In his long career Dr Rapatahana has taught English as a foreign language (EFL) in countries in the Pacific, Southeast, East and West Asia, where he noticed that sexual exploitation was common practice by former colleagues. This prompted him in his retirement to write a book about this difficult and important topic, where he draws on a wide range of sources, from academic papers to media reports, and from blogs to organisations which report on sexual violence against children, to assemble a compelling case for the widespread occurrence of sexual predation in the EFL sector.

The conversation addresses his new book, Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation (Brill, 2024) which explores how teaching English overseas intersects with and enables widespread sexual exploitation.

Trigger warning: this interview discusses sexual exploitation and related content that listeners/readers may find distressing.

If you liked this episode, support us by subscribing to the Language on the Move Podcast on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

For more Language on the Move resources related to this topic, see The dark side of intercultural communication, Orientalism and tourism, The dark side of TESOL and Child pornography and English language learning.

Transcript

Hanna: Welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Hanna Torsh, and I ‘m a lecturer in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University. My guest today is Dr. Vaughn Rapatahana, Te Ātiawa. Dr. Rapatahana is an author, poet, and editor who commutes between homes in Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Aotearoa, New Zealand. He is widely published across several genres in both his main languages, te reo Māori and English, and his work has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia, Italian, French, Mandarin, Romanian, and Spanish. He earned a PhD from the University of Auckland, and is a co-editor of two books, one called English Language as Hydra, and the other called Why English? Confronting the Hydra, published by Multilingual Matters in 2012 and 2016.

Today, we are going to talk about his new monograph, which was published in December 2024, entitled, Sexual Predation and TEFL: The teaching of English as a Foreign Language Enables Sexual Predation, published by Brill.

Welcome to the show, Vaughan!

Vaughan Rapatahana: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Hanna: I’d like to start by asking you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and how you got interested in the topic of your book.

Vaughan: I first started teaching English overseas, I put teaching in quotation marks, because I’m not sure if it’s actually teaching which we’ll talk about later, in the Republic of Nauru in 1979, so I’ve been doing that on and off over the years, ever since, until I retired completely from working in 2019 because I ‘m an old man now. But I’ve taught English overseas which I would equate to teaching English as a foreign language in many overseas locales, including the Middle East, Brunei, Jerusalem, Xi’an in China, Hong Kong, Philippines, where have I missed? Probably other places. And of course, in Aotearoa itself, because as you pointed out my first language is te reo Māori, so I’ve taught English as a second language in schools, Kaupapa, where Māori is the first language, so that’s here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I’ve always been interested in this topic.

Because I have met up with people who are sexual predators during my sojourn overseas. I’ve read lots of news reports, and I guess, like the proverbial rolling stone, the more I read and experience, the more I became interested, and wrote about it, and researched about it, and collated notes, and added to them all the time. It got to the stage I wanted to write a book about it, which I managed to do successfully.

Hanna Torsh: For those who haven’t read the book, one of the things you do at the beginning is you define some of these key terms. So, how do we define sexual predation, and then how do we define TEFL?

Vaughan: I’ve defined them in the book more widely than people probably accept them. Sexual predation, as I’ve noted here, is a control or power-based, exploitative, predatory, abusive form of behaviour, deliberate, often pre-planned. It’s all too often, sadly, by males. whether they be teachers or members of the public in countries where students have gone to learn the subject, or to learn English. It includes all forms of sexual harassment, so I’ve equated harassment and predation together. Doesn’t necessarily have to be physical, can be verbal, can be just the gaze. the sexualized gaze. So that’s sexual predation. And it’s generally male preying on female, whether they’re students, fellow teachers. socio-economically deprived women in countries where male teachers have gone to teach the language. And LGBTQ teachers and students as well are often other victims. So that’s predation. TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

