity's - daily construction. That construction is international.

  48. The construction of exoticised desires in the metropolitan centres, and regional centres like Australia or Japan, is an integral part of relationships between nations, suggesting that the burgeoning field of 'gender and international relations'[57] needs to be supplemented with a more systematic analysis of 'sexuality and international relations'.[58] The desires invoked by the tourist advertising described at the beginning of this article can no longer be seen as innocent. The time has come to start thinking about what is at stake in 'sexing the globe'.[59]


    Endnotes

    [1] The Age 18 May 1991, advertisement for Garuda Airlines and Visit Indonesia Year 1991.The images described here come from my collection of tourist advertising, which I used in teaching a course on 'Gender and Social Change: Asian-Pacific Perspectives' over several years at the University of Melbourne. I would like to express my thanks to the students in that course for their discussions. Papers related to this research have been presented at the conferences of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, University of New South Wales, September 1998; the Cultural Studies Association of Australia, University of Adelaide, December 1998; the Conference on Bodies: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, Edith Cowan University, November 1998; and a Public Lecture presented at Central Queensland University in May 1999. I am indebted to the audiences on those occasions for questions which prompted me to clarify my ideas and for the comments from referees. Thanks also to Paul Magee for many conversations about these issues, and Lucy Healey, Steven Angelides, Craig Bird and Sim Prescott for assistance and encouragement.

    [2] See the Lauda Air advertisement, 'Fly Your Dreams'. On the 'Singapore Girl', see Mike Safe, 'The Girl who Launched a Million Flights', The Australian Magazine, September 25-26 (1993): 34-9; Alex Bellos, 'Fly Me!', The Sunday Age.

    [3] Lonely Planet postcard, author's collection.

    [4] Since first drafting this article, I have come across Dorinne Kondo's use of advertising as a starting point for discussing questions of the construction of Japanese national identities. Dorinne Kondo, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre, New York: Routledge, 1997, pp.157-74.

    [5] John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage,1990, pp. 11-12. Urry makes brief mention of the gendering of the travel experience on pp. 62-3 and p. 141 of his book. Rojek and Urry take the gendering of travel and theory more seriously in their recent edited collection: Chris Rojek & John Urry (eds) Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, London: Routledge, 1997.

    [6] Chris Rojek & John Urry, 'Transformations of Travel and Theory,' in Rojek & Urry (eds.) Touring Cultures, p. 17.

    [7] Soile Veijola & Eeva Jokinen, 'The Body in Tourism', Theory, Culture and Society, 11, (1994): 125-51.

    [8] Eeva Jokinen and Soile Veijola, 'The Disoriented Tourist: The Figuration of the Tourist in Contemporary Cultural Critique', in Rojek & Urry (eds) Touring Cultures, pp. 23-51. They are also, of course, critiquing the disembodied, disengaged, displaced social theorist. Their work brings a new dimension to the extensive literature on the possible relationship between anthropology and tourism. See Malcolm Crick, 'Tourists, Locals and Anthropologists: Quizzical Reflections on "Otherness" in Tourist Encounters and in Tourism Research', Australian Cultural History, 10, (1991): 6-18. See also James Clifford's discussion of enthnography as 'embodied spatial practice', a phrase he adapts from de Certeau's notion of 'spatial practice'. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 53; Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

    [9] Alison Broinowski, The Yellow Lady: Australian Impressions of Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 39; drawing on Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient, Bloomington: Indiana, 1986.

    [10] See, for example, the cover of the weekend magazine of the West Australian newspaper (appropriately called The West Magazine) of September 12 1998, which bears a carved temple door and the caption 'Bali: A glimpse behind the closed doors of paradise', and the illustrations inside the magazine.

    [11] For different approaches to an understanding of this issue, see: Vera Mackie, 'Division of Labour', in Gavan McCormack & Yoshio Sugimoto (eds) Modernization and Beyond - the Japanese Trajectory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 218-32; Linda Richter, The Politics of Tourism in Asia, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989, pp. 82-101; Thanh-dam Truong, Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in South-East Asia, London : Zed Press, 1990, pp. 110-30; Wendy Lee, 'Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia', in Nanneke Redclift and Thea Sinclair, eds, Working Women: International Perspectives on Labour and Ideology, London Routledge.1991; Vera Mackie, 'Japan and South East Asia: The International Division of Labour and Leisure', in David Harrison, (ed.) Tourism and the Less Developed Countries, London, Belhaven Press, 1992; Laurie Shrage, Moral Dilemmas of Feminism: Prostitution, Adultery and Abortion, London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 150-58; Jan Jindy Pettman, Worlding Women: A Feminist International Politics, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996, pp. 185-207; Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, Night Markets: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle, New York: Routledge, 1998.

