Papers by Kimberly Kay Hoang
Gender & Society, 2014
This article illustrates how the circulation of capital and culture in Asia produces divergent em... more This article illustrates how the circulation of capital and culture in Asia produces divergent embodied gendered ideals of national belonging through the case of Vietnam’s global sex industry. Introducing the concept of competing technologies of embodiment, I show how sex workers’ surgical and cosmetic bodily projects represent different perceptions of an emerging nation’s divergent trajectories in the global economy. In a high-end niche market that caters to local elite Vietnamese businessmen, sex workers project a new pan-Asian modernity highlighting emergent Asian ideals of beauty in a project of progress that signals the rise of Asia. Women who cater to Western men, in contrast, embody Third World dependency, portraying Vietnam as a poverty-stricken country in need of Western charity. By comparing multiple markets, I illustrate how individual agents in the developing world actively reimagine their nation’s place in the global economy through their embodied practices.
Gender & Society , 2020
Engaging with the work of C. Wright mills and eve Sedgwick, in this article i theorize how homoer... more Engaging with the work of C. Wright mills and eve Sedgwick, in this article i theorize how homoerotic relations facilitate the flow of global capital into risky market economies. Drawing on interview data with more than 60 financial professionals managing foreign investments in Vietnam, i examine the co-constitution of gender and global capital by identifying three categories of deal brokers. System maintainers are men and women who accept that women's bodies are necessary for male homosocial bonding between political and economic elites. System transformers are men and women who disrupt the status quo and develop alternative ways of deal brokering outside of erotic spaces. System defectors are those break the triangle altogether and work to create new markets.
How do investors enter and navigate markets where there is a general lack of access to informatio... more How do investors enter and navigate markets where there is a general lack of access to information and where the law is open to interpretation? Drawing on interview data with 100 research subjects in Vietnam's real estate market, this article makes contributions to the literatures of economic sociology and development. First, looking at a diverse set of local, regional, and global investors, I theorize how market actors pursue different strategies to manage risky investments based on their proximity to state officials. Investors' proximity depends on four processes: legal/regulatory, social ties, cultural matching, and stage of investment. Second, I highlight how multiple state-market relations can coexist within the same state. Investors' varying levels of proximity to government officials shape their relationship with the state as one of patronage (predatory), mutual destruction (mutual hostage), or transparency (developmental). Heterogeneous state-market relations help account for the persistence of foreign direct investment in markets that display both a great deal of corruption and a great deal of legality and transparency.
Dealing in Desire by Kimberly Kay Hoang Social Science
Social Science, Dealing in Desire, Feb 11, 2015
Contexts, 2013
Sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang explores sex work and international migration, how sex workers-tur... more Sociologist Kimberly Kay Hoang explores sex work and international migration, how sex workers-turned-wives become breadwinners.
Colonial Racial Capitalism
In Search of the Next El Dorado
Colonial Racial Capitalism
Sociological Theory
This article is an adaptation of the sixteenth Lewis A. Coser lecture, given virtually in 2021 fo... more This article is an adaptation of the sixteenth Lewis A. Coser lecture, given virtually in 2021 for the American Sociological Association Meetings. In this article, I pay tribute to Lewis and Rose Laub Coser by engaging with their past work, which inspired a theoretical provocation about what it means to theorize from the margins. I specifically address the questions of who gets to be a theorist and what kinds of theoretical work get marginalized. I outline the process of epistemic oppression involved in trying to publish marginal ideas in mainstream journals. I argue that the relationship between mainstream sociology and what I refer to as “marginal” requires a relational perspective that (1) situates both marginalized scholars and their scholarship in the broader discipline of sociology and (2) examines the epistemic oppression of their theories regardless of their sometimes-powerful institutional positioning in highly ranked departments or as leaders within various professional as...
