Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia

Author(s): Tamara Loos

Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 114, No. 5 (December 2009), pp. 1309-1324
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the American Historical Association
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 AHR Forum
Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia

TAMARA LOOS

IN 1848, KING RAMA III OF SIAM ordered the execution of the kingdom’s highest-
ranking prince for treason, a charge that partially targeted his indulgence in scan-
dalous sexual relations with members of his cross-dressing male performance troupe.
The legal indictment of the prince located his sexual transgressions within a specific
transnational moral framework:
Your wives who receive a royal salary have recounted vociferously to others that you don’t
care for your children or them and that you have fallen head over heels in love with your
dancers and performers. His Majesty is aware of this and understands that [you] have pref-
erences like those of the Lord of Peking (Daoguang), who loves the Chinese opera and some-
times frequents male prostitutes, sometimes female. If His Majesty had forbidden this and
admonished you for engaging in these unsavory practices, the matter would have become too
scandalous and publicly humiliated the royal family.1

By comparing the sexual comportment of Siam’s Prince Rakronnaret to Qing China’s

Emperor Daoguang, Siam’s ruler gestured toward the relevant comparative field of
transnational sexual exemplars, good and bad. Qing China, previously the region’s
peerless moral, political, and economic power, had become Siam’s paradigm of the
perverse by the late 1840s as a consequence of Britain’s defeat of the Qing in the
First Opium War (1839–1842) and its rise to global imperial dominance.2
This triangulated reassessment of sexual ethics offers a hint at the complexity of
a transnational history of sexuality in Asia. Transnational history is centrally con-
cerned with flows and circulation (of sexual mores, for example) among sites rather
than with historical processes in distinct places.3 The framework of national history,
which has been the privileged category of history since the discipline was established
I thank Margot Canaday for organizing this forum and the wonderfully astute anonymous reviewers for
their advice. In addition, I am grateful to Jyoti Puri, Michael Peletz, Jane Ferguson, and my colleagues
at Cornell—Sherm Cochran, Durba Ghosh, T. J. Hinrichs, Vic Koschmann, Michael Shin, and Eric
Tagliacozzo—for their generous advice about the scholarship on sexuality and its trends in their re-
spective fields.
1 Chaophraya Thiphakorawong (Kham Bunnag), comp., Phraratchaphongsawadan krung ratanako-

sin ratchakan thi 3 (Royal Chronicle of Rama III) (Bangkok, 1934), 320.
2 For a discussion of the shift from Sinocentrism to Victorian ideals of “civilization” among Siam’s

elites, see Thongchai Winichakul, “The Quest for ‘Siwilai ’: A Geographical Discourse of Civilizational
Thinking in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Siam,” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no.
3 (August 2000): 528–549.
3 This is elucidated in C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol,

and Patricia Seed, “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” American Historical Review 3, no.
5 (December 2006): 1441–1464.

1309
1310 Tamara Loos

in the nineteenth century, has become increasingly irrelevant and inapplicable to the
interests of scholars focused on themes, developments, and forces—commerce, en-
vironmentalism, human rights, disease, diasporas, sexuality, and so on—that cut
across national boundaries.4 In contrast to national history, transnational history
analyzes the dynamics of interaction, movement, and exchanges between, within, and
among ideas, material cultures, institutions, and peoples. It emphasizes the hori-
zontal and relational aspects of economic, social, and cultural processes as they move
across space and embed themselves in various regimes of power.5 As such, it
broaches topics that are both subnational and transnational—local and global—
without positioning them against one another. Instead, transnational approaches see
the local and the global as inseparable and yet unevenly integrated.6 Transnational
history also offers a particular global framing of the local, defined as subnational in
some cases and national in others, that reveals the substance of the relationship
between the transnational and the local. Some argue that comparative studies, by
contrast, naturalize and reproduce national entities and “areas” as static units with
their own distinct historical and cultural trajectories.7 However, Ann Laura Stoler’s
2006 edited volume has redefined comparative history and thereby given it a new
lease on life.8 Therein, she argues that comparative projects consider “specific ex-
changes, interactions, and connections that cut across national borders without ig-
noring what state actors do and what matters about what they say.” These com-
parative projects, which clearly share a great deal in common with transnational
historical approaches, also “help identify unexpected points of congruence and sim-
ilarities of discourse in seemingly disparate sites.”9
Transnational and comparative approaches to histories of sexuality in Asia can
be fruitfully evaluated from several perspectives. The paradigmatic scholarship on
transnational sexual history focuses on mixed, international, or interracial unions—
typically between Western men and Asian or mestizo women. The forms these unions
took range from legitimate monogamous marriage to temporary wifedom and pros-
titution. For understandable reasons, transnational histories of sexuality in Asia are
framed by Western imperialism, a fact that makes these studies obviously “trans-
national,” but also privileges the relationship between “West” and “East” over that
between distinct Asian polities and cultures. In addition, a plethora of studies reveal
how colonial encounters transformed “local” moral hierarchies. The imposition by
Asian and foreign rulers of imperial sexual mores and gender norms, including the
demand that male and female be clearly distinguished categories according to West-
ern sensibilities, rearranged and delegitimized local sexual and gender norms. The
process also reveals the intertwined nature of the relationship between imperial and
local sexualities.
4 Akira Iriye, “Transnational History,” Contemporary European History 13, no. 2 (2004): 213.
5 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C., 1999), 4.
6 Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, “Global Identities: Theorizing Transnational Studies of Sex-

uality,” GLQ 7, no. 4 (2001): 671.

7 Micol Seigal, “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical

History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 63–67; Grewal and Kaplan, “Global Identities,” 668–669.
8 Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History

(Durham, N.C., 2006).

