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Book Review of Kimberly Hoang's Dealing In Desire

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314 Reviews
Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western
Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global
Sex Work, by Kimberly Kay Hoang.
Berkeley: University of California Press,
2015. 229 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 978052
0275577.
RONALD WEITZER
George Washington University
weitzer@gwu.edu
In Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, West-
ern Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global
Sex Work, Kimberly Hoang presents the
results from her examinations of gender
relations and sexual commerce in four types
of erotic bars in Ho Chi Minh City,
Vietnam—each of which caters, apparently
exclusively, to a certain kind of customer:
local elite businessmen, expatriate Vietnam-
ese men (Viet Kieu), western businessmen,
and western budget tourists. In stark contrast
to the oppression paradigm rooted in radical
feminist critiques of the sex industry—which
claims that exploitation and victimization are
the norm—Hoang’s findings fit squarely into
the alternative, empowerment paradigm. For
the most part, the women who work in these
erotic bars like their work, make good money,
engage in safe sex, and support each other.
They look forward to coming to work, so
much so that they hang out at the bars on
their days off just to socialize with the other
women.
‘‘All of the bars’’ were ‘‘drama-free’’ com-
munities (p. 118), with surprisingly little
competition among the sex workers. Novices
are taken under the wing by seasoned
workers and bar managers (‘‘mommies’’)
and socialized into the prevailing conduct
norms. The latter include drinking large
amounts of alcohol with patrons, wearing
revealing or expensive clothes, modifying
their bodies via dieting or surgery, performing
to bolster men’s egos, and leaving the bar with
men for paid sex. These job requirements do
not seem to bother the workers. None of the
women had been trafficked, and none were
ever forced to have sex with a client, because
the ‘‘mommies’’ abided by a strict consent-
based moral code and felt that coercion would
bring them ‘‘bad karma.’’ As other studies in
Asia have found, the sex workers viewed
Contemporary Sociology 46, 3
bar work as liberating and far preferable to
domestic work and factory work, with their
low pay, long hours, and poor working condi-
tions. The ‘‘mommies’’ maintained fairly col-
legial relationships with their workers and
served as role models for them.
Hoang’s discussion of both the sex
workers and the ‘‘mommies’’ is insightful,
but she is much more interested in the bar
customers, and especially their psyches.
Accounts of social interaction in the bars
are limited, and instead the focus is more
abstractly centered on masculinity. The core
research questions are: ‘‘(a) how had Viet-
nam’s economic volatility destabilized the
terms on which diverse men understood
their masculinity that hinged on local
women’s various performances of feminini-
ty, and (b) how did these transformations
provide male clients with the tools to claim
or reclaim masculine hegemony?’’ (p. 185).
It is presumed at the outset that economic
change disrupts masculinity and that
reclaiming masculinity ‘‘hinges on’’ the sex
workers: ‘‘Men’s desire for dominance over
other men is enacted through the consump-
tion of distinct types of sex workers in differ-
ent spaces. For male clients, sex workers are
products to be consumed in ways that enable
them to enact distinction’’ (p. 15). Some
readers may dislike the objectifying language
in these sentences, but the bigger problem is
that the research questions appear to have
predetermined the book’s core narrative.
While there is no doubt that many men derive
a masculinity boost from going to erotic bars,
the claim that they do this in Vietnam as
a way of challenging the masculinity of other
men or as an indirect response to changes in
the economy is dubious.
The bars fulfill different functions for the
respective clients: performances of mascu-
linity help to ‘‘affirm Western superiority’’
over Asia in the bars patronized by western
men and to ‘‘contest Western dominance’’
in the bars frequented by Vietnamese men
(p. 14). Western men ‘‘projected their status
anxieties onto women’s bodies, affirming
Western superiority’’ (p. 179), while Viet-
namese men used their bars to ‘‘construct
competing notions of an international hege-
monic masculinity that contests Western
superiority’’ (p. 15). The book contains

some quotations from the men to support
these arguments, but many fewer than
would be needed to sustain such bold claims.
