Sex by Richard Joseph Martin Dieter Haller

Author:Richard Joseph Martin,Dieter Haller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474294720
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

Performing the gaze: Turning on, switching, and flirting back

In the Seduction Zone, when someone reciprocates eye contact with you, the question “What do you do?” comes right after “What’s your name?” In instances such as this, my elementary description of what my anthropology is—“I study sexuality and gender”— frequently gets mistaken for a pick-up line. In Singapore, where Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields dominate the economy and education sectors, and people are not quite familiar with the discipline of “Anthropology,” participants frequently mistook me for a sex therapist and I was tasked to decipher their fantasies and fetishes.

On my third visit to the Seduction Zone, I got to know Nora when we were both seated at a corner of the club. Nora was a petite-framed femme Malay lesbian who was working as a paralegal secretary at that time. She had chatted me up in vernacular Malay (Bahasa Pasar) and I responded to her similarly. However, after learning that I was a graduate student based in the US, she lost the vernacular and code-switched to something that resembled an American accent. I was not quite prepared for what came next: she sat closer and leaned her body closer to mine and started stroking and caressing my lap.

“So … are you studying me right now?”

“What?” I laughed. I was piqued, as well as blushing, and hoped she had not noticed. “I’m off duty.”

“Well … how can I turn you on?”

I basked in the pleasure of Nora’s witty come on and back, both as a man and an anthropologist. For obvious reasons, it is hard to be “off-duty” especially when one’s fieldwork is in one’s own backyard. I did, however, enjoy being turned on.

Before the decolonization of knowledge production, anthropology’s ethnographic past has been marred by the tendency of its white anthropologists (mostly male) to exoticize peoples and cultures they consider different and faraway from “home.” Critiques of Malinowki’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967) contributed to a paradigm shift of the “ethnographic gaze.” Since the reflexive turn of the discipline, the ethnographic gaze has been criticized for its façade of presenting objectivity and factual truths when much of what the lone, emotionally-detached anthropologist understands about the “other” is largely about him. As anthropologists, our gaze lingers on objects, people, practices, and meanings that continue to fascinate us, but ethically, the subjects of our research may not have the same access, language and opportunity to speak back to us.

In erotic spaces and intimate encounters, flirting becomes a social tool to communicate one’s desire, worth, and gauge potential erotic equation. When skillfully employed, flirting is used to establish connection with a subject of desire in anticipation of mutual reciprocity of interest. Flirting is pleasure with high social stakes, marked by uncertainty through the element of anticipation. In my research, the analysis of flirtatious banter facilitated and enhanced my understanding of my own erotic subjectivity as a minority transman and anthropologist. How do I come across to people, and

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