Sealing Cheng

My research is focused on sexuality with reference to sex work, human trafficking, women’s activism, and policy-making. From 1998 to 2000, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on Filipinas who worked as entertainers in U.S. military camptowns in South Korea. In the following decade, I traced some of their migratory trajectories across different continents and evaluated the impact of "anti-trafficking" discourses on their lives. My other research interests span a range of topics including HIV/AIDS campaigns and policies, The Vagina Monologues and transnational feminism, the politics of representation in anti-trafficking discourses, as well as pedagogical issues in women's and gender studies and Asian studies. My latest projects are the globalization of anti-trafficking policies and impacts on sex workers, as well as a photovoice project by sex workers in a Korean red-light district.

My courses are designed to generate a space for critically assessing the connection between the personal and the global, and for conceiving alternative ways of thinking and acting─about global feminism, migration, and gender, as well as love and intimacy. Courses emphasize the experiential dimensions of learning; students are partners in the co-production of knowledge. I facilitate students' participation in giving momentum and substance to a class, conveying the complexities of an issue, and exploring the ways to grapple with them. Due to my anthropological training, I like to start the process of learning from the margins in order to critically engage with the underlying assumptions and politics of the normative. For the students, I guess that makes it very difficult to just sit back, listen, and write notes in my classes!

I enjoy bridging the gap between academia, activism, and the arts, believing that these efforts could open up creative and productive possibilities. I have combined my research interest, feminist commitment, and passion for the theatre in researching, writing, and performing Stories of Our Little Sisters , a production inspired by but also critically engaged with Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. Recently, my Korean co-researchers and I ran a project enabling sex workers in a red-light district in Seoul to take photographs of their living and working space. This project produced the exhibition Our Lives, Our Space: Views of Women in a Red-light District that has appeared at New York University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. I taught at the Summer Institute on Sexuality, Culture, and Society at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands between 2004 and 2008. And in 2009 and 2010, I was one of the faculty members teaching at the Sexuality, Gender, and Rights Institute in Istanbul.

I also enjoy the theater, dance, and traveling. Taichi, yoga, and swimming are what help keep me sane.