A Foreign Adventurer’s Paradise? Interracial Sexuality and Alien Sexual Capital in Reform Era Shanghai

Abstract

Since the early 1980s western men have been coming to China to work and live in coastal cities such as Shanghai, and many have become involved in sexual relationships with Chinese women. Using the framework of sexual capital and sexual fields, this article examines the changes in the sexual status of white western men in their relationships with Chinese women over the past 30 years. A historical perspective shows how the political economy of the interracial sexual field is conditioned by broader changes in the economic and social status of foreigners in China. Western men in China experience their foreign masculinity as both empowering and marginalizing, a kind of ‘alien sexual capital’ that is simultaneously exploitable but estranged. Chinese women find that they can invest in specific forms of sexual capital relevant to this field of interracial relationships, but also feel alienated from social and sexual relations with Chinese men. Despite some psychological stress, both for men and women, sexual capital produced in this interracial field is convertible to other forms of social and cultural capital relevant to life in the global city.