M.Stivens (2010), ‘Gendering Asia after Modernity', in Gendered Inequalities in Asia: Configuring, Contesting and Recognizing Women and Men, Helle Rydström ed., Gendering Asia # 5, Copenhagen: NIAS Press; Washington: Washington University Press, pp. 21-43. (original) (raw)
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Routledge Handbook of East Asian Gender Studies
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2020
An increasing academic interest in gender relations and women's rights movements in East Asia have challenged the Eurocentric approach to social sciences and cultural studies in this region. Positioning itself against the perspective of Area Studies, the Routledge Handbook of East Asian Gender Studies presents diverse empirical engagements and theoretical debates across a range of geopolitical and disciplinary localities. Consisting of twentyfive chapters, this book is divided into seven thematic sections. This review will prioritise the overarching issues throughout the volume, along with the distinctive contribution of each chapter. Gender, as a force generating and in turn maintained by social organising in diverse forms, has its own history in East Asia and yet it has become complicated by the processes of 'modernisation' involved with global capital and postcolonial nationalist movements. Resonating with the emerging decolonial interventions in modernity/coloniality where modern gender and sexual knowledge have been identified to be problematic, in their introductory chapter Liu and Yamashita are explicit about their 'mixed feelings' towards the modernisation of East Asian societies, which should not be simply seen as a passive receiver of westernisation, particularly in terms of knowledge production and socioeconomic development. On the one hand, social and feminist researchers in or from East Asia have been encountering an epistemological problem concerning 'translating' local and regional issues to satisfy the academic hegemony of Anglo-American gender studies, and relatedly, an ethical account regarding how to liberate gendered and sexualised East Asians from an orientalist view. On the other hand, this and many other chapters highlight that the rapid economic growth and independence does not necessarily promote gender equality. These considerations are well situated in the first section on 'Theorising gender relations in East Asia', in dialogues with western and between Asian theorists. Doing so facilitates an inquiry into gender construction in these societies to go beyond the universal/particular binary. For example, Ochiai's chapter contends that referring to East Asian societies simply as 'Confucian societies' not only overlooks the varied interactions between gender and social classes and between politico-ideological structures and everyday practices, but also conflates the diverse fashions of kinship and familial system that are in place. Ochiai draws on both historical and materialist approaches to contextualising the developments of and changes in gender relations in Japan and beyond (including Southeast Asia). Ochiai shows that it is important to identify how the modes of production and the travelling of kinship ideologies (especially Confucianism) affect local arrangements of gender relations, which can be mapped out as a 'geography of Asian patriarchy' (p. 16). As follows, her notion of the 'traditionalisation of modernity' (p. 18) challenges the assumption based on a lineal progressivism,
Gendered Entanglements: Revisiting Gender in Rapidly Changing Asia
NIAS Press is the autonomous publishing arm of NIAS-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, a research institute located at the University of Copenhagen. NIAS is partially funded by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden via the Nordic Council of Ministers, and works to encourage and support Asian studies in the Nordic countries. In so doing, NIAS has been publishing books since 1969, with more than two hundred titles produced in the past few years. Nordic Council of Ministers UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN GENDERING ASIA A Series on Gender Intersections Gendering Asia is a well-established and exciting series addressing the ways in which power and constructions of gender, sex, sexuality and the body intersect with one another and pervade contemporary Asian societies. The series invites discussion of how people shape their identities as females or males and, at the same time, become shaped by the very societies in which they live. The series is concerned with the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Gendering Asia series, no. 10
Reading Gender Trouble in Southeast Asia
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2020
Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble, published in 1990, enjoyed its thirtieth anniversary in 2020. To that end, the Association for Asian Studies, the United States’ largest association of academics working on Asia, invited scholars to consider the importance of her arguments and ideas for Asian studies and scholarship in Asia, including how scholars have diverged from and expanded their studies of gender and sexuality in ways not anticipated by Butler when she first published the book. In this essay, I examine the impact of Butler's book in Southeast Asia. Out of the abundance of scholarship stemming from and about the region's eleven diverse countries and their histories, I prioritize those works that explicitly engage the theoretical insights in Gender Trouble to elucidate the lives of gender-nonconforming communities in Southeast Asia. I include scholarship that allows me to explore the disjunction between categories of analysis that are foundational to Butler's ...
Book Review Essay Handbook on Gender in Asia
Journal of international women's studies, 2021
This journal and its contents may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Authors share joint copyright with the JIWS. ©2022 Journal of International Women's Studies. This journal and its contents may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. ©2021 Journal of International Women's Studies.
