Winner of the 2022 Research Publication Book Award from the Association of Chinese Professors of Social Sciences in the United States. Based on ethnographic research with victims of intimate partner violence since 2014, this book brings to the forefront women's experiences of, negotiations about, and contestations against violence, and men's narratives about the reasons for their violence. Using an innovative methodology - online chat groups, it foregrounds the role of history, structural inequalities, and the cultural system of power hierarchy in situating and constructing intimate partner violence. Centering on men and women's narratives about violence, this book connects intimate partner violence with invisible structural violence - the historical, cultural, political, economic, and legal context that gives rise to and perpetuates violence against women. Through examining the ways in which women's lives are constrained by various forms of violence, hierarchy, and inequality, this book shows that violence against women is a structural issue that is historically produced and politically and culturally engaged.

The recognition of women's human rights to migrate and work as sex workers is disregarded and dismissed by anti-trafficking discourses of rescue in the latest United Nation's definition of trafficking. This volume explores the life experiences, agency, and human rights of trafficked women in order to shed light on the complicated processes in which anti-trafficking, human rights and social justice are intersected. In these articles, the authors critically analyze not only the conflation of trafficking with sex work in international and national discourses and its effects on migrant women, but also the global anti-trafficking policy and the root causes for the undocumented migration and employment. Featuring case studies on eleven countries including the US, Iran, Denmark, Paris, Hong Kong, and south east Asia and offering perspectives from transnational migrant population, the contributors rearticulate the trafficking discourses away from the state control of immigration and the global policing of borders, and reassert the social justice and the needs, agency, and human rights of migrant and working communities. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, gender studies, human rights, migration, sociology and anthropology.

The recognition of women's human rights to migrate and work as sex workers is disregarded and dismissed by anti-trafficking discourses of rescue in the latest United Nation's definition of trafficking. This volume explores the life experiences, agency, and human rights of trafficked women in order to shed light on the complicated processes in which anti-trafficking, human rights and social justice are intersected. In these articles, the authors critically analyze not only the conflation of trafficking with sex work in international and national discourses and its effects on migrant women, but also the global anti-trafficking policy and the root causes for the undocumented migration and employment. Featuring case studies on eleven countries including the US, Iran, Denmark, Paris, Hong Kong, and south east Asia and offering perspectives from transnational migrant population, the contributors rearticulate the trafficking discourses away from the state control of immigration and the global policing of borders, and reassert the social justice and the needs, agency, and human rights of migrant and working communities. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, gender studies, human rights, migration, sociology and anthropology.

This volume is the result of the many years the authors have spent conducting ethnographic field research with sex workers, conversing with other researchers, and, perhaps most importantly, developing a deep sense of empathy for the sex worker participants in the research as well as the colleagues who carry out this work with the goal of advancing social justice. They have a combined total of twenty-five years' experience carrying out research with sex workers, and this extensive period of time has given them ample opportunity to reflect upon the topic of ethics. Sex work, defined as the exchange of sexual or sexualized intimacy for money or something of value, encompasses a wide range of legal and illegal behaviors that present researchers with key ethical challenges explored in the volume. These ethical challenges include: * Research methodology * Distinguishing research from activism * Navigating the politically and ideologically charged environments in which researchers must remain constantly attuned to the legal and public policy implications of their work * Possibilities for participatory sex work research processes * Strategies for incorporating participants in a variety of collaborative ways Sex work presents a unique set of challenges that are not always well understood by those working outside of anthropology and disciplines closely related to it. This book serves an important function by honestly and openly reviewing strategies for overcoming these ethical challenges with the end goal of producing path-breaking research that actively incorporates the perspectives of research participants on their own terms. Ever attuned to the reality that research on sex work remains a deeply political act, Ethical Research with Sex Workers: Anthropological Approaches aspires to begin a dialogue about the meanings and practices ascribed to ethics in a fraught environment. Drawing upon a review of published scholarly and activist work on the subject, as well as on interviews with researchers, social service providers, and sex workers themselves, this volume is an unprecedented contribution to the literature that will engage researchers across a variety of disciplines, such as academics and researchers in anthropology, sociology, criminal justice, and public health, as well as activists and policymakers.