But it’s not merely teachers, male or female, going overseas, to teach English. or students from countries where English is not a first language going to countries where it is, it’s also not just in schools, it’s in tuition centres, it’s, in aid programs, like Peace Corps, and volunteerism, the whole industry of volunteerism, which are advertised, especially online, where young people especially go overseas. sort of like a white saviour complex to go over and help the poor local indigenous person learn English. They think they need it, they think they need to do it, they think they are the white saviour. It’s in orphanages, orphanages, so there’s a big, huge orphanage tourism aspect. to things like the Peace Corps. Also, what Haley Stanton so cogently has written about recently, TEFL tourism, where people go overseas to teach English, but at the same time have a fun time in places like Thailand, going to the beach partying. dropping drugs, having indiscriminate sex. So, TEFL is much wider than just one person going to another country in a school. It’s huge, in volunteerism, TEFL tourism, orphanage tourism, Peace Corps, teaching English, or trying to teach English, or pretending to teach English, often by totally unqualified people. who only are there because they can speak English, is also TEFL.

Hanna: I think that’s really valuable, that definition, because it reminds us that we’re not just talking about classrooms and teachers and students, we’re talking about a whole industry and all the associated practices, many of which, as you say, take place in spaces that are less formal, that are less regulated, and often are associated with cultural practices that are nothing to do with teaching and learning. And how do you think that the way you’ve examined it is different from the kinds of stereotypes and common beliefs that people might have about this issue?

Vaughan: Because I think, as I’m trying to point out, it’s a much wider issue than dirty old men going overseas, traveling child sex offenders deliberately saying they’re going to teach English so they can go and pray on children. That is many people ‘s perception of sexual predation and TEFL. And it’s a key one, and it’s a very sad, unfortunate one, and it’s statistically not stopping, and there’s so many news reports about such people. The preferential sex offender, but it’s also all the other areas I ‘m talking about, it’s the TEFL tourists going overseas and smoking dope, and going to a brothel, and engaging in underage sex with the local prostitutes. That’s just one example of sexual predation in TEFL.

So, it’s much wider than the dirty old men. It includes, as I said before, often Asian girls, teenagers, young women, going overseas, thinking they need to learn English, and being molested or raped or in severe cases, murdered by males in the local population. It also includes what I call Charisma Man, that’s NET ‘s (native-speaking English teachers) who’ve got this  wonderful aura about them because they’re  in another country, and they ‘ve suddenly become charisma men, getting accolades from the local populace women and girls they wouldn’t get in their own countries, and taking advantage of it, and sort of boasting about their accolades and their sexual prowess in those new countries. So, these are just some of the things sexual predation and TEFL involve. It’s a much wider, much more complicated, with many aspects to it, and that’s why the book is so thick, well over 400 pages, because there’s so much in it.

Hanna: And unfortunately, we’re only able to talk about a few of those issues today, but I hope that readers do go and engage with the much wider scope that you’ve explored in your very thorough book. One of the things that struck me while reading your book is that this is an important conversation to be having, but this is one of the few publications that I’ve certainly, in my career in applied linguistics and TESOL, ever come across, so it’s a very under-researched context. And the second point is it draws an important connection between the kinds of, exploitation that you’re talking about. and this phenomenon that many of our audience might know, called linguistic imperialism. Could you expand on those two aspects for the audience? So, the first one is, you know, why is this one of the few books I ‘m seeing on this topic? And the second one is, what is this connection between sexual predation and linguistic imperialism?

Vaughan: There’s a blind spot, especially amongst practitioners of the tongue. That’s English as first language speakers and writers and authors and teachers. They don’t want to hear about this sort of aspect, sexual predation, in their industry. They want to go overseas and earn big money and have a good time, or have a stable career, because they’re not all TEFL tourists, of course. Many are stable, middle-class individuals who are having lucrative overseas careers. The last thing they want to hear about is, bad guys in their profession. And the legal aspects, publishers are wary as well, they don’t want to get too involved, especially if names are concerned, or news reports. There’s a certain amount of embarrassment, but mainly I think it’s just pushing it under the table, ignorance, and denial.

