Tiantian Zheng Livres

The first study of itskind, Tongzhi Living offers insights into the community ofsame-sex-attracted men in northeast China and shows that their attempts topractice both conformity and rebellion paradoxically undercut the goals theyaspire to reach.

In China today, sex work cannot be untangled from the phenomenon of rural-urban migration, the entertainment industry, and state power. In Red Lights, Tiantian Zheng highlights the urban karaoke bar as the locus at which these three factors intersect and provides a rich account of the lives of karaoke hostesses—a career whose name disguises the sex work and minimizes the surprising influence these women often have as power brokers.Zheng embarked on two years of intensely embedded ethnographic fieldwork in her birthplace, Dalian, a large northeastern Chinese seaport of over six million people. During this time, Zheng lived and worked with a group of hostesses in a karaoke bar, facing many of the same dangers that they did and forming strong, intimate bonds with them. The result is an especially engaging, moving story of young, rural women struggling to find meaning, develop a modern and autonomous identity, and, ultimately, survive within an oppressively patriarchal state system.Moving from her case studies to broader theories of sex, gender, and power, Zheng connects a growth in capitalist entrepreneurialism to the emergence of an urban sex industry, brilliantly illuminating the ways in which hostesses, their clients, and the state are mutually created in postsocialist China.

This volume of Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's and Gender Studies launches its third printed edition. Wagadu the Soninke name of the Ghana Empire controlled the present-day Mali, Mauritania and Senegal and was famous for its prosperity and power from approximately 300-1076 CE. It constituted the bridge between North Africa, the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds and Sub-Saharan Africa. Ghana gave birth to the two most powerful West African Empires: Mali and Songhay. The modern country of Ghana (former British Gold Coast) derives its name from the Ghana Empire. Why Wagadu? Wagadu has come to be the symbol of the sacrifice women continue to make for a better world. Wagadu has become the metaphor for the role of women in the family, community, country, and planet. In this volume the authors grapple with the intersecting discourses on anti-trafficking, human rights, and social justice, edited by Tiantian Zheng, associate professor of anthropology at SUNY Cortland. Duna taka siro no yagare npale The world does not go without women. Tiantian Zheng is associate professor of Anthropology at SUNY Cortland and author of the forthcoming book _Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China_, by University of Minnesota Press, in 2009.

The book explores the detrimental effects of criminalization on sex workers' health, safety, and rights across China, Canada, and the U.S. It highlights how punitive legal frameworks foster isolation, mistrust of authorities, and hinder access to safe work and housing. Through ethnographic research, it reveals the harsh realities of police harassment and stigma, while also examining how sex workers navigate these challenges through strategies like arrest avoidance and mutual aid. Additionally, it addresses the ethical dilemmas faced by researchers in criminalized environments.