    [12] Shrage, Moral Dilemmas of Feminism, p. 150.

    [13] See Teresa de Lauretis, 'Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies: Femininity and Fetishism in David Cronenberg's M. Butterfly', Signs, 24, 2, (December 1999): 303-34, for a careful discussion of the relationship between 'public and private fantasies'.

    [14] Dennis O'Rourke, The Good Woman of Bangkok, Canberra: Film Australia, 1991; Chris Berry, Annette Hamilton and Laleen Jayamanne (eds) The Filmmaker and the Prostitute: Dennis O'Rourke's The Good Woman of Bangkok, Sydney: Power Publications, 1997.

    [15] Pierre Loti, Japan: Madame Chrysanthemum, London: Kegan Paul International, 1985, reprint of 1920 edition. The French original, Madame Chrysanthème, was published in 1888. On Pierre Loti and his writings, see Lesley Blanch, Pierre Loti: The Legendary Romantic, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1983; Irene Szylowicz, Pierre Loti and the Oriental Woman, London: Macmillan, 1988; Tessa Dwyer, 'Literary Exoticism and the Postcolonial Wardrobe: Travel-Writing in Pierre Loti, Marc Helys, and Isabelle Eberhart', Antithesis, 7, 2, (1995): 67-86.

    [16] There is also, of course, a whole genre of operas on Orientalist themes, including Aida, Turandot, and the Pearl Fishers. See program notes on Opera Australia's recent production of the Pearl Fishers, in particular Charles Sowerwine's essay, 'How Far the East, How Far Desire?', Les Pêcheurs de Perles [The Pearl Fishers], Sydney: Playbill/Showbill Publications, 2000, unpaginated.

    [17] On consent, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988; Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989, pp. 71-89; Jocelynne Scutt, 'Judicial Vision: Rape, Prostitution and the "Chaste Woman"', Women's Studies International Forum, 17, 4, (July-August 1994); Catherine Burns, 'Judicial Narratives on Trial: Constructions of Sex, Gender and Sexuality in the Japanese Courtroom', Proceedings of the International Conference on Women in the Asia-Pacific Region: Persons, Powers and Politics, Singapore, August 1997, pp. 127-38; on the scene in question, see Annette Hamilton, 'Mistaken Identities: Art, Truth and Dare in The Good Woman of Bangkok', in Berry et al. (eds) The Filmmaker and the Prostitute, p. 64; on the ethical issues raised by this and other documentary films, see Linda Williams, 'The Ethics of Documentary Intervention: Dennis O'Rourke's Good Woman of Bangkok', in Berry et al (eds) The Filmmaker and the Prostitute, pp. 79-90.

    [18] For an account of Bernard Boursicot's relationship with the Chinese opera performer, see Joyce Wadler, Liaison, New York: Bantam Books, 1993.

    [19] David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly, New York: New American Library, 1989; Marjorie Garber, 'The Occidental Tourist: M. Butterfly and the Scandal of Transvestism', in Andrew Parker et al. (eds) Nationalisms and Sexualities, London: Routledge, 1992, pp. 121-46. Hwang himself refers to the story as a 'deconstructivist Madame Butterfly', Garber, 'The Occidental Tourist', p. 124.

    [20] Chris Berry, 'Dennis O'Rourke's Original Sin: The Good Woman of Bangkok OR Is This What They Mean by "Australia in Asia"?', in Chris Berry, A Bit on the Side: East-West Topographies of Desire, Sydney: EMpress, 1994, pp. 21-57. For further discussion of the theoretical relationships between nationalisms and sexualities, see George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985; Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities.

    [21] Chris Berry, 'A Bit on the Side: Thoughts after seeing Dennis O'Rourke's "Documentary Fiction", The Good Woman of Bangkok', in A Bit on the Side, pp. 59-67.

    [22] Berry, 'Dennis O'Rourke's Original Sin', pp. 33-40.

    [23] Berry, 'Dennis O'Rourke's Original Sin', p. 34.

    [24] See also Teresa de Lauretis' discussion of David Cronenberg's film of M. Butterfly. De Lauretis argues that the homosexual desire of the Chinese man is elided from most commentaries on the film. De Lauretis, 'Popular Culture, Public and Private Fantasies', pp. 325-33.