Tongzhi, which translates into English as "same purpose" or "same will," was once widely used to mean "comrade." Since the 1990s, the word has been appropriated by the LGBT community in China and now refers to a broad range of people who do not espouse heteronormativity. Tongzhi Living, the first study of its kind, offers insights into the community of same-sex-attracted men in the metropolitan city of Dalian in northeast China. Based on ethnographic fieldwork by Tiantian Zheng, the book reveals an array of coping mechanisms developed by tongzhi men in response to rapid social, cultural, and political transformations in postsocialist China. According to Zheng, unlike gay men in the West over the past three decades, tongzhi men in China have adopted the prevailing moral ideal of heterosexuality and pursued membership in the dominant culture at the same time they have endeavored to establish a tongzhi culture. They are, therefore, caught in a constant tension of embracing and contesting normality as they try to create a new and legitimate space for themselves. Tongzhi men's attempts to practice both conformity and rebellion paradoxically undercut the goals they aspire to reach, Zheng shows, perpetuating social prejudice against them and thwarting the activism they believe they are advocating.

Sex work continues to provoke controversial legal and public policy debates world-wide that raise fundamental questions about the state's role in protecting individual rights, status quo social relations, and public health. This book unites ethnographic research from China, Canada, and the United States to argue that criminalization results in a totalizing set of negative consequences for sex workers' health, safety, and human rights. Such consequences are enabled through the operations of an exclusionary regime, a dense coalescence of punitive forces that involves both governance, in the form of the criminal justice system and other state agents, and dynamic interpersonal encounters in which individuals both enforce and negotiate stigma-related discrimination against sex workers. Chapter Two demonstrates how criminalization harms sex workers by isolating their work to potentially dangerous locations, fostering mistrust of authority figures, further limiting their abilities to find legal work and housing, and restricting possibilities for collective rights-based organizing. Criminalized sex workers report police harassment, seizure of condoms, and adversarial police-sex worker relations that enable others to abuse them with impunity. Chapter Three describes how sex workers negotiate these restrictions on their rights and personal autonomy via their arrest avoidance and client management strategies, self-treatment of health issues, selective mutual aid, rights-based organizing, and entrenchment in sex work or other criminalized activities. Chapter Four describes how researchers working in countries or locales that criminalize sex work face ethical concerns as well as barriers to their work at the practical, institutional, and political levels.

Gender in Chinese Music draws together contributions from ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to explore how music is implicated in changing notions of masculinity, femininity, and genders "in between" in Chinese culture. Village ritualists, international classical pianists, pop idols, and professional mourners -- whether they perform in temples, on concert stages, or in TV shows, Chinese musicians continually express and negotiate their gendered identities. Gender in Chinese Music brings together contributions from ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to explore how gender is not only manifested in the diverse musical traditions of Chinese culture but also constructed through performing and observing these traditions. Individual chapters examine unique music cultures ranging from those of courting couples in China's heartlands to ethnic minority singers in the borderlands, and from Ming-period courtesans to contemporary karaoke hostesses. The book also features interviews with musicians, music industry workers, and fans talking about gender. With its wide-ranging subject matter and interdisciplinary approach, this volume will be an important resource for researchers and students interested in how music is implicated in the changing notions of masculinity, femininity, and genders "in between." Contributors: RuardAbsaroka, Rachel Harris, Stephen Jones, Frank Kouwenhoven, Olivia Kraef, Joseph Lam, Rowan Pease, Antoinet Schimmelpenninck, Hwee-San Tan, Shzr Ee Tan, Xiao Mei, Judith Zeitlin, Tiantian Zheng. Rachel Harris is Reader in the Music of China and Central Asia at SOAS, University of London. Rowan Pease is Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS, University of London. Shzr Ee Tan is Senior Lecturer in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

In China today, sex work cannot be untangled from the phenomenon of rural-urban 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 hostesses-a 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.