Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Mary M. Steedly, Harvard University
Leslie Ann Jeffrey, St. Thomas University
This paper examines the way in which the discussion of the problem of prostitution in Thailand today has much to do with Thailand’s ambivalent relationship with westernization/modernization rather than with a concern over women’s exploitation. The most popular understanding of prostitution today in Thailand is its link to the problem of "consumerism." While this understanding appears to be a Buddhist critique of Western values and the growing influence of international capitalism, its application in Thailand is limited to the prostitutes themselves and their families. The "consumerism" critique therefore, registers alarm over the loss of "traditional Thai values" but also indicates who exactly is responsible for upholding those values—i.e., rural women. In this paper I argue that this understanding of the cultural role of rural women has limited the possibilities for the protection of women in prostitution. It is the result of the particular resolution of the events of the 1970s wherein the state regained its hegemony through the absorption of certain elements of the student movement—by allowing for the growth of development oriented NGOs—and the configuring of a rural based national identity to counter communist insurgency. Some of these NGOs share with the government a sense of the place of peasant women in national culture and see prostitution as symptomatic of cultural breakdown. The answer, therefore, lies in re-integrating the women into "traditional culture"—through domestic skills training and handicraft production. Such an approach, however, has sidelined attempts by some women’s organizations, and demands by prostitutes themselves, to recognize prostitutes as workers who require protection under labour legislation.
Ann Marie Leshkowich, Harvard University
Approximately eighty-five percent of Ben Thanh Market’s cloth and clothing stalls are run by women. Deeply rooted in Vietnam’s history, women’s dominance of market trade is usually attributed to Confucian notions disdaining commerce as base and suitable only for women. The persistence of these perceptions today can easily be blamed for the apparent inability of women traders to expand their market stalls into larger private businesses.
This paper advances a different interpretation: rather than hampering women’s businesses, the conceptual links between gender, trade, and smallness serve as a protective cloak enabling women traders and their families to conceal their activities from officials. Interweaving traders’ life histories with an exploration of the kin and social networks through which they conduct business, this paper argues that many traders consciously choose to remain "small" because they perceive that the overall social, economic, and political environment actively discourages them from becoming larger. Maintaining a facade as "just a stall run by a woman" becomes a strategy to survive or even prosper.
As an important symbol of both Vietnamese markets and Ho Chi Minh City, Ben Thankh has recently become central to debates about the city’s future. In state-sponsored discussions of development, "market trade" seems a symptom of economic backwardness or a quaint vestige of Vietnamese tradition. The very notions of smallness which many traders have manipulated may now mean that they are unable to advocate for the importance of this sector as an engine for Vietnam’s economic growth.
Sirpa Tenhunen, Helsinki University
This paper explores the cultural construction and impact of women’s wage work in a low income neighborhood in Calcutta. I examine how wage work is conceptualized through cultural discourses involving conceptions of space, personhood, and gender and how women’s agency is embedded in these discourses. Women use cultural structures, making creative combinations, participating in dominant discourses, and turning them into potentially subversive practices and discourses. Women are actively associating wage work and their earnings with their separate and in many instances secret sphere. Instead of presenting themselves as wage workers or moving into the public sphere from private homes, women integrate wage work into the broad domain of Bengali household (sangsar) and keep their earnings separate from the husband’s earnings. Constructing women’s income and wage work as separate provides women with freedom (svadhinata) which does not openly threaten the family hierarchy and strengthens the complementary bond between the husband and the wife. Although women’s secrecy is built on the idea of women’s separate sphere, secrecy also highlights how the interconnectness of domains can entail conflicts and is under constant negotiation. Women’s domain becomes a site for developing ideas and discourses on freedom and articulated critique towards dominant discourses. In integrating wage work and their earnings into women’s sphere, women are changing their sphere in an unpredictable way.
Patricia A. Martinez, Temple University
This paper uncovers and analyzes the genealogy of an unprecedented phenomenon in Malaysia: how a small group of Muslim women who call themselves Sisters in Islam are disrupting the carefully constructed and nurtured cohesiveness of Islam in Malaysia, yet negotiating their protests within the mainstream by situating their strategies and rhetoric in government discourse.
Homogeneity is presumed in Islam by the word ummah, the name for the Muslim community whether worldwide or within a single location. Homogeneity is especially prioritized for Islam in Malaysia by its government, for Islam functions to provide legitimacy to polity as well as a needed cohesiveness among Malays who are mostly Muslim, and who have political dominance over a large non-Muslim, non-Malay minority. This paper describes how although Islam is harnessed for intracommunal unity, it also provides the premise for ethnic differentiation and re-enforcement of Malay privilege intercommunally, in relation to other ethnic/religious communities in Malaysia. Thus, monolithic pronouncements and presumptions abound in the discourse on Islam. However, Islam is now also the site of open discord in an intra-communal squabble over the rights of women. Founded in 1987, Sisters in Islam is increasingly vocal in exposing those elements of Islam which impact unfairly on the lives of Muslim women in Malaysia. This paper argues that Sisters in Islam strategies of resistance and empowerment are unique among Muslim women’s struggles and movements, for resistance and dissent are strategized not in contradiction to, but in conformity with national imperatives of western-engendered progress and development.
Jacqueline Siapno, University of California, Berkeley
This paper examines the competing constructions and representations of Islamic identity and gender relations in Aceh, a region which has been called the most Islamic "province" of Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world. My focus is on how the competing constructions between the central government’s models of "good" Islam (i.e., religious leaders and institutions which can be co-opted such as ICMI and MUI) and "bad" Islam (i.e., the Acehnese Islamic resistance through DI/TII and Aceh Merdeka) have affected rural women’s lives. In the consolidation of the modern Indonesian nation-state, Islam and gender relations have been reconstructed in a particular way: on the one hand Aceh is represented by Acehnese Muslim nationalists as having a long tradition of "strong, fighting women," and on the other hand it is reconstructed by the Indonesian state as the cradle of "Islamic fundamentalism," a movement which is often associated with misogynist practices. This contradiction is further complicated by the fact that Acehnese have had a long history of fierce independence from the central state, their cultural nationalism finding expression in strong Islamic identity as a symbol of cohesion. This dissertation seeks to account for ideas of power, political agency and strategies through articulations of female voices which break from the dominant discursive practices that justify and legitimize patriarchy and institutionalized state violence.
1. Funding for this project was provided by the Social Science Research Council Dissertation Fellowship and sponsored by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and Majelis Ulama Aceh, Indonesia.