JOHN  JAY  COLLEGE  OF  CRIMINAL  JUSTICE

Department of Sociology Colloquium

Department of Sociology Conference Room (3232N) Third floor, North Hall

April 29, 2014

1:40 - 2:40 pm (community hour)

Heidi Hoefinger’s new book analyzes the ways in which intimacy and commerce intersect in the everyday lives of “professional girlfriends” employed at tourist bars in Cambodia.

Join us as she explores a new theoretical framework for understand transactional sex and the ways in which gender, desire, and power and embedded in globalized and commodified relationships.

Heidi Hoefinger is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Development and Research Institutes in New York, an Adjunct in the Department of Anthropology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and an Adjunct Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Institute of South East Asian Affairs at Chiang Mai University, Thailand.

I'm excited to announce the latest issue of Studies in Gender and Sexuality which is a special edition focused on Cambodia, featuring papers by me, Melissa Ditmore, Joanna Busza, and Trude Jacobsen,with an introduction by Katie Gentile. The premise of the special issue was first born at symposium that I organized at Goldsmiths College, University of London in May 2010 titled "New Directions in Sex Research - Examples from Cambodia", where Melissa, Joanna and I presented papers on sex in Cambodia. That symposium was chaired by Professor Angela McRobbie.  Over dinner we discussed doing a special edition somewhere. 

Two years later, Melissa and I presented on a similar panel with Trude at the Cambodia Studies conference in 2012, called *Intimate Contexts*.  The panel rationale at that conference was as follows: 

Inter-personal connections, in which sexual activity forms a major component of the nature of the relationship, are by their nature private. The sanction of relationships such as marriage may be performed publicly, but the nuances of daily life often go unrecognized and ill-understood. Only through elite-authored legal texts and didactic codes can such relationships be evaluated in the distant past; rarely does the scholar find a human story upon which to base hypotheses of the lived experience. By contrast, ethnography permits a multiplicity of voices to be heard. The result is a series of conflicting notions of intimate contexts over time, as perceived by scholars whose biases may have prevented them from seeing the true nature of such relationships. This panel seeks to address this imbalance by presenting papers that reorient intimate contexts away from western traditional perspectives and speak to the Cambodian social milieu with its particular historical and cultural trajectories.

The papers in this new special edition of Studies in Gender and Sexuality range across debt bondage, commercial sexual transactions, professional girlfriends, and transnational partnerships. My paper is titled "Gendered Motivations, Sociocultural Constraints, and Psychobehavioral Consequences of Transnational Partnerships in Cambodia"  (50 free copies are available for download with this link. If that doesn't work, try this link).  The paper is about what motivates Cambodian hostess bar workers and western men to engage in relationships, and then what happens when cultural misunderstandings take place and expectations aren't met. Here's the abstract:

Global flows of people, information, and capital have created transnational spaces in Cambodia.Within those spaces exists the formation of complex and multilayered interpersonal relationships between people attempting to capitalize on the opportunities created by these flows. The purpose of this article is to describe these transnational relationships, namely, between young women employed in the entertainment sectors in Phnom Penh and their western male partners, while highlighting the racialized and gendered motivations of the global actors, the inevitable sociocultural conflicts/constraints/misunderstandings that arise within the partnerships, and the resulting challenges
and psychobehavioral consequences experienced by the mobile and differentiated individuals involved in these postcolonial relational formations.

I would love and thoughts or comments! 

This morning I received the following email from Paul van der Velde, the Secretary of the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS): 

It is my pleasure to inform you - it was already announced during the IBP 2013 Award Ceremony in Macao on 25 June 2013 - that you have won the IBP Reading Committee Ground-breaking Subject Matter Accolade in the Social Sciences for your Ph.D Negotiating Intimacy: Transactional Sex and Relationships Among Cambodian Professional Girlfriends (2010).

ICAS is the premier international gathering in the field of Asian Studies. Their International Book Prize (IBP) is a prestigious award granted for both books and dissertations written about Asia in the fields Humanities and Social Sciences. Out of 100 PhD dissertation submissions, mine was chosen for its Ground-breaking Subject Matter in the Social Sciences. My name was read aloud at the 2013 ICAS Award Ceremony in Macao on June 25, 2013. I received my PhD in Social Science and Media Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2010, under the supervision of Angela McRobbie.  It's nice to see it getting some recognition!