The counterargument is more compelling:
men visit these bars primarily for erotic and
sexual purposes (which may or may not
enhance their own sense of masculinity),
but much less as a roundabout way of sym-
bolically dominating other men (for the Viet-
namese business elites) or compensating for
emotional or economic problems in their
home countries (for foreign men). In other
words, bar dynamics may fundamentally
revolve around men’s relationships with
women, not other men.
Indeed, there is little evidence in the book
that the men who visit these bars actually
felt a masculinity deficit (vis-à-vis other
men). The expatriate Viet Kieu men visited
a bar that excluded white men, which gave
some of them a feeling of superiority, but it
appears that the main reason they go to the
bars is because the sex workers treat them ‘‘bet-
ter’’ than their wives and girlfriends back home.
When several western men tell Hoang that the
reason they visit the bars is to drink and have
fun with attractive or ‘‘exotic’’ women, she
writes that these men are ‘‘mitigating their sense
of Western decline through practices of benevo-
lent Western patriarchy’’ (p. 58) or ‘‘to recuper-
ate a class-based masculinity in Vietnam that
they had lost in relation to Western men and
women at home’’ (p. 67). These desires may
be part of this equation, but they are rarely artic-
ulated by the men themselves.
The comparative analysis of different bars
and methodological triangulation (partici-
pant observation and interviews) are major
strengths of the book. But there are several
lingering methodological questions. Are the
four bars representative of bar types, or is
each bar the only bar of its kind in the city?
This selection/sampling issue is murky. Ver-
batim quotations from conversations appear
in the book. How were they recalled so pre-
cisely? In addition to these conversations,
a large number of formal interviews were
conducted: with 146 sex workers, 117 clients,
8 ‘‘mommies,’’ and 5 bar owners. Hoang
does not reveal whether respondents gave
informed consent or how the interviews
were recorded and analyzed. The large
samples lend themselves to at least some
Reviews 315
quantification: reporting frequencies would
nicely supplement and enhance our under-
standing of the qualitative material and
reveal how often specific attitudes or motives
were stated. (Hoang sometimes generalizes to
‘‘men’’ or ‘‘all men’’ per niche.) Differences
between the four bars are accented, but each
particular bar is presented monolithically.
Were there any notable longitudinal variations
within each bar during the 24 months of field
work, any ruptures of normal operations?
Readers learn more about Hoang’s own
activities outside the bars than inside them.
She frequently had meals and went on shop-
ping expeditions with bar clients and sex
workers and helped to translate for one of
the Vietnamese men as he brokered business
deals. She clearly became close to some of the
Vietnamese men (‘‘This is Ca Xanh’s girl,’’
one man tells another [p. 126]). Her activities
inside the bars are more opaque. She took the
roles of bartender or hostess in three of the
bars, consumed lots of alcohol, sang karaoke
songs, sat with men at their tables, and mod-
ified her body to fit in with the other host-
esses. But readers learn relatively little about
the kind and amount of interaction she had
with the sex workers and customers inside
the bars—de rigueur for ethnographic stud-
ies. Why Hoang felt ‘‘shame’’ working as
a hostess is not revealed, but perhaps
because ‘‘men touched me inappropriately’’
or because the role of a hostess meant par-
ticipating in ‘‘acts of female submission’’ to
male patrons, part of the etiquette of this
kind of work (pp. 189–190, 193).
Finally, the book is not well-grounded in
the relevant literature on sex workers or their
clients. She believes that ‘‘few ethnographers
tell a story of how women’s lives are trans-
formed through sex work’’ (p. 154). In fact,
many ethnographies, in Asia and elsewhere,
do precisely this, including those reviewed
in this journal (Weitzer 2010, 2013). Situating
the study within this rich literature would
have highlighted the ways in which it both
built on and extended previous research.
References
Weitzer, Ronald. 2010. ‘‘The Ethnography of Pros-
titution: New International Perspectives.’’ Con-
temporary Sociology 39:262–269.