9 Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History

and (Post) Colonial Studies,” ibid., 40; emphasis in the original.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009

 Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia 1311

Although local sexual mores varied immensely across the vast geographical re-
gion referred to as Asia, gender plays a more salient role in sexual eroticism than
it is typically accorded in modern histories of sexuality in Western Europe and North
America. As a consequence, scholarship on transnational sexuality that uses Western
imperialism as a framework or Michel Foucault as a theoretical point of departure
privileges sex and sexuality over gender in definitions of the erotic. An overemphasis
on heterosexuality and relations between Western men, typically, and Asian women
occludes other forms of eroticism and sexuality. It reveals how the primacy of gender
over sexuality in heterosexual and same-sex erotic relations has begun to shift only
in the past two decades, as studies of the appearance and reproduction of global
sexual identities in Asia, especially same-sex sexualities, have proliferated.
This historiography of the scholarship on sexualities in Asia takes two caveats into
account. First, since World War II, the study of Asia has fallen within the field of
“area studies” rather than exclusively within the purview of any single academic
discipline. Indeed, one could question the very premise of this AHR Forum, which
organizes the transnational historical study of sexuality on the basis of geographic
areas. Had it instead been based on specific religions, language groupings, erotic acts,
or another organizing typology, very different essays would have been produced.10
Second, language itself is as important to consider in this analysis of transnational
histories of sexuality in Asia as are the theoretical frameworks and the asymmetrical
exchanges that occurred under imperialism. The multiplicity of languages, cultures,
geographies, religions, empires, and, more recently, nation-states that constitute
“Asia” as a region are colossal. A summary of the scholarship in each Asian language
on the history of sexuality is impossible, of course, for any single person to provide,
so I have had to rely on monographs and articles written in English (and Thai, the
other language in which I conduct research). This inevitably shapes the contours of
the history of sexuality in each place in ways that we cannot literally see. When
possible, however, I have selected authors who utilized primary and secondary
sources in the local languages from the subregional areas known as East Asia, South
Asia, and Southeast Asia.11

10 As a result of the decision to organize this study of sexuality around geographic regions, my essay

is profoundly (and felicitously) interdisciplinary in terms of the kinds of scholarship and types of sources
I have utilized. I single out the scholarship that focuses on history rather than other fields, and I con-
centrate on studies that prioritize sexuality over gender, and the sub-, supra- and transnational rather
than the more numerous but strictly national studies of sexuality. As a consequence, the meaning of
sexuality in these studies shifts and morphs to include a variety of erotic acts, forms of intimacy, gender
practices, reproductive policies, prostitution, marital organization, family life, and sexual identities.
11 East Asia includes China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, Tibet, and Mongolia; South

Asia includes India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh; and Southeast Asia includes
Brunei, Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore,
Thailand, and Vietnam. I do not include the Pacific Islands, Hawaii, or diasporic communities that could
be considered part of “Asia.” The fact that East Timor has recently broken away from Indonesia to form
its own country reminds us that the boundaries of what constitutes the nations of Asia are shifting and
fluid, and this becomes more relevant as we move back in time. Not all of these areas receive equal
attention, which is a reflection of the materials available in English on the history of sexuality for each
place. The sheer diversity within “Asia” makes it impossible to adequately represent the various ways
in which the scholarship on sexuality is written in each place. Many areas had few or no historical analyses
of transnational sexuality, but had richly documented studies of acute contemporary issues such as traf-
ficking in women and children; commercial sex; women and development, sexual health, reproduction,
and contraception; and sex as a tool of violence.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009

1312 Tamara Loos

HISTORICAL STUDIES OF SPECIFICALLY transnational sexuality have converged on the

long imperial period, which begins in the 1500s in Asia and about which arguably
the first self-consciously transnational histories of sexuality were written. This schol-
arship examines with great nuance and specificity how the practices, norms, and
meanings of sexuality were recalibrated over time, particularly among the internally
differentiated subgroupings of ruler—typically elite or upwardly mobile European
men—and ruled—marginalized Europeans, indigenous groups, and mestizos or the
progeny of interracial unions. The category of imperialism might seem inapplicable
to Asia as a whole, given that major swaths of the region—Japan, Siam (Thailand),
and most of China, for example—were never directly colonized. Yet, if the schol-
arship on sexuality is any indication, colonization of the region by Europe and the
United States affected the economies, polities, and cultures of non-colonized Asia
as intensely as it did those of directly colonized areas.
Interracial sexual unions included arrangements that varied from prostitution,
barracks concubinage between lower-status European soldiers and local women, and
temporary wifedom to long-term monogamous marriages. Kenneth Ballhatchet pi-
oneered the early study of transnational histories of sexuality and empire with Race,
Sex and Class under the Raj, his 1980 examination of the regulation of white prestige
through the management of the Eurasian population and of prostitution as a sexual
outlet for lower-class European soldiers who could not financially support a wife and
family in British India.12 The tension between the fundamental concern on the part
of imperialists to maintain their power by continually and variously reasserting the
boundary between ruler and ruled, on the one hand, and the perceived need to allow
European men access to women in the colonies, on the other, runs throughout this
literature. Race and class were managed through the regulation of sex along gen-
dered lines.
These themes characterize studies on transnational sexuality that are now con-
sidered classics. Jean Gelman Taylor’s 1983 study of the mixed European-Asian so-
ciety in Batavia from the 1600s to the 1940s revealed that Dutch rule in the Neth-
erlands East Indies (Indonesia) was sustained for more than two hundred years
through marital alliances formed with local-born women.13 The Dutch East India
Company’s two-hundred-year near-ban on the immigration of European women ne-
cessitated the development of permanent family ties with local women for Dutch
officials, and less permanent, cheaper barracks-concubinage arrangements for Eu-
ropean soldiers.14 Stoler’s seminal 1989 article on colonial categories and boundaries
of rule examines the sexual relations between European colonialists, especially those
at the lower end of the class spectrum, and Asian subjects.15 In her broader oeuvre,
intimacy and sexual unions operate as vehicles through which colonial and national
state racisms were formulated and reproduced. They have formed the core of her

12 Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies, 1793–1905

(New York, 1980).

13 Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia (1983;

repr., Madison, Wis., 2001).

14 Hanneke Ming, “Barracks-Concubinage in the Indies, 1887–1920,” Indonesia 35 (April): 65–93;

Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley, Calif., 2002).
15 Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries

of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 1 (1989): 134 –161.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009

 Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia 1313

compelling transnational, comparative scholarship. Although Stoler did not set out
to define transnational history, many scholars understand her work as paradigmatic
of the growing subfield of transnational studies, especially as it relates to sexuality
and colonialism. She consistently juxtaposes the ideals and practices of European
metropolitan cultures with those in European and Eurasian communities in colonial
Southeast Asia (and elsewhere). Most famously, Stoler’s work on mixed racial
unions, Eurasian populations, and domestic arrangements in Europe’s Southeast
Asian colonies placed transnational studies of sexuality on the map because of her
extensive focus on sexual relations, which she calls, following Foucault, a dense trans-
fer point of power. Racial relations were managed and other inequities produced
through sexual relations and intimate ties between European colonizers and mem-
bers of the local populace. Following closely on the heels of this pioneering work,
transnational histories of sexuality within specific cultural regions and nation-states
in Asia began to appear in the late 1990s.16
Stoler and other early practitioners of transnational history found in Asia a fertile
site to illustrate their exhilarating new approaches to global sexual interconnect-
edness. With a few exceptions, transnational studies such as theirs typically (and for
logical reasons having to do with European and American imperialism) track the
influence, integration, imposition, and interaction of “Western” ideas, commodities,
peoples, and institutions with their counterparts in non-Western locales. Western
European and U.S. dominance ensured and facilitated the study of their various
effects on cultures around the globe. However, the treasonous case of Siam’s prince
suggests that at least one Asian monarch positioned his kingdom’s normative sexual
culture above that of China, once the regional hegemon, where the Qing emperor
is described as dabbling indiscriminately in sex with prostitutes and male performers.
The latter tended to be young male actors who played female roles in Beijing operas,
much like those in Prince Rakronnaret’s performance troupe.17 Although Siam’s
king deploys the Qing emperor’s sexual life as a negative example at this late date,
the Siamese ruling elite had looked to Chinese elite culture long before they turned
their gaze to London as a site of hegemonic cultural values, including sexual norms.
Comparisons between forms and discourses of sexuality in European communities
and those in their Asian colonies dominate the study of transnational sexuality, when
in fact intraregional “Asian” sexual liaisons were more ubiquitous, if less power-
laden, in practice.18 Perhaps for this reason, a history of intraregional “Asian” sex-
uality has yet to be written.
Because transnational studies of empire and sexuality necessarily include an in-
16 For examples, see Julia Clancy-Smith and Francis Gouda, eds., Domesticating the Empire: Race,

Gender, and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism (Charlottesville, N.C., 1998); Gary Leupp,
Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543–1900 (London, 2003); Philippa
Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York, 2003);
Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire (Cambridge, 2006).
17 Wu Cuncun, Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (London, 2004), 4, 6, 9, 160.
18 Some scholars have examined the impact on gender and sexuality in South Korea as a consequence

of Japan’s occupation, and others currently study the intra-regional marriage market, but the historical
component of intra-regional sexualities is rarely analyzed. See Tamara Loos, “A History of Sex and the
State in Southeast Asia: Class, Intimacy and Invisibility,” Citizenship Studies 12, no. 1 (February 2008):
27– 43. The issue of Citizenship Studies is devoted to present-day intra-Asian relations, international
marriage, and the state in Southeast and East Asia. For South Korea, see Elaine Kim and Chungmoo
Choi, eds., Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism (New York, 1998).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009

1314 Tamara Loos

tense focus on imperial or foreign powers, which often have left deeper and longer
paper trails than have local populations, these studies elucidate more about colonial
policies and the concerns of imperialists than they illuminate about local societies,
their internal distinctions, and their various moral regimes. Moreover, transnational
interactions are uneven in their geographic impact and chronological intensity. As
a consequence, studying sexuality as a transnational issue makes sense only when
global interaction dominates the history of sexuality in a given place; when trans-
national influences remain at the periphery, it may be more relevant to privilege the
analysis of local cultural, social, and historical processes. Stoler’s focus on interracial
unions and domestic arrangements in colonial enclaves places European colonial
moral ideals and practices under the microscope while forcefully linking both to
normative notions of political power. However, her work has less to say about various
“native” cultural and moral ideals, especially the more distant these communities are
from colonial enclaves. Her European archival sources similarly lead her to a critical
examination of the construction of whiteness through sexual practice, child-rearing,
sentiment, domestic arrangements, and notions of belonging. However, these studies
tell us little about, say, various Javanese or Vietnamese notions of sexuality or per-
spectives on interracial unions. Studies modeled on Stoler’s leave ample room for
other scholars to explore the impact of colonial hierarchies on local regimes of sex-
uality.
Perhaps because Stoler’s work is so influential, few scholars work on other kinds
of interracial and interethnic unions. For example, most historical scholarship ig-
nores the arguably far more numerous international intra-Asian liaisons between
local Southeast Asian women and Chinese or South Asian male laborers whose mi-
gration was encouraged by colonial regimes.19 These unions often remained under
the radar of the colonial state (and therefore scholars) because they did not threaten
to blur the lines between ruler and ruled. They are worthy of study as another his-
torical form of transnational sexuality that will move the analysis of colonial-era
power and race relations beyond a focus on Western colonial encounters in Asia.
Such studies require a different set of linguistic skills and a geographical focus that
homes in on intraregional, but no less transnational, relations. Although they will
not replace the scholarship on interracial unions formed under Western colonial
penumbras, they will develop and transform that scholarship to incorporate other
matrixes of gender, sexuality, race, and power. The scholarship about national and
subnational sexuality and gender within an explicitly global framework refocuses
attention on Asian sexualities.

MOST SCHOLARSHIP ON SEXUALITY in colonized and non-colonized Asia argues that the
impact of Western imperialism on sexual practices resulted in a reordering of gender
norms and a narrowing, delegitimization, and sometimes criminalization of what was
19 Loos, “A History of Sex and the State in Southeast Asia”; Chie Ikeya, “Gender, History and

Modernity: Representing Women in Twentieth Century Colonial Burma” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell Uni-
versity, 2006); Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan, “State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism,
Sexuality, and Race in Singapore,” in Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz, eds., Bewitching Women, Pious
Men (Berkeley, Calif., 1995), 195–215; Jiemin Bao, Marital Acts: Gender, Sexuality and Identity among
the Chinese Thai Diaspora (Honolulu, 2005).

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009

 Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia 1315

once a wide range of tolerated sexual practices. In this way, the implications of co-
lonial-era policies for local systems of gender and sexuality are important to consider
within the framework of transnational studies of sexuality. Much of this scholarship
treats as inextricable the relationship between transnational imperial sexual mores
and national sexualities. Without romanticizing the precolonial period, scholars of
India, China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia demonstrate, with varying degrees
of nuance, that the power asymmetries that favored Western imperial states also
authorized Western notions of proper sexuality and delegitimized local variations.
The strongest literature in this respect focuses on the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, when colonial regimes increased their administrative capacity to en-
force “civilized” sexual and gender norms through law, coercion, or moral pressure
backed by economic and political infrastructures.20 The polarization of gender roles
in the late-nineteenth-century “Victorian” era, the elevation of monogamous het-
erosexual marriage as the “civilized” conjugal standard, and the construction of a
heterosexual/homosexual binary emerged strongly in civilizational and sexological
discourses and served as weapons in the imperial arsenal. Scholars who focus on
heteronormative sexual relations demonstrate that among the myriad social shifts
that the imperial encounter wrought was a hierarchy of “marital” arrangements that
redefined the most legitimate sex as that which occurred within the monogamous
heterosexual conjugal family. Polygyny was not necessarily prohibited, but it was
denounced as a less civilized marital form alongside concubinage, child marriage,
and other “native” practices.21
Civilizational discourse and ubiquitous reports on the “status of women” in Asia
during the colonial period pathologized as backward and patriarchal many hetero-
sexual erotic and gender practices, including footbinding, widow immolation, and
polygyny. These discourses removed culture-bound practices from their local reli-
gious and historical context, reified Asian women as victims, and compelled imperial
governments to intervene to rescue women from such “traditions.”22 As a conse-
quence, the meanings of these practices were profoundly reevaluated. Polygyny, for
example, which once performed the political work of integrating polities, was re-
placed by administrative and political institutions of territorial rule and reinter-

