Organizer and Chair: Lynn Kwiatkowski, University of South Alabama
Discussant: Shelly Errington, University of California, Santa Cruz
In conjunction with the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, this panel will focus on gender in Asian societies as it is constructed by overlapping fields of power that are global in scope. As Asian societies become more closely linked to cultures throughout the world through improved communication systems, trade, multinational expansion in the region, labor migration, international development programs, and greater accessibility to international travel, regional analyses of gender in Asian societies have become limited, while globally oriented analyses of gender have become crucial.
The papers on this panel will focus on critical sites of gender formation in Asian societies, including the family, the factory, the psychiatric ward, and international development programs. Presenters will critically examine these so-called "natural" arenas where women's bodies are presumed to be more capable of laboring, producing, or operating. Ethnographic research will be presented from studies conducted in the Philippines, Thailand, and China.
Gendered Experiences of Chinese Psychiatry
Nancy N. Chen, University of California, Santa Cruz
Contemporary practices of psychiatry in China reflect post-Mao trends of embracing Chinese science and global pharmaceutical therapies. This paper will focus on the ways in which experiences within the psychiatric context are constructed and maintained by institutional setting, doctor-client relations, and family interactions. Gender in this context is simultaneously a naturalized category and a site of global practice where health workers and patients are engaged in subjective relations of power and meaning. Based upon ethnographic research in 1990-92 and in 1995, this paper will present recent examples of gendering bodies and mindful subjects in Chinese clinics.
Questions of Hybridity: Sexuality and Power in the Reconstructions of Chinese
Identities among Ethnic Chinese in Bangkok
Jiemin Bao, University of California, Berkeley
In this paper I inquire into the ways in which middle class ethnic Chinese men and women in Bangkok selectively rework the meaning of their ethnic identity based upon their gender-specific experiences and power resources in the spheres of work and sexuality.
Drawing upon my research in Thailand, I argue that current discourse on hybridity in the construction of identities (e.g. Homi Bhabha 1994) obscures the effect of sexuality and gender-based power resources. I suggest that shared class prestige among middle class ethnic Chinese men and women, and gender based men's privilege and women's power in the sexual domain are central to an understanding of gendered aspects of ethnic identities in contemporary Thailand. Apparently hybrid practices and identities drawn from Thai Buddhism, pre-1949 Chinese Confucianism, and Western consumer culture are, in fact, carefully chosen in relation to local constructions of masculinity and femininity in everyday life.
Reflections on the Anthropology of Experience
Jane A. Margold, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Experience is a category so naturalized into social life that explicit theories are lacking of how events are perceived, deemed meaningful and inscribed in cultural memory, shaping subjectivities and becoming the basis for communal action. A notable exception to this undertheorization of experience is the literature on gender that utilizes "herstory" (women's narrative) to retrieve previously-unanalyzed practices of social signification. As Trinh (1989) argues, women's stories serve to interrupt homogenizing accounts of social worlds by interjecting unpredictable perspectives into generalizing explanations. Yet, feminists theorizing the political have also cautioned against the rendering of women's experience as so unimpeachably authoritative that "herstory" becomes a means for revising history, rather than itself the object of analytic examination (Scott 1992).
Following Scott, this paper problematizes the politicizing experiences of a young Filipina worker in multinational factories, as her loyalties are increasingly captured by one of the most vibrant feminist movements in contemporary Asia. The young woman's narratives are seen as consequential, not only because they encapsulate and unveil particular historical transformations, but because they shed light on the complex processes through which experience is constructed, mediated, encoded, and drawn upon selectively to shape and reshape a political position.
Aid or Hindrance to Women?: International Development (Re)Constructing Gender in
the Philippines
Lynn Kwiatkowski, University of South Alabama
International development programs in Asia have in recent years been attempting to raise the social and health status of women. This paper will explore the ways in which modern development practices have played a significant role in the ongoing process of the construction and reconstruction of gender roles among men and women in a rural upland community in the Philippines. I will argue that some international development programs have attempted to alter women's concepts of gender to conform to traditional Western notions of gender roles for men and women (such as promoting women as the primary child care providers within their families and communities), although development agents do not always perceive themselves as encouraging gender roles which limit rather than enhance women's activities and status.
Using ethnographic research gathered in the province of Ifugao of Northern Luzon island in the Philippines, this paper will analyze how Western international development projects which "target" women in so-called "underdeveloped" countries, in a conscious attempt to raise their gender status, slowly transform women's and men's gender identities and roles. This process is sometimes conducted in conjunction with Christian modes of proselytization, which have also been influencing gender identities and roles among Ifugao men and women. Close attention to the effects of the international development project on gender roles allows us to rethink the viability of Western development programs geared toward raising the social status of women in Asian and other societies.