I. Sex Work, continued

A. Third type of club: Overseas Vietnamese men who are nostalgic (Lavender Bar)

1. Prior to 2006, overseas Vietnamese had been most lavish spenders on sex work
2. Women deferential to reflect Asia's rise; perform traditional femininity to cater to clients' nostalgia
3. Western men largely denied access
4. Bottle service at $150-200 apiece
5. Men see themselves as treated better than in US

B. Elite Vietnamese clients trying to get Asian investment (Khong Sao)

1. Hostesses and workers project confidence to fuel direct investment and capitalist speculation
2. US$250 or more on bottles of Johnny Walker Blue Label
3. Conspicuous tipping to display status
4. Deferential behavior, including clinking glasses
5. Elaborate bill paying
6. "These dramatic performances within the bars alluded to men's economic performance in the new global economy; thus, masculinity is not always performed in relation to femininity. Rather, men also achieve their masculinity, albeit in gendered spaces, vis-a-vis other men through displays of wealth. Hostess bars provided Vietnamese men with the space necessary to engage in male rituals, constructing themselves as Vietnamese of a certain class who were succeeding in the midst of rapid economic restructuring and a turbulent global economy" (525).
7. Customers with less money might grab women, be embarrassed about inability to compete

C. New global financial order is created in clubs: "[T]he world of high finance and business is never divorced from intimate life. Transnational capital flows and intimate life are linked in a circle of performative displays of consumerist distinction, hypermasculinity, and stylized femininity. Men's participation in HCMC's sex industry involves much more than the purchase of sex. Men are purchasing status and dignity, and working to protect their precarious positions in the global order. As male clients and female sex workers interact, they reproduce hierarchies of desire and desirability outside macro-level institutions such as nation-states, from the bottom up through the relations between individuals in the mundane discourses and practices that construct new hierarchies in everyday life" (527).

 

II. Prostitution as Moral Barometer (Robert)

A. Prostitute = figure of moral panic
B. "The appeal to morality and the shaming of women at the forefront of the new commodification of economic and personal relations can be understood as a disavowal of new desires -- for money, power, and sex, but also perhaps for liberation from social norms and patriarchal gender roles" (54).

 

III. Surrogacy (Rudrappa)

A. Outsourcing of reproductive labor

1. Changing family patterns in Global North
2. Reproductive labor, such as ova provision or surrogacy, can be purchased in Asia

B. Sharmila Rudrappa: Surrogacy in India

1. US or Australian consumers of surrogacy services talk about their pregnancy
2. India legalized commercialized surrogacy in 2002, now leading provider
3. Two questions: What are commissioning parents' emotions and expectations--both voiced and felt--regarding surrogacy? And, how do these emotional orientations affect the surrogate mother and her intimate labors so central to making that embryo into a baby?" (282).

C. Clients' expectations shape labor of surrogacy: "...desires for normative nuclear families complete with genetically descended children; their anxieties about India when they have perhaps never traveled outside the United States; their expectations for caring concern; their desires sometimes unspoken, but expected to be fulfilled; their love for "their" babies--often still just fertilized eggs--all shape the work experiences of surrogate mothers who are pumped with hormones, sequestered in surrogacy dormitories away from their own families and children, and, almost always, cut open in caesarian surgeries in order for first world clients to achieve their own nuclear families replete with that priceless baby who nonetheless comes at a market price" (282).
D. Woman providing surrogacy labor becomes an invisible, mere receptacle
E. Labor is controlled by client
F. Clients' demands include hormone injections, transvaginal ultrasounds, and caesarian births; no drinking or smoking
G. Domestic clients have been priced out of the market
H. "Cross-border reproductive care" versus reproductive tourism
I. Erasure of surrogates' labor

1. Clients become "real" parents by negating gestational motherhood
2. Hierarchical differences of culture, race, class, geography are both obstacle and benefit to clients
3. Market guarantees clients' rights as parents
4. Market fosters emotional disconnect that benefits clients

J. Breastfeeding

1. Breast milk is desired
2. Manage breast milk production so that gestational mother can't claim maternity

K. Is the child a commodity?
L. Market language and logics enable client parents to establish love for the fetus by removing the gestational mother from the equation: "It is precisely because of such commodification of intimacy that love is possible" (300).

 

IV. Ova Donation (Deomampo)

A. Ova "donation" is a waged service
B. Commissioning parents as consumers making choices in context of little information, so they fill in their own ideas about race, kinship, and genetics
C. Desire for darker skinned or bi-racial children reflects essentialized notions of race and culture
D. India: race less common than community, caste, and religion as distinguishing category
E. Doctors cater to what they perceive as clients' racial preferences in a global order shaped by 500 years of imperialism
F. Ova providers recognized as genetic mothers, but not desired as gestational providers
G. "Exotic" beauty and crossing global borders, yet reflecting child's origins in India
H. Genetic inheritance can include skin color, race, culture, and religion
I. Notions of racial resemblance are an attempt to construct closeness in the absence of information; they essentialize genetic identity in terms of race, skin color, and culture

 

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