    [25] A recent newspaper article on the Eurocentrism of Australian television was perceptively titled 'Television's White Australia Policy', in The Sunday Age: View Magazine, 12-19 March, 1995. For further discussion of the Eurocentrism of the Australian media, see Philip Bell, Multicultural Australia in the Media, Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service.

    [26] On food and ethnicity, see Mary Kalantsis, 'Ethnicity Meets Gender Meets Class', in Sophie Watson (ed.) Playing The State, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990, pp. 39-59; Sneja Gunew, Framing Marginality: Multicultural Literary Studies, Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 1994, p. 61.

    [27] Tony Ayres, China Dolls, Canberra: Film Australia, 1998.

    [28] Akhil Gupta & James Ferguson, 'Beyond "Culture": Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,' Cultural Anthropology, 7, 1, (February 1992): 2.

    [29] See Hou Leong, 'An Australian', in Suvendrini Pereira (ed.) Asian & Pacific Inscriptions: Identities, Ethnicities, Nationalitise, Bundoora: Meridian, 1995, pp. 111-20; and see the discussion of Hou Leong's photomontages in Rachel Fensham and Peter Eckersal, 'Introduction', in Rachel Fensham and Peter Eckersall (eds) Disorientations, Cultural Praxis in Theatre: Asia, Pacific, Australia, Melbourne: Monash Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies, pp. 10-11.

    [30] See Chris Berry's mention of such films as Steven Wallace's Turtle Beach (Australia, 1992) and Philip Noyce's Echoes of Paradise (Australia, 1988), where Southeast Asia provides an exotic site for the sexual and other adventures of the white Australian woman. See: Adrian Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created, Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1989, p. 193; Annette Hamilton, 'Fear and Desire: Aborigines, Asians and the National Imaginary', Australian Cultural History, No 9, (1990): 14-35. See also Inez Baranay's novel, The Edge of Bali, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1992.

    [31] Blanche D'Alpuget, Turtle Beach, Melbourne: Penguin Australia, 1981.

    [32] On tourism as a masculine flight from domesticity, see Meaghan Morris, 'At Henry Parkes Motel', Cultural Studies, 2, 1, (1988): 1-7.

    [33] I am indebted to Peter Phipps for discussion which prompted me to think through this issue. For discussion of the dynamics of relationships which cross gendered and racialised boundaries in colonial situations, see: Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991; Ann Stoler, 'Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia', in Micaela di Leonardo (ed.) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 51-101; Anne McClintock, '"No Longer in a Future Heaven": Gender, Race and Nationalism', in Anne McClintock et al., (eds) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation & Postcolonial Perspectives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, London: Cassell, 1999. These works have helped me to theorise what might be at stake when travellers engage in relationships across these perceived boundaries.

    [34] Not only is the Raffles Hotel the symbol of colonial nostalgia in Singapore, Singapore Airlines refers to its business class as 'Raffles class'. Sir Stamford Raffles was Lieutenant Governor of Java, and founder of the city of Singapore.

    [35] John D. Kelly, 'Gaze and Grasp: Plantations, Desires, Indentured Indians, and Colonial Law in Fiji,' in Lenore Manderson & Margaret Jolly (eds) Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997, p. 92.

    [36] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London: Pluto Press, 1986; Albert Memmi, The Coloniser and the Colonised, London: Souvenir Press, 1974; Edward Said, Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978; Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985; Homi Bhabha, 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', October, 28, (1984): 125-33.

    [37] Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995; Ann Laura Stoler, 'Educating Desire in Colonial Southeast Asia: Foucault, Freud, and Imperial Sexualities', in Manderson & Jolly (eds) Sites of Desire, pp. 27-47.

    [38] Stoler, 'Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power', pp. 51-101.

    [39] See the discussion of the practice of liaisons between Japanese women and non-Japanese men in tourist destinations in Karen Kelsky, 'Flirting with the Foreign: Interracial Sex in Japan's "International" Age', in Rob Wilson & Wimal Dissanayake (eds) Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Durham: Duke University Press, 1996, pp.173-92. My rather clumsy formulation in the above paragraph is an attempt to avoid the word 'miscegenation', which is likely to be offensive to those in mixed relationships and in particular to their children.

    [40] Stefan Tanaka, Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

    [41] Miriam Silverberg, 'Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story', in Tani Barlow (ed.) Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, p. 280.