Guest Editors' Introduction: Inter-Asian Capital Circulations, Cultural Transformations, and Methodological Positions
positions: asia critique, 2017
This issue, “Decentering ‘Globalized’ Asia,” highlights the work of rising scholars whose researc... more This issue, “Decentering ‘Globalized’ Asia,” highlights the work of rising scholars whose research provides new perspectives on the multidimensional transformations occurring in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Drawing inspiration from the Social Science Research Council’s 2008 call to take seriously interAsian connections, this issue crosses traditional area studies boundaries to create a new dialogue within Asian studies. The authors provide empirical evidence of crossborder exchanges that produce diverse forms of urban development, governance, modes of inclusion and exclusion, and social protest. The pieces shift Asia to the center of innovative scholarship on the changing geography of global culture, economy, and politics by describing how crossborder transformations play out at the regional, national, and local levels. Over the last two decades, Asian studies has worked to free itself from
6. Constructing Desirable Bodies
Dealing in Desire, 2019
New Economies of Sex and Intimacy in Vietnam
Author(s): Hoang, Kimberly Kay | Advisor(s): Ray, Raka | Abstract: Over the past two decades, sch... more Author(s): Hoang, Kimberly Kay | Advisor(s): Ray, Raka | Abstract: Over the past two decades, scholars have paid particular attention to the growth of global sex tourism, a trade marked by convergence between the global and local production and consumption of sexual services. In the increasingly global economy, the movement of people and capital around the world creates new segments of sex work, with diverse groups of consumers and providers. This dissertation examines the dialectical link between intimacy and political economy. I examine how changes in the global economy structure relations of intimacy between clients and sex workers; and how intimacy can be a vital form of currency that shapes economic and political relations. I trace new economies of sex and intimacy in Vietnam by moving from daily worlds of sex work in Ho Chi Minh City [HCMC] to incorporate a more structural and historical analysis. Drawing on 15 months of ethnography (2009-2010) working as a bartender and hoste...
1. Sex Work in HCMC, 1867–Present
Dealing in Desire, 2019
Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. By Kimberly Kay Hoang. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+229 $65.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper)
American Journal of Sociology, 2016
How to Do Ethnography Right
Contexts, 2016
Selected essays from the Contexts forum on ethnographic best practices explore the practice of et... more Selected essays from the Contexts forum on ethnographic best practices explore the practice of ethnographic “masking,” IRBs and legal counsel, and gaining access to vulnerable populations.
Journal of Asian American Studies, 2015
This article brings theories of immigrant entrepreneurship into conversation with a broader liter... more This article brings theories of immigrant entrepreneurship into conversation with a broader literature on Asian American racialization in the United States. Drawing on four months of ethnographic field research, I shed light on the micro-processes, routines, and everyday interactions in two Vietnamese-owned nail salons located outside of Vietnamese enclaves in majority black and Latino neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California. Introducing the triangular system of labor relationships concept, I highlight a system of racialized and class-based labor relationships among owners-workers-clients that were crucial to sustaining business relationships in majority-minority neighborhoods. • Journal of asian american studies • 18.2 In the past thirty years, a burgeoning literature on Chinese, Korean, and South Asian immigrants has cited entrepreneurship as a key mechanism for these groups' upward mobility. Like these other Asian immigrants, Vietnamese immigrants have incorporated themselves into the American economy through self-employment since the late 1970s. 3 Yet Vietnamese Americans are often omitted from this literature, missing the ways in which immigrant entrepreneurs engage in not only upward economic mobility but also complex processes of integration into U.S. society through interactions with multiple racial/ethnic and class groups. This article brings theories of immigrant entrepreneurship into conversation with a broader literature on Asian American racialization in the United States. 4 Drawing on four months of ethnographic field research, I shed light on the micro-processes, routines, and everyday interactions in two Vietnamese-owned nail salons located outside of Vietnamese enclaves in majority black and Latino neighborhoods in Northern and Southern California. These salons were a fruitful place to observe immigrant entrepreneurship and economic incorporation, interracial relationships, and new labor processes in service work. Previous scholarship describes the racialized relations that emerge when Asian immigrants come into contact with nonwhite Americans in urban spaces, with a special focus on Korean entrepreneurs in predominantly black neighborhoods. 5 This article turns to Vietnamese entrepreneurs in the enclave export sector to describe how race relations are intertwined with labor processes in immigrant businesses. In doing so I incorporate Claire Kim's concept of racial triangulation, which focuses primarily on race relations among immigrant entrepreneurs and their black and white patrons and Miliann Kang's concept of body labor, which looks at labor relations between workers and clients to develop the triangular system of labor relationships concept. 6 More specifically, the triangular system of labor relationships concept highlights three sets of interconnected interactions on the shop floor. Interactions between the owner and clients, the owner and workers, and the workers and clients form the three legs of a triangle. Together, these interactions constitute a system of racialized and class-based labor relationships that were necessary for the two salons I studied to sustain business relations in non-coethnic neighborhoods that catered primarily to black and Latino clients. The owners operated at the apex of the triangle, bridging workers and clients, because they spoke English and Vietnamese, had lived in the United States longer than the workers, and were more knowledgeable about how to operate a business that catered to multiethnic clients. The workers, most of whom did not speak English, relied on the owners to
