Locating sexual politics and gendered lives: East Asian perspectives

This special issue brings together 11 articles on gendered lives in East Asia written by East Asian scholars. Despite recognition of this region’s economic ascendancy and increasing awareness of its significance in terms of global geopolitics, it is still treated as marginal to academic, including feminist, research in the West, of concern only to area specialists. In Western public consciousness, East Asia is still subject to an orientalizing gaze whereby its cultures and peoples are seen as exotically other, even as some of its cultural products are embraced and adopted by Westerners; such racialized ‘othering’ is gendered, often contradictory and rarely has much to do with the actuality of East Asian lives. The articles published here offer insights into everyday gendered and sexual practices in East Asia as well as negotiations with and struggles against gendered and sexual injustices – injustices hardly confined to this part of the world but which have particular local specificities. We include articles on and/or from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea as well as Singapore, which, while geographically in South-East Asia, is a Chinesemajority society. A quick glance at the issue’s contents will reveal that the majority of articles deal with mainland China. This is hardly surprising given the size of the country, its population and its university sector. Moreover, there is a need for a better understanding of China given its increasing regional and global influence. At a time when China is much in the news for largely negative reasons, these articles provide alternative narratives to the media focus on totalitarian governance, human rights abuses, aggressive ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy and, of course, the origins of the pandemic. They offer analyses of the everyday lives and aspirations of Chinese citizens, who are more often concerned with negotiating the challenges and opportunities they face in a rapidly changing society than with the limitations imposed by an authoritarian state – though they can be swiftly be made aware of the latter if they overstep certain boundaries (see, for example, Guo and Yin, this issue). The Chinese authors whose work is featured here engage in critical analysis of their society, but offer more nuanced and varied accounts than those available in international media, making interventions into cross-national academic conversations about both conformity with and resistance to normative gendered and sexual practices. China exists within a region that has a long history of social, cultural and economic connections between neighbouring countries and with more distant regions. This history has resulted in some commonalities across East Asia, but also significant differences in cultural legacies as well as in forms of governance and politics. Added to this are varied extra-regional influences, especially from the mid-19th Century onwards. Unlike South-East Asia and South Asia, however, East Asia was only partially colonized by European powers. British colonialism has left its mark on Singapore and Hong Kong and contributed to their distinct local identities and their self-promotion as global cosmopolitan cities. In the case of China, military defeats, unjust treaties and the imposition of foreign concessions (effectively colonial enclaves governed under extraterritoriality) are remembered in terms of the ‘century of humiliation’, which also included Japanese occupation in the 1930s and 1940s. Japan, having learnt from China’s misfortune, began a project of modernization and militarization in the late 19th Century while also seeking to preserve and sometimes (re)invent a distinctive cultural heritage (Vlastos, 1998). Japan’s gains in military might enabled it to colonize both Korea and Taiwan, as well as, later, to invade China and then, in JOURNAL OF GENDER STUDIES 2021, VOL. 30, NO. 5, 503–511 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2021.1930179