Heidi Hoefinger
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Book
  • Articles
  • Activism
  • Media
  • Events
  • Research

Hot off the Press!  "Gendered Motivations, Sociocultural Constraints and Psychobehavioral Consequences of Transnational Partnerships in Cambodia"

3/20/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
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! 







0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Heidi Hoefinger, PhD

    Thoughts, experiences, reviews.

    Picture
    photo courtesy of Cameron Hickey

    Archives

    October 2016
    July 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Abolitionism
    Anti-trafficking
    Asia
    Awards
    Bars
    Book Interviews
    Book Reviews
    Book Talk
    Cambodia
    Cambodian Americans
    Cambodian-Americans
    Cambodian Diaspora
    Cambo Western Relationships
    Cambo-western Relationships
    Cannabis
    Criminology
    Deportation
    Deported Refugees
    Drug Research
    Feminism
    Hysteria
    Khmer Exiled Americans
    Moral Panic
    Ndri
    Nyc
    Phd
    Professional Girlfriends
    Sea Globe Magazine
    Sex Work
    Social Science
    Somaly Mam
    Sssp
    Thinking Allowed Ethnography Award
    Transactional Sex
    Valentine's Day
    Voice Of America
    Youth Sexuality

Proudly powered by Weebly