    [42] Vera Mackie, '"Japayuki Cinderella Girl": Containing the Immigrant Other', Japanese Studies, 18, 1, (May 1998); see also David Pollack, 'The Revenge of the Illegal Asians: Aliens, Gangsters, and Myth in Ken Satoshi's World Apartment Horror', in positions: east asia cultures critique, 1, 3, (1993): 676-714; Sandra Buckley, 'The Foreign Devil Returns: Packaging Sexual Practice and Risk in Contemporary Japan', in Manderson & Jolly (eds) Sites of Desire, pp. 262-91.

    [43] Kondo, About Face, p. 85.

    [44] Mackie, 'Japayuki Cinderella Girl'.

    [45] Yamatani Tetsuo, Japayuki-san: Ajia wa Onna da, Tokyo: Jôhô Sentâ Shuppankyoku, 1985.

    [46] cf. Kathryn Robinson, 'Of Mail-Order Brides and 'Boys' Own' Tales: Representations of Asian-Australian Marriages', Feminist Review, 52, (Spring 1996); Hamilton, 'Fear and Desire', p. 18.

    [47] Millie Creighton, 'Soto others and uchi Others: imaging racial diversity, imagining homogeneous Japan,' in Michael Weiner (ed.) Japan's Minorities: The Illusion of Homogeneity, London: Routledge, 1997 p. 212.

    [48] Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society, Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998, pp. 134-38.

    [49] Anne Allison, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996, p. xv; see also Anne Allison, Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure and Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994.

    [50] See Mackie, 'Japayuki Cinderella Girl'; Crick, 'Tourists, Locals and Anthropologists', p. 9.

    [51] Here, I wish to distance myself from Maria Mies' attempts to understand the dynamics of the tourism-related prostitution industry. Mies attempts to encompass the whole history of European misogyny, from witch-burning to the contemporary tourism industry in one chapter, and fails to make a detailed analysis of the contemporary situation. In her invocation of the 'white man's dilemma', she reveals an inability to theorise situations where observers do not neatly fit the pattern of 'Western' observers gazing on 'non-Western' others. Mies also fails to present a theory of the relationship between what de Lauretis (see above) refers to as 'public and private fantasies'. Maria Mies, 'White Man's Dilemma: His Search for What He Has Destroyed', in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1993, pp.132-63.

    [52] cf. Carolyn Nordstrom, 'Rape: Politics and Theory in War and Peace', Australian Feminist Studies, 11, 23, (1996): 147-62.

    [53] Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War, Berkeley: University of California, 1993.

    [54] Enloe, The Morning After, p. 145.

    [55] As Anne McClintock explains, drawing on Elleke Boehmer: 'Excluded from direct action as national citizens, women are subsumed symbolically into the national body politic as its boundary and metaphoric limit: 'Singapore girl, you're a great way to fly.' Women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation but are denied any direct relation to national agency. As Elleke Boehmer notes, the 'motherland' of male nationalism thus may 'not signify "home" and "source" to women.' Boehmer noted that the male role in the nationalist scenario is typically 'metonymic'; that is, men are contiguous with each other and with the national whole. Women, by contrast, appear 'in a metaphoric or symbolic role. Yet it is also crucial to note that not all men enjoy the privilege of political contiguity with each other in the national community.' McClintock, 'No Longer in a Future Heaven', p. 90; Elleke Boehmer, 'Stories of Women and Mothers: Gender and Nationalism in the Early Fiction of Flora Nwapa,' in Susheila Nasta (ed.) Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, London: Women's Press, 1991.

    [56] On Miss Saigon, see Dorinne Kondo, About Face, pp. pp.24, 211-212, 228-235, 252; on Australian depictions of the Vietnam War, see Robin Gerster (ed.) Hotel Asia, Melbourne: Penguin, 1995; on the Australian soldier forced to dress as a geisha, see Alison Richards' discussion of Jill Shearer's play Shimada. Alison Richards, 'The Orient and its Dis/contents: Images of Japan as Oriental 'Other' in Australian Drama 1968-1998', in Fensham and Eckersal (eds) Dis/Orientations, pp. 143-48.

    [57] Rebecca Grant & Kathleen Newland (eds) Gender and International Relations, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991; V. Spike Peterson & A.S. Runyon, Global Gender Issues, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993; Gillian Youngs, International Relations in a Global Age: A Conceptual Challenge, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.

    [58] Pettman refers to the 'international political economy of sex': Pettman, Worlding Women, pp. 185-207.

    [59] cf. Gayle Rubin, 'Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality', in Carol Vance (ed) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 267: 'The time has come to start thinking about sex.'


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This paper was originally published in Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, with the assistance of Murdoch University.

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