Marital Acts: Gender, Sexuality, and Identity among the Chinese Thai Diaspora

by Jiemin Bao

Overview

Succeeding waves of migration, from China to Thailand and from Thailand to the United States, have helped shape the identities of three generations of diasporic Chinese Thai. In this exciting new study, Jiemin Bao focuses on how cultural identities—as seen through the lens of marriage—play a central role in the formation of cultural citizenship. By challenging models of cultural identity that separate gender, sexuality, and class into discrete domains of analysis, Bao examines the competing roles of sex/gender, class, and race/ethnicity in shaping the ongoing construction of Chinese Thai identities in contemporary Bangkok and the San Francisco Bay area.

Marriage has long been treated as a mechanism of assimilation in the anthropological literature on diasporic Chinese: the Chinese "minority" is absorbed into the dominant "majority" through intermarriage. Bao approaches marriage differently, viewing it not only as an institution that fosters and reproduces fundamental ideas of masculinity and femininity, but also as a site where the various categories of ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality—the stuff of identity—intersect. Through a fine-grained analysis of the lives of men and women and the language that three generations use to talk about their experiences in different locales, Bao powerfully demonstrates how masculine and feminine identities are both classed and ethnicized in Thailand and the United States. Nuanced and provocative, Marital Acts shows how diasporic Chinese are both self making and being made, not once, but twice—first in the society in which they are born and second in the society to which they migrate.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780824828790
Publisher:	University of Hawaii Press, The
Publication date:	11/30/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

Table of Contents

	Language Conventions	xi
	Preface	xiii
	Acknowledgments	xix
Part I	Positions
1	Introduction	3
2	The Ongoing Process of Identity Formation	15
Part II	The Chinkao Experience
3	The Gendered Politics of Migration and Marriage	31
4	Middle-Class Chinese-ness, Nei/Wai Politics	53
5	Changes in Sexual Practice: "Same Bed, Different Dreams"	74
Part III	The Lukchin Experience
6	Hybrid Identities	93
7	What's in a Wedding?	105
8	Naturalized Sexuality and Middle-Class Respectability	125
9	Shang Jia: "Family Business"	144
Part IV	The Chinese Thai American Experience
10	Multiple Belongings	167
	Notes	191
	Glossary	201
	Bibliography	203
	Index	215