Sexuality on the move: gay transnational mobility embedded on racialised desire for ‘white Asians’

Abstract

This paper offers a Bourdieusian field analysis to unpack the intersection among sexuality, place, and mobility through an ethnographic study of Taiwanese gay men’s trips to Bangkok. It unveils that how the societal cause of ‘Eastern orientation’— a racialised sexual desire for ‘white Asians’ among Thai gay men — and other material circumstances have transformed distinct scales of territory, including nation-states and gay establishments, into nuanced yet not thoroughly disparate sexual fields. Such nuances are closely associated with gay men’s intra-Asian mobility between Thailand and Taiwan that I elucidate through the concept of ‘sexuality on the move.’ This concept suggests that individuals’ geographical movements may diversify their sexual habitus as well as fluctuate their tiers of desirability and vice versa, delineating how different aspects of human sexuality are reshaping and reshaped during or after their embodied mobility. At the same time, their yearning for sexuality alterations also shapes the pattern of individuals’ trans-national and intra-urban movements. Moreover, the paper underscores that these alterations are not just objective reality but these gay men’s subjective belief which, along with their sexual desire, embodied practices and personal experiences composing a conceptual ‘circuit of sex and tourism’, attracting and captivating gay men to participate in and then be obsessed with this form of sexual/touristic practice.

Keywords:

• East Asia
• gay spaces
• geographies of sexuality
• sex tourism
• sexual capital
• sexual field theory

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan under grant 110-2420-H-002-003-MY3-D11010.

Notes on contributors

Yo-Hsin Yang

Yo-Hsin Yang is a human geographer investigating intersections between sexualities, places, and mobilities through the lens of different spatial scales. He has conducted his doctoral research focusing on Taiwanese gay men’s sex tourism to Bangkok. Now his post-doctoral project exploring interrelations between the sex industry and its neighborhoods in the urban context.