Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Kindle
$16.99

Available instantly

Hardcover
$51.05

Paperback
$25.50

$25.50

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Thursday, May 9 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35. Order within 11 hrs 43 mins

Select delivery location

In Stock

$$25.50 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Ships from

Amazon.com

Ships from

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Sold by

Amazon.com

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

Returns

Eligible for Return, Refund or Replacement within 30 days of receipt

This item can be returned in its original condition for a full refund or replacement within 30 days of receipt.

Read full return policy

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

$3.51

Good - Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name - GOOD Standard-sized. Good - Bumped and creased book with tears to the extremities, but not affecting the text block, may have remainder mark or previous owner's name - GOOD Standard-sized. See less

$3.99 delivery May 13 - 17. Details

Or fastest delivery May 9 - 14. Details

Select delivery location

Only 2 left in stock - order soon.

$$25.50 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Enhancements you chose aren't available for this seller. Details

${cardName} not available for the seller you chose

${cardName} unavailable for quantities greater than ${maxQuantity}.

Ships from and sold by midtownscholarbookstore.

Other sellers on Amazon

New & Used (25) from $3.51 + $3.99 shipping

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

Tiantian Zheng

Follow

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China Paperback – March 23, 2009

by Tiantian Zheng (Author)

4.4 23 ratings

See all formats and editions

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$25.50","priceAmount":25.50,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"25","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"50","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"wX9cuq8Ir%2FDwYG8BDTkKgXdoIOv4ekvWmg4StAgR%2FhqdJuGe8HBRGr8UrcXJ1gYM5wrf2sADSCUB2Y56tfdqPmW1GYp7LRa34DkCLmeXvq3T9j3RCOCTv9Nfbdcfwl%2BFJdFVjMv4uFg%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$3.51","priceAmount":3.51,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"3","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"51","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"wX9cuq8Ir%2FDwYG8BDTkKgXdoIOv4ekvWQoSbsgkr5ThmFL162tUUnCk%2FCyeYNxPMS6z4za7DBynXRdPnQO86CWx20lPS%2FEyUfP%2FM4mlrmndSvJBiDHq21OLab1EnoGA6r04t%2FL9mEeTO6s7C%2B4xum8OkT%2BkTkjWopDyKpPkKJ0E%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

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.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Univ Of Minnesota Press
Publication date

March 23, 2009
Dimensions

6 x 1.6 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

9780816659036
ISBN-13

978-0816659036
See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tiantian Zheng is associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Cortland.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0816659036
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Univ Of Minnesota Press (March 23, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780816659036
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0816659036
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.6 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,084,368 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,506 in Medical Psychology of Sexuality
- #3,839 in Psychology & Counseling Books on Sexuality
- #5,871 in Chinese History (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 23 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Tiantian Zheng

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5

23 global ratings

2 star

0%

1 star

0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

InSu Whoo

They lied to men resercher but not to her

Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2013

Verified Purchase

Awesome. Sex workers always lie to male researchers which keeps the myths alive as fact. Ms. Zheng is the 1st Chinese female antrhopolgist in China. I'm unhappy that Ms. Zheng wrote about the well established facts were myths or facbrications as tools and techniques to make the work easier and to increase their tip, All those Chinese esperts must be furious that they had been scamed. And those furious clients, Chinese tricks are physically abusive to begin with. Hopefully, they're too busy being corrupt at work and play to read.

It's amazing how their social structure and interaction with each other is practically identical to USA on the street to upscale clubs.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

laurie

Wow.

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book is tremendous. It is a wonderful resource for researchers but also an amazing insight into human psychology. I recommend it to anyone interested in the effects of capitalism on vulnerable populations.

3 people found this helpful

Helpful

Hubert Shea

Karaoke bar hostesses as victims and agents of social and economic changes in China

Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2011

This book is an anthropological inquiry into a group of marginalized people in Northern China. These marginalized people are karaoke bar hostesses who have struggled to survive in an unfavorable institutional environment and dominant patriarchal social culture. The author adopts participant observation as a research instrument to collect in-depth data from three karaoke bars in Dalian. Research participants in this ethnographic study include a group of hostesses and their next of kin, clients (government officials and entrepreneurs), and karaoke bar owners so that a solid theoretical foundation can be built to understand sex workers in this booming economic city.

According to the author, hostesses are derivatives of state-clientelism and traditional patriarchal culture. Entrepreneurs rely on discretionary favoritism of government officials for permit procurement and resource allocation and accordingly karaoke bars become a common platform to corrupt interest-seeking behavior of government officials. More aggravating to tell is that entrepreneurs and government officials exploit hostesses to display their masculine power and sex consumption is considered the "embrace of a western-oriented model of modernity" (P.106). The essentialist view of subservience of woman to man in post-socialist China allows social status of hostesses to deteriorate.

Hostesses in Dalian have homogenous and heterogenous traits as compared with their western counterparts. They are homogenous in terms of conspicuous consumption practices and commodification of their bodies. Hostesses spent substantial amount of their income in body refashioning and ornamentation to "avoid tuqi (backward look), strive for yangqi (foreign style)" (P.186). Hostesses also take an economic view of their bodies by demanding quantified monetary gains for the sexual services they have engaged. They feign intimacy and romance with clients to obtain financial security (P.219) Hostesses in Dalian, however, demonstrate something heterogenous as compared with their western counterparts. First, the Confucian value of family patriarchalism and filiality is still ingrained in hostess' mind. Most of the hostesses under study have made significant contribution to economic well-being of their families (Chapter 5). Second, hostesses are migrant workers from rural villages but they have ambivalent and mercurial feelings about their hometowns. They do not view their hometowns as a permanent shelter due to lack of economic opportunities but working conditions in urban areas are violent, exploitative, and risky due to police's arbitrary power, widespread corruption, and chronic anti-pornography campaigns (P.65). Third, hostesses have a pure economic view to exploit resources (money and social networks) possessed by their clients but they never forgo their hope for a romantic and financially marriage while engaging with their clients.

The author has maintained that hostesses are either victims or agents of social and economic changes. They are victims because of the wide gap between the theory of socialist policy (against sex industry) and the practices of enforcement so that bar owners and government agents (polices and local government officials) continue to exercise their interest-seeking behavior and aggravate violent working conditions of hostesses. They are, however, agents because sex industry was reported to be an essential source of municipal government revenue in Dalian and hostesses take advantage of their client's resources to solidify their economic power and efface their inferior rural status. In this book, the author aptly applies different theories (i.e. game theory, economic-reductionist theory, theory of conspicuous consumption, theory of body economy) to demystify this marginalized social group and their "onstage" and "offstage" living repertoires. This book is a must read for those who are interested in understanding sex workers and the dynamic interaction of state-agent relationship in China.

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

brynnvisible

correction...

Reviewed in the United States on April 14, 2012

I have no idea why this book would be in the "Gay and Lesbian - History" section. None at all. Like the earlier review said, it's an anthropological case study. Sooo... Yeah...

One person found this helpful

Helpful