Urban Readers Series: Kimberly Hoang - "Dealing in Desire" - Michael D. Kennedy

The Urban Readers Series presents Kimberly Hoang in Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. She will be joined in conversation by Michael D. Kennedy.

At the Co-op

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About the book: This captivating ethnography explores Vietnam’s sex industry as the country ascends the global and regional stage. Over the course of five years, author Kimberly Kay Hoang worked at four exclusive Saigon hostess bars catering to diverse clientele: wealthy local Vietnamese and Asian businessmen, Viet Kieus (ethnic Vietnamese living abroad), Western businessmen, and Western budget-tourists. Dealing in Desire takes an in-depth and often personal look at both the sex workers and their clients to show how Vietnamese high finance and benevolent giving are connected to the intimate spheres of the informal economy. For the domestic super-elite who use the levers of political power to channel foreign capital into real estate and manufacturing projects, conspicuous consumption is a means of projecting an image of Asian ascendancy to potential investors. For Viet Kieus and Westerners who bring remittances into the local economy, personal relationships with local sex workers reinforce their ideas of Asia’s rise and Western decline, while simultaneously bolstering their diminished masculinity. Dealing in Desire illuminates Ho Chi Minh City’s sex industry as not just a microcosm of the global economy, but a critical space where dreams and deals are traded.

About the author: Kimberly Hoang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago.

She received her Ph.D. in 2011 from the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and in 2012 she won the American Sociological Association Best Dissertation Award.

Dr. Hoang is the author of, Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (2015) published by the University of California Press. This monograph examines the mutual construction of masculinities, financial deal-making, and transnational political-economic identities. Her ethnography takes an in-depth and often personal look at both sex workers and their clients to show how high finance and benevolent giving are intertwined with intimacy in Vietnam's informal economy. Dealing in Desire is the winner of six distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association, the National Women Studies Association, and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

With funding support from the Social Science Research Council and the Fulbright Global Scholar Award, she is currently conducting research for her second book project, Capital Brokers in Emerging Markets. This second book involves a comparative study of the articulation of inter-Asian flows of capital and foreign investment in Southeast Asia.

Her work has been published in Social Problems, Gender & Society, City & Community, Contexts, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her peer reviewed journal articles have won over 10 prizes from the Sociologists for Women in Society, Vietnam Scholars Group, and the American Sociological Association: Section on Global & Transnational Sociology, Section on Race, Gender and Class, Section on Sociology of Sex & Gender, Section on Sociology of Body and Embodiment, Section on Asia and Asian America, and the Section on Sexualities.

About the interlocutor: Michael D. Kennedy is professor of sociology and international and public affairs at Brown University. Throughout his career, Kennedy has addressed East European social movements, national identifications, and systemic change. For the last 15 years, he also has worked in the sociology of public knowledge, global transformations, and cultural politics, focusing most recently on social movements, universities, and solidarity. His book, Globalizing Knowledge: Intellectuals, Universities and Publics in Transformation addresses those themes with extensions found here. In the coming decade, he will also research projections of identity and transformations of human and social capacity.

Kennedy was the University of Michigan's first vice provost for international affairs in addition to being director of an institute and five centers and programs at UM; he also served as the Howard R. Swearer Director of Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies.  Kennedy concluded 9 years of service on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors at the Social Science Research Council in 2015.  He now chairs the Open Society Foundations' Higher Education Support Program Advisory Board, and serves on the International Academic Advisers Panel for the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University and the Governing Board of the European Humanities University.

About the series: In collaboration with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores, UChicago Urban has launched the Urban Readers Series, an author-centered series of readings and conversations at the Seminary Co-op.  At Urban Readers, people from all over Chicago can hear from the university’s scholars and connect with one another over urban issues, histories and futures.  All books in the series are written by UChicago’s faculty, alumni, and affiliates.