Dealing in Desire Quotes

“Can you go back to America and tell all your friends that I do NOT want to be rescued? All these Americans and Viet Kieus who come here thinking that they need to save us are so stupid. If you had to choose between working in a factory for twelve hours a day with bosses who don't let you rest and [who] look at you like they are raping you with their eyes, or working in a bar where you have a few drinks and sometimes spread you legs for a man, which would you choose? Why don't people go rescue factory workers? We are the ones who were not scared to leave factory work for sex work. We are smart hustlers [*nguoi chen lan*], not dumb, scared factory workers!
—Trinh, twenty-four-year-old hostess in Lavender”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Within their distinct niche markets, sex workers employ competing technologies of embodiment that in turn reveal how desire reflects and constructs different national formations in the global imaginary.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“But the truth of Asian ascendancy or Western decline is not central to the argument of this book; instead, this book shows that importance of how people reimagine the global order through their desires to assert a superior masculinity and reconfigure hierarchies of race and nation.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Although the four niche markets rarely came into contact with one another, the very existence of these separate niche markets enabled the clients and workers in the them to construct competing masculinities and technologies of embodiment that simultaneously projected pan-Asian modernity, nostalgic cosmopolitanism, ad Third World dependency.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“All these women were, however, careful to distinguish *sexual commerce*, in which women view sex work as skilled labor and their chosen occupation, from *sex trafficking*, described by governments, NGOs, and activists as forced sexual labor. Key to this distinction is a labor process that depends heavily on workers' consent and the establishment of trust in relation to both the clients and the madams/bar owners who regulate the workers' labor.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Western men hear about girls who are sold and forced to sell their bodies, but no one here is forced to do anything. I come to the bar to work, …and if I want to have sex with a client, I have sex with him. If I don't, then I won't. No one forces me to do anything I don't want to do. [NGO workers} come here trying to give us condoms or save us, [but] how can they help me when I make more money than them?'
—Vy, twenty-two-year-old hostess in Naughty Girls”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“In these spaces of leisure, powerful local elites, Viet Kieus from the diaspora, business executives, and marginal tourists enter into niche markets that never overlap. Instead, each niche market operates with a unique logic of desire that has important implications for how we think about that place of sex work in the global economy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Dealing in Desire takes seriously the labor of the women I studied. This book views women as, in the words of Caitrin Lynch, 'creative agents in their own lives, not simply as pieces in some global monopoly played by capitalists and state representatives.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“In fact, this is not a book about sex or sexual relations; rather, men's and women's participation in HCMC's sex industry involves much more than the purchase of sex.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“But while women were able to capitalize on Vietnam's rapid development, it is important to situate their mobility as constrained within structures of patriarchy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Therefore, while changes in the global economy structure relations of intimacy between clients and sex workers, intimacy also serves as a vital form of currency that shapes economic and political relations.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“The multiple niche markets in Vietnam's global sex industry offer insight into some of the larger macroeconomic shifts that reframe our understanding of the coproduction of gender and global capital.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Western men engaged in relationships with local sex workers to mitigate their sense of Western decline through practices of benevolent Western patriarchy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“The niche markets that catered to Western men were not about establishing relations of trust among men that would lead to business deals.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“The perceived decline of the West, coupled with the incompatible business practices, made it exceedingly difficult for Westerners to place competitive bids, particularly on land development projects that involved a great deal of risk and potential reward.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“they wanted Westerners to understand that Vietnam is redefining its place in the global economy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Business deals such as this one were not merely about making money. Local Vietnamese businessmen also used them to redefine Vietnam’s global economic position and its relationship to the West and East Asia. When Chu Xanh compared Vietnam to the economic powerhouse of China, he was asserting Vietnam’s rise as a strong nation in the new global economy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“The ritual of paying the bill and publicly tipping the women provided men like Chu Xanh with a symbolic vocabulary to critique the U.S. credit system and demonstrate Vietnam’s ability to mobilize liquid capital to make deals in an increasingly Asian-centered economy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“two simultaneous processes are at work in HCMC’s niche markets—a recuperation of Western power and a contestation of that very power by those with aspirations for Asian ascendancy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“However, I take this analysis one step further by illuminating a simultaneous process wherein local Vietnamese elites and Viet Kieus articulate their desire to imagine a new global order that no longer privileges a white, First World masculinity.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“masculinities are indeed mobilized to privilege an international hegemonic masculinity that affirms Western superiority.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“multiple hierarchies of masculinities.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“how the commodification of sexual labor can have multiple and varied effects as male clients and female sex workers negotiate their changing status—either by embracing the shifts in global capital flows that bolstered Asia’s ascendancy or by reproducing old regimes of global power that hinge on Western dominance.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“For businessmen tied to Asian financial capital, the sex industry allows men to broker deals by projecting confidence in the Vietnamese market. For Western men and overseas Viet Kieus, who are largely excluded from the segment of the sex industry linked to business transactions and FDI flows—since the vast majority of FDI into Vietnam comes primarily from Asia—the sex industry serves a different purpose, allowing men to displace their status anxieties onto women’s bodies.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“this book also examines how overseas Vietnamese men and Westerners simultaneously negotiate perceptions of Asia’s rise and Western decline while recuperating their failed masculinity and marriages through personal relationships with local sex workers.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“economy that was moving from central command to one that depended on” the brokering of relations between state officials, foreign investors, and private entrepreneurs.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“Entrepreneurial men used sex buying to establish personal ties facilitating their access to the means of production and exchange in an”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“the sex industry plays a vital role in establishing social contracts for state entrepreneurs with political capital to strike deals with private entrepreneurs and foreign investors.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“FDI is embodied in entrepreneurial relations that are largely male dominated and heavily influenced by existing practices established in China, Japan, and South Korea, where men rely heavily on the sex industry to facilitate informal social relations of trust as foreign investors embed themselves in the local economy.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work

“economic practices take place in a complicated web of social relationships, which change in degree and form over time.”
― Kimberly Kay Hoang, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work