20 Discussions of the impact of these new norms on women, sex, and gender in local culture are

strongest in India and Southeast Asia. See, for example, Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, eds., Re-
casting Women: Essays in Colonial History (New Delhi, 1989); Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-
Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (London, 1999); Patricia Uberoi, ed., Social Reform,
Sexuality and the State (New Delhi, 1996); Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Women and the Colonial State:
Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies, 1900–1942 (Amsterdam, 2000); Barbara An-
daya, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 2006);
Tamara Loos, Subject Siam: Family, Law, and Colonial Modernity in Thailand (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006); and
Peter Jackson, “Performative Genders, Perverse Desires: A Bio-History of Thailand’s Same-Sex and
Transgender Cultures,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 9 (August 2003),
http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue9/jackson.html.
21 Partha Chatterjee discusses the conflation of women and tradition in colonial India in The Nation

and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, N.J., 1993); but see also Samita Sen,
“Offences against Marriage: Negotiating Custom in Colonial Bengal,” in Janaka Nair and Mary E. John,
eds., A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India (London, 1998), 77–110; and Loos,
Subject Siam.
22 For examples, see Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley,

Calif., 2005); and Lata Mani, “Contentious Traditions: The Debate on SATI in Colonial India,” Cultural
Critique 7 (Fall 1987): 119–156.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009

1316 Tamara Loos

preted as a depraved and exclusively sexual institution.23 New sites of sexuality

emerged in factories, mills, and movie theaters, while older ones, including the elite
courtesan tradition in places such as Lucknow in South Asia and temporary mar-
riages in port cities, were collapsed into the category of “prostitution.”24 Moreover,
colonial-era Asia witnessed enormous growth in the numbers of prostitutes by the
early twentieth century in tandem with an increase in the regulatory policies and
moral discourses about prostitution.25 Similarly, same-sex attachments and other
sexual practices such as transgenderism that were once compatible with marriage and
procreation were reinterpreted as debauched, the cause of Asia’s weak global po-
sition, and the justification for colonization. In the nationalist literature by Hindus
in India, for example, they were even disavowed as Muslim.26 In China, public de-
bates about eugenics and non-normative heterosexual practices such as concubinage,
prostitution, and footbinding were causally linked to that country’s semicolonial sta-
tus.27
The recalibration of primarily “local” sexual hierarchies—that is, sexual mores
and practices that were not interracial or did not otherwise directly involve European
individuals—occurred nonetheless because of and within the framework of impe-
rialism in Asia. To the extent that authors elucidate the interaction between imperial
moral hegemony and national sexual norms, their scholarship is transnational. More-
over, the reinterpretation of sexual and gender practices that took place in colonized
23 Tony Day, “Ties That (Un)Bind: Families and States in Premodern Southeast Asia,” Journal of

Asian Studies 55, no. 2 (May 1996): 384 – 409; and Tamara Loos, “Sex in the Inner City: The Fidelity
between Sex and Politics in Siam,” Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 4 (November 2005): 881–909.
24 Nair and John, A Question of Silence ; Scot Barmé, Woman, Man, Bangkok: Love, Sex and Popular

Culture in Thailand (Lanham, Md., 2002); Veena Talwar Oldenburg, “Lifestyle as Resistance: The Case
of the Courtesans of Lucknow, India,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 259–287; Barbara
Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early Modern South-
east Asia,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 11–34.
25 For China, see Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Cen-

tury Shanghai (Berkeley, Calif., 1997). For Thailand, see Barmé, Woman, Man, Bangkok; Dararat Met-
tarikanond, “Kotmai sopheni ‘ti-thabian’ krangraek nai prathet thai” [The First Prostitution “Regis-
tration” Law in Thailand], Sinlapa-Wathanatham 5, no. 5 (March 1984): 6–19. For colonial Singapore
and British colonies generally, see James Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore,
1870–1940 (Singapore, 1993); Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics; Sumanta Banerjee, Dangerous
Outcast: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Bengal (New York, 1998). On imperial Japan, see Sheldon
Garon, “The World’s Oldest Debate? Prostitution and the State in Imperial Japan, 1900–1945,” Amer-
ican Historical Review 98, no. 3 (June 1993): 710–732; and Kim and Choi, Dangerous Women.
26 Gail Hershatter, “Sexing Modern China,” in Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Jonathan N. Lipman,

and Randall Stross, eds., Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 77–93;
Suparna Bhaskaran, Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects (New
York, 2004); Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in
Colonial India (New York, 2001); Rosemary George, Indrani Chatterjee, Gayatri Gopinath, C. M. Naim,
Geeta Patel, and Ruth Vanita, “Tracking ‘Same-Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia,”
Gender and History 14, no. 1 (2002): 7–30; Nair and John, A Question of Silence ; Scott Kugle, “Sultan
Mahmud’s Makeover: Colonial Homophobia and the Persian-Urdu Literary Tradition,” in Ruth Vanita,
ed., Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian Culture and Society (New York, 2002), 30– 46;
Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late
Nineteenth Century (New Delhi, 1997); Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, eds., Same-Sex Love in India:
Readings from Literature and History (New York, 2000); Jackson, “Performative Genders, Perverse De-
sires”; Michael Peletz, Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times (London, 2009).
27 Frank Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China: Medical Science and the Construction of Sexual

Identities in the Early Republican Period (Honolulu, 1995); Christina Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese
Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1995); Hershatter, “Sexing Modern China”; Hershatter, Dangerous Plea-
sures; Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters; Tze-Ian D. Sang, The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern
China (Chicago, 2003).