As NET myself in some of those countries, or all those countries I mentioned, I often used to write to the South China Morning Post when I lived in Hong Kong, and still return there all the time, saying, why have you got these NET teachers in your country earning such huge money with huge, gratuities and airfares every two years. What are they actually doing? Do the local population really need English? Of course, my answer was always no. Those letters were published in the South China Morning Post, and of course a huge barrage of letters coming in from other native English-speaking teachers who are then saying, of course we’re needed here, and of course the Hong Kong Chinese need to learn English. So, there’s that denial and defiance and sweeping under the table. But I know what I was talking about, because my family is Hong Kong Chinese. They can speak English; their first language is Cantonese. They had no need for native-speaking English teachers in their schools, absolutely no need at such huge expense. So, there’s the first part of the question. That’s why there’s very little written about it. It’s about time there was, and this is the book which I ‘m very proud of, because I think it’s my most important work, and I’ve written well over 50 books. This is my key one.

Hanna: Over 50 books, and this is the most important one. So, there’s a real vested interest there in people not exploring and uncovering these practices?

Vaughan: And the employing countries who think they need to have English to become wonderful countries turn a blind eye as well, because they think they need to have English, so they don’t have good hiring practices. This is a huge generalization. There are so many loopholes. People can get rehired, a traveling child sex offender who ‘s teaching English can go from one country to another, and there’s no overall global mechanism to even know that they’re moving from one country to another. So, the actual employing countries are just as bad as the employer countries. There’re so many loopholes involved. One example about such sinister predators, the preferential sex offenders, they can change their names, get new passports, and travel overseas again and escape the sexual offender registers in their own countries, like the UK, which is still ineffective in that area.

It’s an exploitative industry, summarized by my other two books published by Multilingual Matters, The [English] Hydra, this huge mechanism, earning huge amounts of money for certain vested interests, basically white, middle-class, Western, concerns, the Hydra is spreading linguistic imperialism, native-speaking English teachers, huge testing industry, textbooks, and they’re  going to turn a blind eye because of the money. Yes? And then, at the same time, the local people, the local countries, the cultures were not gifted English as a first language and never historically have been them, are being lulled into the sense that they need to have English. It’s pushed onto them. And a white face will always get a job, even if they have no qualifications. So, it’s exploitation, imperialism continuing. Robert Phillipson must take a lot of accolades there, and he was one of my co-authors in the first book, English Language Hydra. I’ve worked together with Robert and the late and lamented Tove Skutnubb-Kangas, his wife, we all worked together on those two early hydra books.

So going back to your second part of your question. I mentioned a term English language sexual imperialism, which, to me, is part and parcel of the hydra, part and parcel of linguistic imperialism. They go together. So, when English language is spread and forced and sold to places that think they need to have English. Sexual imperialism happens at the same time. through some of the channels I’ve already mentioned before, they go hand in hand in hand. I ‘ll read you a quote, if you don’t mind, from Joanne Nagel in 2003, “the history of European colonialism is not only a history of language dominance, it is also a history of sexual dominance.” I agree completely. So, they’re hand in glove via all the different ways I’ve mentioned in this book. So, in my own quote: “When the language is presented in English as a foreign language situation, at least potentially, so are patriarchal, sexist, chauvinist tropes and the correlated behaviours.”

Linguistic imperialism and sexual imperialism go together. And it’s been going on for hundreds of years, from the white man going to Africa and bringing his own sexual tropes there. That’s still going on. The male preoccupation with the exotic Asian female, for example. This is 2025, but nothing ‘s changed.

Hanna Torsh: In your book, you give us concrete examples of the kind of link that you’re talking about between English language teaching and sexual imperialism. In your book, you talk about the ways in which, the career of teaching English overseas is sexualized, even before potential teachers begin teaching. Can you tell our audience what you found that out about that?

