Organizer: Laura J Bellows, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Chair: Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Discussant: Louisa Schein, Stanford University

Sale of pornographic media represents an estimated 52 billion dollar global industry, a phenomenon Asians are participating in both as producers and consumers. Academic discussion, now called porn studies, has attempted to engage the impact of this industry mainly in the US and Japan, focusing on content analyses that assume continuity between the location of porn’s production and its consumption. Despite the fact that sexually explicit media produced in the US and elsewhere has reached a circulation of unprecedented scale since the late 90s, almost no scholarly attention has been paid to the reception, interpretation, and use of porn across borders in Asia. In this panel we are interested in how the cross-cultural reception and interpretation of pornographic media evince the merging of issues surrounding the body, sexualities, and gender with questions of ethnicity, race, or nation. Wilson’s paper places pornography in the context of representations of extra-normal corporeality drawn from religion, the state, and popular culture in Thailand. Adamson’s paper investigates activists’ work in response to pornografi/pornoaksi legislation in Indonesia. Dell looks at the opposition of "pornographic" (foreign) versus "ordinary" sex in India. Bellows focuses on the physical transformation into "other people" Balinese suggest results from their incorporation of sexual "styles" (gaya) from foreign porn. Our principal aim in this collection of papers is to launch a border-crossing discussion that delves into local definitions of what may be considered pornography and how such ideas intersect with and implicate race, gender, sexualities, caste, or class, religion, and nation across Asia.

Ara Wilson, Ohio State University

Although the prominent sex industry in Thailand garners much attention, pornography is less noticed in either scholarly or popular discussions. This paper proposes an approach to sexual representations in Thailand that moves beyond associations with the large and well-known sex trade. It places pornography in a wide representational field of extra-normal corporeality, considering forms from religion, the state, and popular culture. One example is the orthodox Theravada Buddhist meditation practice (asubha kammatthana) of focusing on gruesome corporal images to comprehend the impermanence of the body (e.g., Klima 2002); other examples are images from government anti-AIDS or anti-smoking campaigns and tabloid photographs of accidents. Alongside porn, these genres are predicated on tacit understandings of the material effects of representations of the body. Viewing sexual representations in relation to this array of imagery shows how such tacit theories of representational effects are conjoined with capitalist, state, and cultural projects. The paper draws on long-term fieldwork in Bangkok, including work on the sex industry, and preliminary investigations of pornographic texts and images from the West and Asia and spanning heterosexual, gay, and "lesbian" subjects and consumers.

Heather Dell, University of Illinois at Springfield

In their struggle for power, colonial nations and the people they sought to colonize have leveled the charge of women’s impropriety or even sexual depravity against each other. Among the colonial powers of Europe in the nineteenth century, "normative sex" was seen as a measure of a nation’s strength. In European ideology, sexual propriety was one key index in measuring the moral superiority of nations, which could then be ranked in a hierarchy ranging from civilized to savage. In the colonial encounter, England ranked itself at the apex of civilized development, with India imagined far below. In contrast, Indian elite constructed a nationalist/colonial difference between the ideal middle-class Indian wife and the proletarian prostitute. They used the wife ideal to locate a domain of nationalist, class-based respectability that supposedly stood quite apart from colonial influence. In contrast, they constituted the prostitute as the ideal wife’s other: a sexualized, disreputable identity that symbolized the threat of colonization as well as a loss of elite standing. These icons of femininity embodied the imagined difference between the Indian home and the colonized world. Yet in postcolonial India the wife/prostitute opposition is being challenged due to the influx of pornographic videos/dvds into middle-class homes, which in turn is creating "new" sexual demands in ways that change the division of labor between wives and sex workers. Because these videos and practices depicted are sometimes called "English" sex, meaning oral or anal sex, they resurrect debates about what is Indian and what is foreign.

Clarissa Adamson, The Catholic University of America

The 1999-2004 Indonesian congress proposed new legislation that criminalizes pornography and pornoaksi (pornographic actions). Women and gender rights advocates quickly moved to criticize the legislation for its potential to harm women and children and restrict women’s rights. The continuing campaign against the "Pornografi dan Pornoaksi" legislation takes a sophisticated approach to pornography legislature that takes into consideration the broad ideological context of women’s rights and roles in society. For activists, the proposed legislation does not protect women and children against sexual violence, harassment or rape – issues that are classically tied to anti-pornography concerns. Instead, they argue that it reflects a developing trend to promulgate moral ideologies based on the control and constriction of women’s rights and freedom of expression. This presentation explores how activists engage the issues of expression, production and distribution of pornography in Indonesia. I also examine activist criticism of the characterizations of "pornoaksi" framed by the legislation in the broader ideological context of a political reform movement that activists fear may lead to new moral restrictions on women’s rights while superficially appearing to operate in their favor. Finally, this presentation engages how in the process of their opposition movement, Indonesian gender activists are developing their own location-specific critique of pornography and sexual violence which demonstrate the cultural and historical contingency of Western feminist approaches to similar topics.

Laura J Bellows, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This paper develops a notion of corporeal fungibility, a flexibility of bodies Balinese evoked in the context of foreign erotic and pornographic media that "came out" in unprecedented ways during the first years of the reform era that began in 1998 following the end of the Indonesian New Order government. Through an analysis of the shifting ways Balinese characterized the provenance of both contemporary Western pornographic media and historical indigenous erotic palm-leaf texts, this presentation investigates the transformative capacity of porno in terms of gaya, a term meaning "style." When applied to sexual acts, gaya indicate modes of sexuality associated with ethnic and racial others; gaya always come from elsewhere, pointing to the efficacy of mimesis to transform the subject. This paper shows that in the Balinese context, sexual practices that are culturally inflected and racially coded, such as Western pornographic videos, contain a transformative power that is not dependent upon direct sexual engagement with cultural and racial others, nor limited to fertile outcomes of unions. Neither the partners to, nor the products of, sex are racially other, but the sex itself; the very acts and practices adopted from media posited as express otherness and contain the possibility of becoming other people through the adoption of other sexual "styles" (gaya).