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 Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia 1317

Asia occurred in non-colonized Japan, China, and Thailand as well, suggesting that
the centralization of the state to avoid colonization was related to the standardiza-
tion of sexual practices and discourses. In China, for example, the state may not have
been robust enough to enforce a new regime of sexuality, but it and popular sources
produced a similar moral and increasingly scientific, eugenic discourse about sexual
practices.28 An influx of translations via Japan of Western sexological texts during
the May Fourth period in the early twentieth century “liberated” sexual pleasure
from the constraints of what it categorized as repressive patriarchal tradition at the
same time that it confined sexual pleasure to the conjugal family.29 By the late 1920s,
sexual pleasure had been re-stigmatized in new and powerful ways. In Japan, a new
paradigm of sexuality condemned as uncivilized all sexual acts—from adultery, pros-
titution, and same-sex erotics to premarital sex and masturbation—outside state-
sanctioned monogamous heterosexual marriage.30 The abundance of sexological ma-
terials and their literary offshoots written by Japanese authors in the early twentieth
century has enabled a rich density of scholarship about cross-sex sexuality, hermaph-
roditism, gender ambivalence, prostitution, lesbianism, masturbation, and male ho-
mosexuality.31 In both places, discourses favoring polarized gender roles and con-
fining legitimate sex to marriage dovetailed with Western-originated sexological
discourses introducing a strict homosexual-heterosexual binary that in many places
invented both heterosexuality and homosexuality as distinct, compartmentalized sex-
ualities. Transnational histories of sexuality trace ideas as they were translated across
cultural and national boundaries.
In all of Asia, women and sexuality served as a lightning rod for debates about
modernity and its flip side, backwardness—both of which were inventions of the
modern. Indigenous ideologues privileged certain local strains of morality over oth-
ers as they participated in this re-categorization of practices along the lines of mo-
dernity and tradition. Authors vary in the degree to which they attribute these seismic
shifts in evaluations of sexuality to European and U.S. imperialism. The politics of
interpreting the relationship between Western imperialism, gender ideologies, and
sexual discourses, on the one hand, and indigenous gender and sexual practices, on
the other, is fraught with postcolonial anxieties about power and agency. Jennifer
28 Dikötter, Sex, Culture and Modernity in China.
29 Ibid.; Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution; Bryna Goodman and Wendy Larson, eds.,
Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Lanham,
Md., 2005); Hershatter, “Sexing Modern China.”
30 Gregory Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600–1950

(Berkeley, Calif., 1999).

31 Teresa Algoso, “Thoughts on Hermaphroditism: Miyatake Gaikotsu and the Convergence of the

Sexes in Taisho៮ Japan,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 3 (August 2006): 555–573; Sabine Frühstück,
Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley, Calif., 2003); Frühstück, “Then
Science Took Over: Sex, Leisure and Medicine at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” in Sepp
Linhart and Sabine Frühstück, eds., The Culture of Japan as Seen through Its Leisure (Albany, N.Y., 1998),
59–79; Mark McLelland and Romit Dasgupta, eds., Genders, Transgenders and Sexualities in Japan (Lon-
don, 2005); Hitoshi Ishida, Mark McLelland, and Takanori Murakami, “The Origins of ‘Queer Studies’
in Postwar Japan,” ibid., 33– 48; Mark McLelland, Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age
(Lanham, Md., 2005); Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire ; Jennifer Robertson, “Biopower: Blood, Kin-
ship, and Eugenic Marriage,” in Robertson, ed., A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (Malden,
Mass., 2005), 329–354; Donald Roden, “Taisho៮ Culture and the Problem of Gender Ambivalence,” in
J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity: Japanese Intellectuals during the Interwar Years (Princeton,
N.J., 1990), 37–55; Michiko Suzuki, “Writing Same-Sex Love: Sexology and Literary Representation in
Yoshiya Nobuki’s Early Fiction,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 3 (August 2006): 575–599.

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1318 Tamara Loos

Robertson most astutely treats this problematic when she argues that “the West” was
and arguably is still invoked “as a discursive space for a range of adversarial cultural
and political critiques” by Japanese.32 To extrapolate to all of Asia, Asians of various
political stripes used “the West” as a rhetorical device and foil to critique and trans-
form local gender and sexual practices and policies.
This is no less true in postcolonial Asia, where discourses on Asian values and
national authenticity often blame (neo) imperialism for the existence of homosex-
uality, prostitution, and human trafficking.33 Given the existence of colonial troops
and later U.S. bases in parts of Asia, it is not surprising that much of the scholarship
deals with military prostitution on U.S. bases in South Korea, the Philippines, and
Thailand.34 Other studies focus on forms of prostitution that are more accurately
categorized under the rubric of “violence against women,” such as those that ex-
amine the rape camps filled with “comfort women” who were forced to “service”
Japanese soldiers during the Pacific War.35 Prostitution, sex crimes during war, and
international sexual unions are topics of enduring interest to historians of transna-
tional sexuality.

THE LION’S SHARE OF ATTENTION in transnational studies of sexuality has been focused
on international interracial heterosexual sexual unions and the restructuring of sex-
ual relations “locally” as a result of their appropriation within an imperial transna-
tional framework of understanding. The reliance on heterosexual definitions of sex
in these studies, however, opens them to critique for their implicit omission of non-
heterosexual unions, and also for their privileging of sex and genitalia over gender
in definitions of the erotic. The term “sexuality” as a category of comparative study
stems from scholars’ appreciation of volume 1 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality,
which spurred the growth of a subfield in Asian history that overlapped and arose
in tandem with women’s and gender history.36 Stoler, much of whose work relies on
a reworking of Foucault, is also deeply concerned with sexuality and the issue of
32 Jennifer Robertson, “Dying to Tell: Sexuality and Suicide in Imperial Japan,” Signs: Journal of

Women in Culture and Society 25, no. 1 (1999): 24.

33 Michael Peletz, Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton, N.J.,

2002); Peletz, Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics in Modern Asia (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2007), chap.
4.
34 Katherine Moon, “Prostitute Bodies and Gendered States in U.S.-Korea Relations,” in Kim and

Choi, Dangerous Women, 140–174; Moon, Sex among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations
(New York, 1997); Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International
Politics (Berkeley, Calif., 1990); Annette Hamilton, “Primal Dream: Masculinism, Sin and Salvation in
Thailand’s Sex Trade,” in Lenore Manderson and Margaret Jolly, eds., Sites of Desire, Economies of
Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (Chicago, 1997), 145–165; Leslie Jeffrey, Sex and Borders:
Gender, National Identity and Prostitution Policy in Thailand (Vancouver, B.C., 2002); Ryan Bishop and
Lillian Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (London, 1998); Thanh-
Dam Truong, Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in South-East Asia (London, 1990); and
Lisa Law, Sex Work in Southeast Asia: The Place of Desire in a Time of AIDS (London, 2000).
35 Hyunah Yang, “Re-membering the Korean Military Comfort Women: Nationalism, Sexuality, and

Silencing,” in Kim and Choi, Dangerous Women, 123–139.

