11 Quotes by Kimberly Kay Hoang

But the truth of Asian ascendancy or Western decline is not central to the argument of this book; instead, this book shows that importance of how people reimagine the global order through their desires to assert a superior masculinity and reconfigure hierarchies of race and nation.

Western men hear about girls who are sold and forced to sell their bodies, but no one here is forced to do anything. I come to the bar to work, …and if I want to have sex with a client, I have sex with him. If I don't, then I won't. No one forces me to do anything I don't want to do. [NGO workers} come here trying to give us condoms or save us, [but] how can they help me when I make more money than them?'—Vy, twenty-two-year-old hostess in Naughty Girls

Dealing in Desire takes seriously the labor of the women I studied. This book views women as, in the words of Caitrin Lynch, 'creative agents in their own lives, not simply as pieces in some global monopoly played by capitalists and state representatives.

But while women were able to capitalize on Vietnam's rapid development, it is important to situate their mobility as constrained within structures of patriarchy.

All these women were, however, careful to distinguish *sexual commerce*, in which women view sex work as skilled labor and their chosen occupation, from *sex trafficking*, described by governments, NGOs, and activists as forced sexual labor. Key to this distinction is a labor process that depends heavily on workers' consent and the establishment of trust in relation to both the clients and the madams/bar owners who regulate the workers' labor.

Within their distinct niche markets, sex workers employ competing technologies of embodiment that in turn reveal how desire reflects and constructs different national formations in the global imaginary.

In these spaces of leisure, powerful local elites, Viet Kieus from the diaspora, business executives, and marginal tourists enter into niche markets that never overlap. Instead, each niche market operates with a unique logic of desire that has important implications for how we think about that place of sex work in the global economy.

In fact, this is not a book about sex or sexual relations; rather, men's and women's participation in HCMC's sex industry involves much more than the purchase of sex.

Although the four niche markets rarely came into contact with one another, the very existence of these separate niche markets enabled the clients and workers in the them to construct competing masculinities and technologies of embodiment that simultaneously projected pan-Asian modernity, nostalgic cosmopolitanism, ad Third World dependency.