Contemporary Sociology 46, 3
 316 Reviews
Weitzer, Ronald. 2013. ‘‘Researching Sex Work in
the Twenty-First Century.’’ Contemporary Soci-
ology 42:713–722.
Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism,
by Randolph Hohle. New York: Routledge,
2015. 256 pp. $148.00 cloth. ISBN: 97811388
32558.
KASEY HENRICKS
University of Illinois-Chicago
khenricks@abfn.org
How do we explain changes in American
capitalism during the latter half of the twen-
tieth century? The short answer: race. That is
the crux of what Randolph Hohle argues in
Race and the Origins of American Neoliberalism.
He identifies southern states as the fire from
which neoliberalism spread and racial
dynamics as the fuel that ignited it. Whereas
others (e.g., Babb 2001; Prasad 2006) trace
the origins of neoliberalism to national and
international economic crises of the 1970s,
Hohle offers a localized historical alternative
that probes the racialized struggles that
began in the 1950s in the American South.
What is missing from conventional genealo-
gies of neoliberalism, he argues, is an expla-
nation of why whites turned their backs on
a well-functioning welfare state that benefit-
ed them. Instead, they chose to pursue
a narrower agenda that centered on anti-tax
sentiment, business interests over labor inter-
ests, privatized economic development, and
general withdrawal from public institutions.
The racialization of neoliberal policy,
Hohle insists, was not automatic or inevita-
ble. It coalesced out of interest convergence
among white subgroups in the South. In par-
ticular, sectors of a liberal business class who
wanted to modernize the region’s agricultur-
al economy aligned with segregationists who
desired to retain political control and pre-
serve white privilege. The alliance repre-
sented a new coalition that transcended his-
torical class politics of the South, in which
agrarians, industrialists, and liberal busi-
nessmen were more or less pitted against
one another to support a new brand of Amer-
ican capitalism. Simply defined, neoliberal-
ism refers to a ‘‘political project designed to
Contemporary Sociology 46, 3
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create the conditions for capital accumula-
tion based on the upward distribution of
resources, and an ideological adherence to
meritocratic notions of individual success
and personal responsibility’’ (p. 1).
Hohle claims that those who advance neo-
liberalism do so in ways that consciously and
unconsciously tap into racialized political
meanings. These meanings fuse positive
associations of whiteness with the private
market economy and negative associations
of blackness with public works and social
services, or what is labeled ‘‘the white-pri-
vate/black-public binary.’’ Hohle contends
this binary represents a shifting tide of polit-
ical support among whites, who once sup-
ported an expansive welfare state but
opposed it once pushes toward racial democ-
racy were achieved (e.g., Brown v. Board of
Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the
Voting Rights Act of 1965). Among the
targets of black resistance to racial inequality
were integrated schools and neighborhoods,
access to better jobs, and a universal safety
net—all gains that would signify larger
social acceptance of minority groups.
Because whites associated themselves with
a bootstrapping ethos of prudence, industry,
and future investment and defined black-
ness in oppositional terms, Hohle argues
that they began to see welfare in blackface
and stigmatized public services in unprece-
dented ways (see also Quadagno 1994).
Whites retaliated by pursuing four interre-
lated but distinct policies that are definitive
of neoliberalism.
The four racialized policies include: 1) aus-
terity, 2), privatization, 3) deregulation, and
4) tax cuts. Austerity is embodied in terms
like ‘‘balanced budgets,’’ where borrowing
money and accumulating debt are consid-
ered fiscal sins—ones indicative of an out-
of-touch government seen as pandering to
minority interests. Privatization generally
refers to transforming publicly owned
subsidiaries into private ones, like when
state-funded school vouchers preserve seg-
regation through ‘‘free choice’’ initiatives.
Deregulation has to do with the reconfigura-
tion of laws so that one group benefits,
often at the expense of another. A recent
example includes the shift in mortgage lend-
ing from state-sanctioned racial exclusion