Vaughan: It comes from just lots of experience, lots of reading, lots of research, and just the sheer obvious facts. For example, English itself is a sexualized language, just given the components, structures of the tongue itself are sexualized. If you want to read Lewis and Lupyan in 2020, a very good article about that, just how pronouncedly sexist English language as a language is, in terms of its words and the word use. Many TEFL textbooks, even in 2025, are still predominantly sexed or gender biased. That’s even if some of those countries receiving English as a supposed gift, even have textbooks. And if they do, they’re usually old ones, and there might be one shared between 50 students.

The gender bias is apparent and still obvious. Males still continue to dominate in management, and TEFL conferences. Varinder Unlu, came up with the website ELTToo, and about the sexist basis of the English language teaching industry, the EFL, TEFL conferences and management structures. And she got repudiated and reprimanded by too many males for doing so, which goes back to that vested interest, not wanting to know and hiding it away.

English is taught in a sexualized fashion. For example, as in Spanish TV, a woman strips as she’s teaching English. Bizarre, but true. And it’s advertised, especially tuition centres, for example, in Japan, some of the advertisements are so blatantly sexualized and sexist. Dozens of examples are shown in the book. Another key point is the sex tourism. There’s a huge global trend, and it’s not just English teachers going overseas to partake in sex tourism, but the fact that so many people from Western countries and local countries might go to Southeast Asia for sex tourism encourages the teaching of English to cater for those tourists. The “sex pats”, another term, who just goes overseas to partake in sexualized adventures with the young, people who have no money, who are in the sex trade, because they have to be to survive, people like that. And the statistics shown by concerns that are trying to combat sexual predation in TEFL, like ECPAT and APLE Cambodia. There’re so many examples that they publish on their website and in their reports, shows the problem isn’t going away, it’s probably escalating. Despite the best efforts of places like EPAC and Apple to do something about it, and the poor efforts by local governments and countries sending the offenders overseas.

Hanna Torsh: And can you just, for the audience, explain what those acronyms are?

Vaughan: Good question. ECPAT is not just one organization, it’s an overall name for organizations that fight child exploitation, and protecting children being exploited. And APLE Cambodia is a specific example that works under EPAC, but it’s its own separate body in Cambodia, fighting child exploitation and protecting children over there. Many cases are of English-speaking teachers, tutors, or people going over and opening orphanages, or pretending to do aid out in rural communities, but actually are there as sexual predators, preying on youth. Often some of them are so cheeky as to marry a local say, Cambodian woman, and then exploit the woman ‘s children. So that’s APLE, Preda in the Philippines is another organization doing the same thing, preventing child exploitation, including by white men going there and running sex rings, paedophile rings, which is all in the book.

Hanna Torsh: Yeah, great, thank you. We are running out of time, Vaughan, and it’s such a big topic, but I ‘d like to end by asking, you’ve talked about the issue being bigger than the kinds of extreme, horrific crimes you’ve just talked about, that it’s actually permeating the whole industry, and that there’s this close relationship between English language teaching and sexual predation. What would you like our audience to go away with, in terms of the key message of your book, bearing in mind that a lot of our audience are emerging and established researchers in Applied Linguistics and TESOL.

Vaughan: Be aware of the problem, be far more aware. Report any incidents of sexual predation, even if they seem minor. If you think a student’s being harassed by a male teacher, or you think of fellow female teachers being harassed by a male teacher, or by local members of the community, report it. Get your own professional bodies to be far more proactive. They’re not proactive in fighting this massive problem across the board, all the different types of behaviours of sexual predation and TEFL, and it’s all its various guises.  Close loopholes globally, not so easy, but let ‘s get, say, UK government to say, how come sex offenders who are on the sexual offenders list can still go overseas and teach by changing their names through a passport? And be caught years later in another country altogether. And these are all documented cases.

And my final key point has always been, do we really need to teach English in other countries beyond first language countries? And my point is, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don’t need English even to be taught. There’s no clear requirement for EFL in many places anyway. You can circumvent the hydra by just doing away with it. People can develop their own languages, because as Tove Skutnabb-Kangas said many, many years ago, linguicism comes in when linguistic imperialism comes in, and linguicism is the loss of your own Indigenous tongue, because English is taking over. We don’t need the hydra.