36 Michel Foucault’s catalyzing effect is related to a major theme that runs throughout most of the

literature on the history of sexuality in Asia: the “West” and how it figures into studies of sexuality.
Utilizing Foucault or any other “foreign” framework to interpret local sexualities is a fraught subject
for scholars working on and in Asia. At their best, these debates expose Western hegemony and the
complexities of navigating it, but at their worst they fixate on the aporetic issue of authenticity. In any

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 Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia 1319

commensurability—what is deemed comparable or incommensurable by whom and

when—in transnational and comparative histories. “Incomparability compels for-
getting, just as comparison prescribes some lessons and effortlessly disavows oth-
ers.”37
A consideration of Asian histories compels us to turn this fierce critical gaze on
the term of comparison herein: “sexuality.” How has sexuality been defined histor-
ically, what normative assumptions are imbued in the term, and what can historians
say about the sexual life of the population, the majority of whom did not leave much
by way of evidence, particularly of the sort that reveals subjective experience? These
questions admittedly plague historians of most world areas, but they are especially
relevant to the areas where Stoler’s and Foucault’s work has been so influential.
Foucault’s History of Sexuality, based on French history specifically and Western Eu-
rope more generally, requires sagacious rethinking to accommodate places with dif-
ferent geographic, religious, political, and economic histories.38 Historical scholar-
ship about “sexuality” in Asia almost inevitably cites Foucault, often uncritically,
without questioning the degree to which his otherwise brilliant theoretical inter-
vention that separated sexual behavior from identity applied to places where gender
was the privileged marker of the erotic.39
Relatedly, Stoleresque transnational histories can be critiqued for their near-
exclusive focus on heterosexual relations that threatened the imperialist’s continued
rule because it literally reproduced a class of mixed-race children who transformed
the colony’s social geography. Michael Peletz, who praises Stoler’s work overall, has
trenchantly critiqued her for offering a reassessment of Foucault’s The History of
Sexuality in light of the colonial experience, yet curiously (given Foucault’s focus on
the invention of the “homosexual”) failing to treat same-sex sexuality. In Gender
Pluralism: Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times, Peletz argues that “colonial re-
gimes of gender and sexuality, their local counterparts, and the intertwining of co-
lonial and local genealogies were far more interesting, complex, and fraught with
ambivalence and contestation than Stoler suggests in the context of her privileging
of heterosexuality and her deafening silences on the subjects of same-sex erotics and
transgenderism.”40
According to Peletz, the sources prioritized by Stoler offer views that are “more
or less isomorphic with the ideological apparatuses underlying colonial governmen-
tality.” She does not rely on other sources that demonstrate the degree to which
European men engaged in same-sex erotics with Asian men (and with each other).41

case, most authors working explicitly on the history of sexuality (as opposed to women’s or gender
history) rely on Foucault consciously, critically, or sometimes only implicitly.
37 Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Stoler,

Haunted by Empire, 6.
38 Stoler addresses this in her Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and

the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, N.C., 1995).

39 But see Peter Jackson, “Thai Research on Male Homosexuality and Transgenderism and the Cul-

tural Limits of a Foucaultian Analysis,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 1 (July 1997): 52–85;
and Jackson, “Performative Genders, Perverse Desires.”
40 Peletz, Gender Pluralism, 115.
41 Ibid.; Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (New York, 2003); Rudi Bleys, The Geog-

raphy of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behavior outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination,
1750–1918 (New York, 1995).

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1320 Tamara Loos

Peletz cites numerous instances of these unions in colonial Southeast Asia and the
imperial deployment of stereotypes of Southeast Asian men as effeminate sodomites
to construct a racial hierarchy that in turn justified colonial intervention. Not only
were heterosexual interracial unions threatening to the boundaries of colonial rule
because of their potential to reproduce mixed-race progeny, but “intimacies with
same-sex bodies, whether fellow colonial or native, could also threaten the manhood
of white soldiers and colonial officials alike.”42
Perhaps the problem lies in the use of the term “sexuality,” which places blinders
on scholars searching for the erotic in Asia because it privileges “sex” and genitalia
over gender. However, studies of the erotic in Asian history reveal that gender
played, and arguably still plays, a more significant role in determining sexual morality
than the sex of participants. Emperor Daoguang and Prince Rakronnaret both in-
dulged in same-sex but hetero-gendered erotic acts (the prince was masculine, and
his male performers comported themselves and dressed as feminine). For much of
Asia’s history, particularly before the onset of modern state-building projects during
the late colonial period, these acts were considered normative so long as certain
hetero-gendered and age-related principles were followed. The erotic, in this case,
is not captured adequately in the term “sexuality” embedded in “heterosexuality”
and “homosexuality,” which privilege vaginal-penile and same-genitalia acts, respec-
tively, and obfuscate the hetero-gendered aspect of erotics. As a consequence, stud-
ies of transnational sexuality risk imposing modern Western definitions of “sexu-
ality” anachronistically onto cultures where hetero-gendered same-sex sexual
relations were considered unremarkable, if not normative.43
By contrast, transnational regional, national, and subnational historical studies
of sexuality in Asia reveal a remarkable regional consistency: gender was primary in
determining normative heterosexual and same-sex erotic relations. Forgoing a brief
account of these sexual histories would unwittingly downplay this characteristic of
the erotic and allow anachronistic Western-derived definitions of the sexual to dic-
tate the parameters of eroticism historically in Asia. Peletz’s transnational exami-
nation of gender pluralism, transgenderism, and sexuality in Southeast Asia since the
1400s reveals that differently gendered individuals (with the same anatomies) could
partner up—the degree of legitimacy given to such unions varied by context and
time—but same-gendered individuals could not legitimately do so; same-gender love
has been taboo both historically and today.44 In other words, individuals’ gender
rather than their genitalia determined their sexual object choice.45
Region-wide comparisons are still in their infancy. With a few exceptions, these
studies merely gesture toward transnational regional similarities while remaining
primarily national in their focus. What is clear, however, as a brief overview of na-
tional studies reveals, is the primacy of gender in definitions of same-sex erotics. The
scholarship is uneven in its geographic and chronological focus, but much of it is
richly documented, especially for China, South Asia, and Japan. In India and China,
42 Peletz, Gender Pluralism, 119.
43 For a critique of Western heterosexist bias in the term “sexuality,” see Deborah Elliston, “Erotic
Anthropology: ‘Ritualized Homosexuality’ in Melanesia and Beyond,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 4
(1995): 849.
44 Peletz, Gender Pluralism.
45 See also Jackson, “Performative Genders, Perverse Desires.”