As the book title, Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia, suggests, this edited volume provides not only a guide to gender and sexuality studies in Asia but also arguments that centre sexuality in Asian cultural politics. The book presents a collective effort to ethnographically examine recent changes within the political economy in Asia through the lenses of gender and sexuality. Moreover, across the twelve chapters, the authors address various methodological and theoretical issues that extend beyond Asia as a regional case and sex/gender as a sole analytical dimension. Such a volume would benefit not only students and scholars who are already interested in Asia, political economy, and sex and gender studies, but also those who primarily study social changes in first-world countries. Like other excellent ethnographic studies, the essays in this book constantly ask readers to be mindful of specific cultural and historical contexts that may be different from and yet connected to other parts of the world. This volume manifests a critical theoretical position between strong cultural relativism and universalism in anthropology. In other words, the authors simultaneously present their studies as unique in specific contexts and claim broader implications of the cases in relation to studies done elsewhere. For instance, Ahmed Afzal (chapter 11) argues against a universal assumption of premodern or Western gay identity in understanding male-male sexual relationships in Pakistan. Instead, he says that the selfhood and 'homosociality' of these relationships should be understood in the context of localised adulthood, gender roles, familial expectations, and religious beliefs. Danning Wang (chapter 5) stresses the historical situation as an important aspect within discourses of the family planning campaign in China as it simultaneously 'desexualiz[ed] working-class women's family life' (94) and reoriented the notion of family to state interests. Afzal, Wang, and many other chapter authors highlight the importance of specific social and historical conditions in ethnographical analyses, but at the same time, their cases speak to various theoretical and methodological issues beyond particular regions and populations. While essays in this book focus on cultural politics in Asia, the human subjects in the studies are in the process of migration, and so are materials and ideologies. The authors demonstrate that Asia is never in a closed, homogeneous, or stable state. Rather, it is highly diversified with movements of people, wealth, and ideas in both global and local scales. Furthermore, by focusing on humans experiencing relocation or displacement, the authors identify the constant changes of political economy that shape migrations from rural to urban areas and international movement. In these cases, humans are not confined to a region, and their migrations suggest layers of social changes. In Heidi Hoefinger's (chapter 10) research of Cambodian women engaging in transactional sex with Western foreigners as a means of class mobility, she identifies a series of contradictions and negotiations regarding
Harvard Asia Quarterly 16.3: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Asia
The Fall 2014 issue of the Harvard Asia Quarterly focuses on Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Asia. This issue aims to provide an engagement with key themes in studies of gender and sexuality that departs from the Journal’s previous issues centered primarily on topics of social policy and international relations. Amidst recent reportage of discrimination against local LGBTQ groups on international media challenging Thailand’s perceived gay-friendly culture of tolerance, we begin with an interview with Ara Wilson, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, on Thailand’s localized queer and sexual identities embedded in the infrastructure of embodied capitalist modernity and international economic markets. Excavating origins, Jennifer Cullen takes up the canonization of the Meiji Era writer Higuchi Ichiyō (1872-1896) – often considered the first woman writer of modern Japanese literature – as a site of contention revealing shifting gender roles and representations of an idealized Japanese femininity. In her article, Leslie Winston interrogates differing representations of the hermaphrodite in Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926) Japan that challenged the prototype of a binary sexual paradigm promoted by sexologists. Crossing borders, Sylvia Lee examines the orchid paintings of seventeenth-century Chinese courtesans to illuminate how they were seen as sensual performances and tokens of courtship or seduction, which courtesans used to their advantage. Moving forward to the turn of the twentieth century, Yun Zhang traces the transformation of Female Student imagery in China from the late Qing to early Republic era. Zhang argues that the Female Student assumed agency and appeared as a bold, active, and potentially subversive figure via the prototype of New Woman celebrated in 1920s China. On her part, Miya Xiong Xie examines the conspicuous unspeakability of war rape during Chinese wartime fiction produced during the Sino-Japanese War (1931-1945) and its relation to the crisis of national identity. In contribution to discourse on contemporary literary production, Justyna Jaguscik looks at three Chinese female poets – Zhai Yongming (b. 1955), Lü Yue (b. 1972), and Zheng Xiaoqiong (b. 1980) – and representations of femininity vis-à-vis the subaltern body in their work. Jaguscik posits that these poets boldly present a feminist perspective in depicting the subaltern body to counter the hegemony of a male-centered literary discourse. Lastly, Svati Shah, Associate Professor Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, shares her views about India’s recent changes in the public arena around discourses regarding gender and sexuality in light of her ethnographic work in Mumbai. With the increasing visibility of Asia’s LGBTQ and feminist issues on international media, this issue strives to provide intriguing perspectives on the embodiment of gendered and sexual lives in the region. The HAQ hopes that readers will find the articles in this issue illuminating, and that future scholarship on the region will continue to engage with the dynamic and distinctive history and contemporary manifestations of gender and sexuality in Asia.
Studying Women and Gender in Southeast Asia
The International Journal of Asian Studies, 2007
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CAS360. Syllabus. Asian Genders. U. of Toronto. Winter 2022. Dylan Clark
This course will explore ways that genders are produced, lived, and mobilized in parts of Asia. Together, we aim to understand genders in their diversity and in attempts to "fix" or locate them in various bodies and places. We will attempt also to see how gender is made knowable in terms of sexuality, medicine, nation, class, ethnicity, religion, and other discourses. Possible themes include: gendered aspects of industrial labour in Asia, gendered qualities of colonialism, and gendered dimensions of autonomy.