Hanna: You also make the point in your book that local teachers are often underpaid and undervalued relative to, imported teachers. And I thought that was a powerful message too, and linked to the idea of decolonizing, English language.

Vaughan: And it rankles with them. I was earning much more money than most of my fellow teachers in Hong Kong, and I wasn’t working the hours that they were putting into, or were expected to put in, and they weren’t getting the big, huge gratuities. Total exploitation. Totally unnecessary, but as I keep on saying, there’s a vested interest going on there, and they aren’t going to shut up. They want the money. Although in the last two years, finally, maybe they went back and read my letters to the South China Morning Post. the Hong Kong government now has now de-escalated the financial benefits for the NET scheme there and has now thrown open the budget that was formerly there for nets to be hired by schools, to the schools themselves to hire NETs, but at a lower rate. Why? Because fiscally, Hong Kong can ‘t afford what they were spending before, billions and billions of Hong Kong dollars on net teachers. So, ironically, socioeconomically, the net scheme is becoming disempowered because Hong Kong can ‘t afford to pay anymore.

Hanna Torsh: Wow. A good outcome for local teachers, potentially, and for schools, if they’re getting more of that funding. So that’s perhaps a nice place to finish up. Look, thank you so much, Vaughan, for this important work. It certainly got me thinking about my own teaching career as an English language teacher, and the various associations that I ‘m part of, and how particularly how this issue of sexual predation intersects with a lot of the work we talk about on LOM on native speakerism and now this new emerging, body of work on decolonizing English. So, lots of important food for thought. Thanks again. Do you have any final comments you would like to make before we say goodbye?

Vaughan: Tēnā koe. Thank you very much for the opportunity. I guess I ‘m going to have to say, find the book and read it, because it’s new, and it’s important. And it’s not been expressed sufficiently, or powerfully before. It’s telling things that people don’t want to hear, quite frankly.

Hanna Torsh: I couldn’t agree more. And if you’re like me working at a university, request that your library order Vaughan ‘s important book.

So, thanks again, Vaughan, and thanks everyone for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move podcast and our partner, The New Books Network, to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Till next time.

Everyone wants to be a winner in the dating game; but it doesn’t always work that way …

A 2015 article in the New York Post argued that mobile dating apps, such as Tinder and its many clones, are ultimately ‘tearing society apart’ by drastically changing the way young single adults in Western society seek and pursue romantic and sexual partners.

A recent study by Mitchell Hobbs, Stephen Owen and Livia Gerber (2016) asks whether that assessment is really true. The project explores the experiences of dating app users and investigates how the technology has influenced their sexual practices and views on romantic ideals and long-term relationships.

Offline desires, online realities

Meeting sexual and romantic partners specifically through dating apps has four characteristics: First, users are able to engage in casual, one-off or short-term, sexual encounters without engaging in any further social interaction. Second, dating apps allow users to broaden their romantic networks, extending beyond their existing social networks. Thirdly, dating apps are an efficient means of connecting with several potential partners at the same time. And, fourth, the emergence of dating apps has perpetuated a culture in which communication is increasingly focused around self-presentation and self-commodification.

The latter characteristic in particular may generate a sense of anxiety and frustration around the need to create a successful profile.

Self-presentation in the dating game

Mobile dating apps were initially designed as a type of game to take the stress and emotional investment out of dating. The tactile functionality of the app, combined with users’ photo-based profiles resembles a virtual stack of cards: Profiles are presented like playing cards, and the user can swipe left on the screen to ‘dislike’ or swipe right to ‘like’ a profile. These profiles are only shown once – swiping left to ‘dislike’ therefore eliminates these profiles from the ‘game’. Mutual right swipes result in a ‘match’ and only then can communication be initiated. Successful tindering is therefore in part measured by the amount of matches one obtains, as one of our participants explained:

Yeah when you get matched it’s like ooh! That’s quite cool, that’s the fun part and that’s also probably quite the addictive part of it as well, I’d imagine. And yeah it’s obviously good for good feelings.

