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2008, Dialectical Anthropology
2012 •
Commercial sex is a risky business and men who buy sex engage in a form of voluntary risky behaviour. Using Stephen Lyng’s notion of edgework, this qualitative study examines Hong Kong men who buy sex in Hong Kong/China and argues that these men’s engagement can be understood as a form of leisure edgework which balances risk and pleasure by negotiating the boundary between order and chaos. This article concludes that men buying sex can be seen as a form of resistance to normative companionate sexuality and the skills they exercise are key cultural principles needed in late-modern society. Edgework therefore plays an important role in modern intimacy, especially in shaping masculinity and men’s sexual scripts.
Fat sexuality is often stigmatised, where fat individuals are culturally viewed as asexual and incapable of arousing sexual desire unless it is fetishistic. This is in contrast to the thin privilege experienced by thin individuals where thin bodies are viewed as beautiful and desirable and thin sex as the norm. Upon closer scrutiny these domains present as being more similar than distinct. The fetishisation of one and the normativity of the other seem to be more a consequence of fat prejudice rather than being based on relevant criteria not related to body size.
In the West, and increasingly globally, individuals, particularly women, are fixated on weight loss, driven by the goal of achieving a culturally-desired, and aggressively marketed, "skinny" female physique. There are online forums where individuals refer to themselves or their eating disorders as "pro-ana" and "pro-mia". Individuals who post on these sites both align with, and challenge, what medical and mental health professionals define as serious mental health problems that result in severe, sometimes fatal, medical complications. This thesis specifically focuses on interactions with, and within, the proana/mia culture on the social media websites Tumblr and YouTube. Over sixteen months, and guided by a feminist postmodern perspective, I immersed myself within a "grounded virtual liquid ethnography" that draws on contemporary methodologies that are suitable for the transitory and destabilized characteristics of blurred online and offline interactions. Through embracing ethnographic sensibilities and being open to marginalized perspectives, I present analyses that are attentive to nuanced meanings produced by others. These critical, sociological analyses alternatively theorize the motivations behind responses to pro-ana/mia communities. Through challenging the dominant responses of the medical model and similar societal discourses that pathologize pro-ana/mia supporters, I uncover serious implications for the socio-cultural, economic, physical and mental health of women and their communities. My analyses do not place blame on pro-ana/mia individual women. Instead of supporting the eradication of proana/mia from online spaces, my findings support the importance of learning about how online environments develop and extend critical consciousness about eating-disordered ideologies, practices and solutions to these.
The 2016 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference
Animating the Handscroll: Edward Yang’s Unfinished Film The Wind2016 •
Ethnographers have long explored the challenges of gender dynamics in researcher–participant relationships, particularly in relation to attempts by female researchers to gain and maintain access to male research populations. However, little is known about these relationships in urban research settings characterized by crime and violence, where gender relations between young men and women are shaped by often extreme forms of social marginalization. Drawing on the field experiences of two female ethnographers who studied disadvantaged and criminalized groups of men in Germany and Canada, our article sheds light on how our experiences in our respective research sites were molded by the local contexts where our ethnographies took place. In particular, we analyze how the respective cultural meanings that the men subscribed to affected their perceptions of women, and how these perceptions ultimately shaped our interactions with our research groups, structured our gendered experiences, and presented quite different challenges for us as female " crime " ethnographers.
The 2017 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference
Translocality, Remediation, and the Vernacular: Teochew Opera Film in the 1950s and 1960s2017 •
"Quoting Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room on One’s Own”, Sarah Frantz and Katharina Rennhak, in chapter 1 of Women Constructing Men: Female Novelists and Their Male Characters 1750-200, remind us that “women do not write books about men”—at least, they are not supposed to. If they do, men’s bodies are rarely explored or depicted in any extensive way, maybe because, as Peter Brooks explains, “vision is a typically male prerogative, and its object of fascination the woman’s body, in a cultural model so persuasive that many novelists don’t reverse its vectors”. Southern women writers have dared to explore men’s bodies with women looking at, objectifying men’s bodies, making the latter visible and more than once, visibly lacking! Ellen Glasgow offers one such example in The Sheltered Life with the portrayal of General Archbald, a wounded/failing/aging patriarch or Mr. Birdsong, a young able-bodied seducer who figures as a self-defeated gentleman. Both appear as clearly exposed sites/sights of male anxiety. Margaret Mitchell explores similar issues of male visibility and female vision in Gone with the Wind and thus clearly complicates the workings of what Laura Mulvey sees as the patriarchal unconscious: “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, sexual pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly”. The treatment of manhood—as seen through women’s eyes—is a theme that, I believe, deserves further inquiry, for as many theorists have now identified, women representing and/or looking at men’s bodies are said to produce and proliferate instabilities thus providing a space for reconstitution of gender relations. According to Nghana Tamu Lewis, Mitchell and Glasgow both highlighted “without necessarily resolving, the problems created at the moment of defining what are and should be southern woman’s roles within and outside familiar structures” (167) . In exploring the theme of gender reversal that seemed to have fascinated both writers, this paper aims to investigate the extent to which Mitchell and Glasgow both produce new and innovative ways for understanding not only the Southern woman’s role as Lewis argues, but for theorizing gender, vision and corporeality and the Southern man’s role. What does it mean for Glasgow to look at men’s bodies? What does it mean for Mitchell? Here are some of the questions I would like to explore."
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Qualitative Research
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