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 Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia 1321

evidence of same-sex erotics exists as far back as 1500 and 1000 B.C.E., respectively.46
The bulk of these studies concentrate on male same-sex erotics, which reflects the
relatively abundant evidence of such relations compared to that for women.
Historically, male same-sex sexuality in Asia was not condemned so long as these
relations followed principles regulating social status and age-ranked relations in
which the male status superior was the older, active (masculine) sexual partner.47 In
Matthew Sommer’s study of law in Qing China (1644 –1911), for example, a male
penetrator’s masculinity remained intact if he penetrated a male of inferior status,
who then bore the brunt of social stigma as the feminized, passive partner.48 Rosalind
O’Hanlon suggests that masculinity and same-sex sexuality operated along similar
lines in Mughal North India prior to the nineteenth century, and Gregory Pflugfelder
reveals in minute detail how male-male sexuality in Tokugawa Japan (1600–1868)
was legally regulated to preserve hierarchal notions of loyalty, duty, and obligations
between samurai and their younger male adolescent servants or acolytes.49 Accord-
ing to Japan historian Gary Leupp, male-male sexual liaisons were a “highly con-
spicuous, central, institutionalized element of social life” that was “not merely com-
mon in Tokugawa society . . . but normative.”50 Significantly, male-male erotics were
not practiced to the exclusion of heterosexual relations, and in fact these men typ-
ically maintained heterosexual relations. Theater arts, court life, urbanism, high sta-
tus, and wealth provided seemingly endless opportunities for erotic relations to de-
velop between male patrons and male actors, pages, servants, female courtesans,
prostitutes, wives, consorts, and others.51
By contrast, very little historical evidence of female same-sex erotics exists prior
to the nineteenth century. The intense regulation of female sexuality, compulsion to
marry and reproduce, and restrictions on female education contributed to the si-

46 For India, see Rosalind O’Hanlon, “Manliness and Imperial Service in Mughal North India,”

Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 1 (1999): 47–93; Francesca Orsini, ed., Love
in South Asia: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 2006); Kumkum Roy, “Unravelling the Kamasutra,” in Nair
and John, A Question of Silence, 52–76; Vanita, Queering India; Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in
India; but see George et al., “Tracking ‘Same-Sex Love’ from Antiquity to the Present in South Asia”;
and Leonard Zwillig, “Homosexuality As Seen in Indian Buddhist Texts,” in José Ignacio Cabezón, ed.,
Buddhism, Sexuality, and Gender (Albany, N.Y., 1992), 203–214. For China, see Bret Hinsch, Passions
of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China (Berkeley, Calif., 1990), 27– 46; Matthew
Sommer, “Dangerous Males, Vulnerable Males, and Polluted Males: The Regulation of Masculinity in
Qing Dynasty Law,” in Susan Brownell and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, eds., Chinese Femininities/Chinese
Masculinities: A Reader (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 67–88; Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial
China (Stanford, Calif., 2000); Sommer, “The Penetrated Male in Late Imperial China: Judicial Con-
structions and Social Stigma,” Modern China 23, no. 2 (April 1997): 140–180; and Wu, Homoerotic
Sensibilities.
47 Katherine Butler Brown, “If Music Be the Food of Love: Masculinity and Eroticism in the Mughal

mehfil,” in Francesca Orsini, ed., Love in South Asia: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 2006), 61–83;
O’Hanlon, “Manliness and Imperial Service”; Leupp, Male Colors; Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire ;
Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve ; Sommer, “Dangerous Males”; Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society; Wu,
Homoerotic Sensibilities.
48 Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society; Sommer, “The Penetrated Male.”
49 O’Hanlon, “Manliness and Imperial Service”; Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire.
50 Leupp, Male Colors, 2–3; emphasis in original.
51 Hinsch, Passions of the Cut Sleeve ; R. H. Van Gulik, Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary

Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644 A.D. (1961; repr., Leiden, 2003); Wu,
Homoerotic Sensibilities; Leupp, Male Colors; Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire ; McLelland, Male Ho-
mosexuality; Watanabe and Iwata, The Love of the Samurai; Roy, “Unravelling the Kamasutra”; Tom
Boellstorff, “The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia,” GLQ 5, no. 4 (1999): 475–510.

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1322 Tamara Loos

lences around female sexuality, especially same-sex erotics.52 To the extent that ev-
idence exists of female same-sex sexuality, it too follows the hetero-gendered mod-
el.53 However, many authors refuse to collapse same-sex relationships into a
heterosexual model, arguing that the meanings of female same-sex erotics and re-
lations differ.
The study of hetero-gendered models of same-sex erotics is often conducted
within the framework of “globalization.” A great deal of ink has been spilled on
several major debates about globalization and sexuality in Asia. These debates,
which largely fall within the purview of anthropology rather than historical studies,
question the politics and economics behind the localization since the 1960s of West-
ern sexual identity categories such as “gay,” “queen,” “tomboy,” and “lesbian,” and
the degree to which their appropriation reveals global homogenization of sexuality
or the resurgence of authentic traditions in transnational disguise.54 Most scholars
provide a balanced interpretation of the productive tension between processes of
globalization and the histories and sociocultural specificities of particular places.
Similar debates rage over the oppressiveness or emancipatory potential of human
rights discourse as it applies to sexual identities; the compulsion of traditional sexual
norms—including “authentic” versions of same-sex sexuality—among queer Asians
in the diaspora; and the deployment of arguments about authenticity by conserva-
tives within Asia to stigmatize queer Asians as irredeemably Other.55 It has proven

52 Sang, The Emerging Lesbian, 52; Susan Mann, East Asia (China, Japan, Korea) (Washington, D.C.,

1999).
53 For examples, see Loos, “Sex in the Inner City”; Megan Sinnott, Toms and Dees: Transgender

Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand (Honolulu, 2004); Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn
Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya, Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia (New York,
2007); Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa, Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender
Practices across Cultures (New York, 1999); Peletz, Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics; and Jennifer
Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (Berkeley, Calif., 1998).
54 For Southeast Asia, see Jacob Aronson, “Homosex in Hanoi: Sex, the Public Sphere, and Public