Despite this elation of getting a match, many – particularly male – participants expressed a sense of frustration over their lack of success (i.e. their lack of matches) when using dating apps, indicating that dating apps may be perpetuating the exact anxiety they were designed to eliminate:

Tinder is purely based on looks. It’s a numbers’ game essentially. It’s swipe how many times you want. Um so I don’t personally like it still as a primary means of finding a relationship.

Engagement with the ‘game’ creates a level of anxiety that appears to stem from not gaining access to the smorgasbord of potential sexual and romantic partners theoretically available through dating apps. As another male participant remarked:

Everyone is copping a root but me.

In the online sphere, unattractive men have less chances at winning mutual matches, creating a sense that the average-looking guy is missing out on the dating game:

The 10% of highly attractive people fucking all the time make the rest of us feel bad.

In an offline context, ‘average-looking’ guys might be able to harness their interpersonal and communication skills instead:

I’m not suited to this app. I’m trying to find the right phrase but like the profiles that you think would get like high likes because of certain things they put in isn’t really me and I don’t try and do it. I also just think I’m more traditional in so far as I like to bump into someone at a bar or room across- eyes across a room that’s how I actually connect with people because I think half of meeting someone the fun is body language like reading little bits of body language.

In sum, how to present oneself in the best possible light online is a major concern for the users of dating apps. Whilst some participants felt that they are not suited to mobile dating apps due to a lack of successful self-presentation strategies, others engage in self-commodification in an attempt to increase their dating app success.

Self-commodification in the Tinder game

Self-commodification becomes an essential part of designing one’s profile. One interviewee described how he helped his friend to improve his Tinder profile:

So I ask ‘Can I look at your profile and can I change it for you?’ So I get him a different picture and I make his profile his ‘buyer’ – he didn’t have a buyer. I made his profile a buyer, and said ‘You can always go back’ and it blew up! It was almost like in the movies.

Users have the option of adding additional information or captions (referred to here as a ‘buyer’ and elsewhere as ‘digital pick-up line’) to their profiles. While some profiles strategically communicate very little, some male participants reported feeling put off by long digital pick-up lines:

So most of the time apparently it’s just a highly sexualised or very blunt statement of intentions. Um there are funny ones. But um and then some like you see some girls will put- um have like a really long thing, really long statement about fun-loving. Everyone in the world apparently is fun-loving. Oh god. Worst, most overused statement I’ve ever- but anyway [sighs] um the- at the very end of these monstrous spiels sometimes they’ll write ‘say orange if you’ve read this.’ And so you’re expected if you match, the first thing you say to them is orange to show that you’ve actually read through it.

In general, men appear to be less particular about whom they swipe right on in an attempt to increase their chances of gaining a match. However, these swipes do not always result in the kind of match the users were looking for, as another participant indicated:

He was frustrated cause of like five matches he’d had in the last two weeks four of them turned out to be prostitutes. The thing that made him so angry was that one of them actually talked to him for a whole week before she told him her rates.

In sum, male participants reported many frustrations related to looking for love on the move: getting a match was not actually ‘as easy as play’ – and even if they got matches, they were not always the kind of match they desired.

Changing communication strategies for the sexual marketplace

Dating apps certainly do not take the stress out of trying to find love, sex and romance. On the contrary, they may be creating new anxieties around online communication strategies. Male users, in particular, expressed frustration over the need to brand themselves as desirable commodities in the sexual marketplace. If dating apps are indeed ‘tearing society apart’ it is not because they result in everyone having casual sex all the time but because they create many more desires than they can fullfil.