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 2013
Scholars have produced a substantial body of literature on the lives of female sex workers in the... more Scholars have produced a substantial body of literature on the lives of female sex workers in the commercial sex industry in developed and developing countries around the world. This literature on heterosexual relations has focused overwhelmingly on the experiences of female sex workers, neglecting to examine the significance of male clients (Chapkis 1997;
Perverse Politics? Feminism, Anti-Imperialism, Multiplicity, 2016
Abstract Drawing on ethnographic field research on female sex workers and male clients in Ho Chi ... more Abstract Drawing on ethnographic field research on female sex workers and male clients in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s global sex industry, this paper complicates our understanding of human trafficking in two ways. First, introducing the term perverse humanitarianism, the paper extends work on carceral feminism by offering concrete examples of interagency commitments between NGOs and the police. Second, my ethnography reveals that women framed their relationships with male clients as mutually beneficial because the men provided them with alternate pathways to economic mobility outside of sex work. Drawing on the same tropes of victimhood employed by the NGOs, sex workers elicited sympathy from male clients that they leveraged into gifts of money. Using men’s charitable gifts, many women became small entrepreneurs who opened local businesses and empowered other sex workers far beyond what NGOs were able to provide.
Protagonist–Driven Urban Ethnography
City & Community, 2015
Sociologists credit the University of Chicago as the birthplace of urban ethnography and view Rob... more Sociologists credit the University of Chicago as the birthplace of urban ethnography and view Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess as the field’s foundational scholars. Park and Burgess urged their students to leave the musty stacks of the library to conduct first-hand observations; the ideal ethnographer was a “disinterested researcher who assembled subjective findings without distortion” (Park and Burgess 1925 [1967]). Since its founding, urban ethnography has been an immersive exploration of the local yet unfamiliar. The field has evolved to systematically document the connections between individuals and organizations (Vargas Forthcoming), institutions (Lara-Millán 2014), and the broader social, political, and economic context of the urban environment (Carlson 2015; Hoang 2015). In the 1980s and 1990s, a Bourdieusian tradition of reflexivity developed alongside “standpoint theory,” a distinctly feminist epistemology. Ethnographers in both schools of thought questioned the consequences of sensationalizing “other” places and people in their research. These epistemological frameworks questioned the taken-for-granted relationship between the researcher and research participants where only the researcher was a legitimate “agent of knowledge” (Harding 1988:3). Conceptually, they opened ground for new ways of knowing based on a deep understanding of actors’ “symbolic templates for [their] practical activities” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:7) and on the structural location of “situated knowledge” (Haraway 1988). These concepts became slippery when applied to urban ethnography. Broadly, scholars recognized a relationship between personal standpoint and academic research: The researcher’s position affects site selection, data analysis, presentation, and interpretation of findings. They responded to this relationship with calls for embodied commitments to the research project and for clarity and transparency regarding the researcher’s position in the field. Yet in practice, the turn toward embodied, transparent ethnography seemed to defeat the purposes of analyzing subaltern knowledge and of tapping into the deep understandings of scholars who occupy a similar marginal position to their research subjects. Instead, contemporary urban ethnography too often fuses objectivity and subjectivity into a kind of scholar-centered ethnography. In this popular form, scholars establish their legitimacy by
American Sociological Review, 2018
How do investors enter and navigate markets where there is a general lack of access to informatio... more How do investors enter and navigate markets where there is a general lack of access to information and where the law is open to interpretation? Drawing on interview data with 100 research subjects in Vietnam’s real estate market, this article makes contributions to the literatures of economic sociology and development. First, looking at a diverse set of local, regional, and global investors, I theorize how market actors pursue different strategies to manage risky investments based on their proximity to state officials. Investors’ proximity depends on four processes: legal/regulatory, social ties, cultural matching, and stage of investment. Second, I highlight how multiple state–market relations can coexist within the same state. Investors’ varying levels of proximity to government officials shape their relationship with the state as one of patronage (predatory), mutual destruction (mutual hostage), or transparency (developmental). Heterogeneous state–market relations help account fo...
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Papers by Kimberly Kay Hoang