This collection examines the shaping of local sexual cultures in the Asian Pacific region in order to move beyond definitions and understandings of sexuality that rely on Western assumptions. These diverse studies range across the Pacific Rim and encompass a variety of forms of social, cultural, and personal expression, examining sexuality through music, cinema, the media, shifts in popular rhetoric, comics and magazines, and historical studies.''A concrete presentation of very distinctive (homo)sexualities that derive from specific nonwestern histories. Using such varied methodologies as analysis of oral history, personal ads, linguistics, and literary and film criticism, this book semiotically deconstructs the articulation of contemporary sexual identities.''-Gary P. Leupp, author of Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543--1900