If you like this post, you might also like

• No Sex for Generation On-the-Move
• Language shift and phone sex
• To English with love

Reference

Hobbs, M., Owen, S., & Gerber, L. (2016). Liquid love? Dating apps, sex, relationships and the digital transformation of intimacy Journal of Sociology DOI: 10.1177/1440783316662718

Gay men, English and desire in Bangkok

I have recently begun working on my MA thesis on sexuality and second language learning at the Graduate School of English, Assumption University of Thailand, under the supervision of Kimie Takahashi. She has encouraged me to share my experience in developing this project here on Language on the Move. Funny enough, my research topic is often seen as ‘outside the box’ here, but it came quite naturally, so to speak, and here is why.

In 2010, I arrived in Bangkok as an international student from Taiwan, and since then I’ve been introduced to many fashionable gay hubs, such as the glamorous Telephone Bar or The Balcony on Silom Soi 4 or the always-packed DJ Station on Soi 2.  The city has always been well-known  internationally for its gay-friendliness and sexual diversity (Jackson, 2011), and indeed these places are packed with international couples, especially Asian and Western.

What struck me most about Bangkok’s international gay scene here is that these Asian gay men from non-English-speaking backgrounds, do not only speak good English but also seem very confident and skilful in socialising with Westerners: they so elegantly flirt, joke around and engage in intellectual conversations on the economy, education, globalisation and whatnot, all in English. They definitely don’t fit the image of Asians as deficient or shy speakers of English that is still paramount in the literature that I have been reading since I began my master’s degree in ELT. I’m pretty sure that they’d roll their eyes or be offended if I told them how Asians are talked about as such by researchers.

When I initially started developing an MA thesis project last year, I didn’t know that what I had observed in my daily life could be a research topic. Having read A Passion for English by Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi (2006), I learned that research on the intersection of sexuality and desire in second language learning is actually cutting-edge I then decided to propose a project that would look into the language learning trajectory of gay Asian men in Bangkok, to explore if they were like the Japanese women in their study who developed akogare (desire) for the English language alongside their fantasy for Western masculinity.

Having decided to model my project on Ingrid’s and Kimie’s work, I looked for similar ELT studies with a focus on Asian gay men’s desire for English and the West. My pursuit was rather fruitless. Brian King (2008) explains that although the fields of ELT in general and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in particular have investigated learner motivation and learner identities since the 1980s, the literature has suffered from heteronormativity. Indeed, doing my literature review has made me wonder what kind of world previous research has been occupying for the last so many decades – certainly not the one occupied by millions of fellow gay and lesbian friends of mine living side by side with fellow heterosexual folks.

As such the fields of ELT and SLA have failed to address why gay learners aspire to learn English or how such aspirations manifest in their linguistic practices and learning or if being gay really matters at all. Similarly, the fields of Sexuality Studies or Sociology seem to have paid little attention to the language learning trajectories of gay Asian men who desire Western men. My study is thus designed t to fill this gap in the literature on Asian gay men’s desire for English and Western men, and how their desires may impact their opportunities to learn and use English in Bangkok.

As part of the requirements for my degree, I defended my proposal, a critical ethnography of Asian gay men’s desire and second language learning in Bangkok, to the proposal committee in April, 2012. One of the comments by an examiner was “This is an interesting project. It’s like thinking outside the box”. I was flattered, of course, as every new research has to be original and innovative. But, at the same time, the metaphor of the ‘box’ seems to index the very problem I’m going to challenge head-on, i.e., heteronormativity. For me, a gay man belonging to the thriving gay community in Bangkok and beyond, what I’m going to look into is pretty much inside the box.

References
Jackson, P. A. (2011). Queer Bangkok : Twenty-first-century markets, media, and rights. Aberdeen, Hong Kong; Chiang Mai, Thailand: Hong Kong Univ. Press; Silkworm Books.

King, B. (2008). “Being Gay Guy, That is the Advantage”: Queer Korean Language Learning and Identity Construction Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 7 (3-4), 230-252 DOI: 10.1080/15348450802237855

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2006). A Passion for English: Desire and the Language Market In A. Pavlenko (Ed.), Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression, and Representation: Multilingual Matters, pp. 59–83.