Sex,” in William L. Leap, ed., Public Sex/Gay Space (New York, 1999), 203–222; Blackwood and Wier-
inga, Female Desires; Tom Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton,
N.J., 2005); Boellstorff, Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Durham, N.C.,
2007); Neil Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture: The Last Thirty Years (Quezon City, 1996); Peter Jackson,
“Kathoey ⬎⬍ Gay ⬎⬍ Man: The Historical Emergence of Gay Male Identity in Thailand,” in Mander-
son and Jolly, Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure, 166–190; Peter Jackson, “An Explosion of Thai
Identities: Global Queering and Re-Imagining Queer Theory,” Culture, Health and Sexuality 2, no. 4
(2000): 405– 424; Martin Manalansan, “In the Shadows of Stonewall,” in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd,
eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, N.C., 1997), 485–505; Michael Tan,
“Survival through Pluralism: Emerging Gay Communities in the Philippines,” in Gerard Sullivan and
Peter Jackson, eds., Gay and Lesbian Asia: Culture, Identity, Community (New York, 2001), 117–142. For
China, see Chou Wah-Shan, “Homosexuality and the Cultural Politics of Tongzhi in Chinese Societies,”
ibid., 27– 46. For Japan, see McLelland, Queer Japan. For South Korea, see Seo Dong-Jin, “Mapping
the Vicissitudes of Homosexual Identities in South Korea,” in Sullivan and Jackson, Gay and Lesbian
Asia, 65–80. And for India, see Bhaskaran, Made in India; and Nair and John, A Question of Silence.
55 For debates over globalized sexual identities, see, for example, Dennis Altman, Global Sex (Chi-

cago, 2001); Boellstorff, The Gay Archipelago and Coincidence of Desires; Jackson, “An Explosion of Thai
Identities”; and Mark Johnson, Beauty and Power: Transgendering and Cultural Transformation in the
Southern Philippines (Oxford, 1997). On rights, see, for example, Manalansan, “In the Shadows of Stone-
wall.” For debates regarding same-sex sexuality in the diaspora, see Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin
F. Manalansan IV, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism (New York,
2002); Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham,
N.C., 2005); and Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham,
N.C., 2003). For discourses of Westoxification, globalization, and cultural/national authenticity, see
Bhaskaran, Made in India; Geetanjali Misra and Rahdhika Chandiramani, eds., Sexuality, Gender and

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 Transnational Histories of Sexualities in Asia 1323

impossible to avoid discussing the transnationality of sexuality in contemporary stud-

ies of same-sex sexuality in most parts of Asia where “national” debates about “glob-
alization,” the “West,” and similar references to the foreign have been interpreted
by indigenous conservatives as the origin of “homosexuality.” Only the scholarship
on transgenderism in contemporary Asia avoids some of the polarizing debates about
origins, because it has a longer and relatively well-documented history in Southeast
Asia, India, and China, if one includes eunuchs.56
This recent anthropological scholarship on “new” transnational sexualities en-
courages historians to revisit the concept of sexuality as it manifested in and across
Asia. For example, historicizing diasporas would entail more than a rehashing of J. S.
Furnivall’s concept of plural societies in which colonial states subdivided colonized
populations according to their ethnicity in order to reap economic profits and to
prevent them from unifying against their minority rulers. It would explore not only
relations between those from the imperial metropole and their colonies in Asia, but
also the massive intra-Asian labor migration that occurred under colonial auspices.
A social history of these exchanges would invert the typical top-down view derived
from studies of colonial policies and shift the focus from miscegenation between
“whites” and members of the colonized populations to include that between local
and foreign Asians. A study of sexual subjectivities historically is another inviting
area of future research. This kind of study is particularly salient given that studies
of Asian sexuality borrow from Foucault without addressing the dissonance for Asia
of his deeply culturally embedded notions of the self, including the role of the con-
fessional in sexual subjectivity and the idea that an individual’s sexual behavior came
to reflect his or her innate self. How does this “translate” to places where notions
of the self and the relationship between sex and subjectivity follow different religious,
moral, and historical trajectories? Sex work, sentimentalities, contextualized trans-
lation studies, religion, and sexuality each could promisingly be researched from the
angle and with the methodologies of transnational history.57

Rights: Exploring Theory and Practice in South and Southeast Asia (New Delhi, 2005); and Peletz, Islamic
Modern.
56 Leonard Andaya, “The Bissu: Study of a Third Gender in Indonesia,” in Barbara Andaya, ed.,

Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 2000), 27– 46; Car-
olyn Brewer, Shamanism, Catholicism, and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 1521–1685 (Al-
dershot, 2004); Brewer, Holy Confrontation: Religion, Gender, and Sexuality in the Philippines, 1521–1685
(Manila, 2001); Brewer, “Baylan, Asog, Transvestism, and Sodomy: Gender, Sexuality and the Sacred
in Early Colonial Philippines,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 2 (May
1999), http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue2/carolyn2.html; Michael Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gen-
der Pluralism in Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 1 (February
2006): 309–340; Serena Nanda, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India (Belmont, Calif., 1999);
Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (Chicago, 2005); Zia Jaffrey,
The Invisibles: A Tale of the Eunuchs of India (New York, 1996); Mary Anderson, Hidden Power: The
Palace Eunuchs of Imperial China (Buffalo, N.Y., 1990); David Robinson, Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son
of Heaven: Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China (Honolulu, 2001); Shih-shan Henry
Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (New York, 1996).
57 Some have begun transnational or global histories in these fields. Kamala Kempadoo, “Women

of Color and the Global Sex Trade: Transnational Feminist Perspectives,” Meridians 1, no. 2 (2001):
28–51; Ann Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison of North American History
and (Post)Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (December 2003): 829–865; Lydia
Liu, Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, N.C., 1999); Liu,
Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stan-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009

1324 Tamara Loos

Transnational histories of sexuality hold out the promise of enriching history in

Asia because, unlike studies of economic and political interconnections, they detail
the intimate lives and experiences of people. As social history, transnational schol-
arship on sex and sexuality restores the texture, contradictions, ambiguities, and
ambivalences that characterized individuals and their contexts in the past no less so
than such complexities typify lived realities for people today.

ford, Calif., 1995); and Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Co-
lonial Context (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).

Tamara Loos is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University, where she

has taught since 1999. Her first book, Subject Siam: Family, Law and Colonial
Modernity in Thailand (Cornell University Press, 2006), was born out of her
interest in state legal interventions in gender, sexuality, and family during the
colonial era. In addition, a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard
supported her historical scholarship on female same-sex erotics and its potential
to disrupt Siam’s politics, which has been published in the Journal of Asian Stud-
ies. She is currently writing a social history of emotions and intimate violence
in Siam, and the life story of Dr. Krisana Kraisintu, a Thai woman fighting AIDS
and malaria in Africa.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 2009