Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Penny Edwards, Monash University
Chair: Khatarya Um, University of California, Berkeley
Discussant: David Chandler, Monash University
Traditional Khmer culture historically reinforced the female ideal of the srey-krup-leakh (perfectly virtuous woman) through didactic verse, oral history and religious injunction. This panel charts the multi-stranded reframing and redrafting of this gender ideal. Embracing new scholarship in anthropology, political science, and history, it charts the shifting shape of the srey-krup-leakh through the changing roles and representations of women in the national and transnational Khmer cosmos.
Focusing on changing coiffures and costumes, Penny Edwards explores the fusion of fashion and nation in the nationalist model of the srey-krup-leakh that emerged under colonial rule. Through the lens of Khmer newsmedia, she examines how nationalist debate extended the srey-krup-leakh’s burden of duty from the traditional spheres of family and clan to the modern strata of nation and state. Kate Frieson’s paper explores the legacy of this gendered nationalism in postcolonial Cambodia. Her analysis of how states and politicians tasked female citizens with defending the racial and cultural purity of the Khmer nation traverses the policy and rhetoric of diverse regimes. Judy Ledgerwood’s journey through cyberspace expands the frontiers of the panel from the national to the transnational. Her paper explores the constant referencing and reinvention of the srey-krup-leakh in the language and lives of Khmer youth today.
Penny Edwards, Monash University
In precolonial Cambodia, dress codes encrypted gender through subtle distinctions in the tie and cut of cloth and hair. These cultural ciphers were often lost on western observers, who commonly depicted Khmer men and women as long-skirted, short-haired androgens.
Cropped at adolescence, clipped at marriage and shorn in mourning, hair had a special place in traditional Khmer culture. The absorption and adaptation of western cosmetic notions of femininity under colonial rule (1863–1953) gradually changed this. In 1928, several Cambodian princesses refused to shave their heads for King Sisowath’s funeral; by the 1930s, bobbed hair was de rigueur.
In Phnom Penh and provincial towns, western blouses, handbags, and high-heeled shoes were increasingly adopted by students at French schools as markers of femininity and sophistication. Cambodian male students and civil servants adopted western-style trousers for study and work, but were urged to wear sampots in national ceremony. In the 1940s, Khmer newspapers encouraged men to wear shorts, and sanctified the sampot as national dress for women.
By independence in 1953, the sampot had emerged as a marker of both Khmerness and femaleness. This paper explores how the adaptation of western aesthetic ideals and notions of gender cleavage resulted in the refashioning of the srey-krup-leakh (perfectly virtuous woman).
Kate Frieson, University of Victoria
On the eve of colonial collapse in the 1940s, Khmer newspapers fused maternal devotion and patriotic duty into a nationalist ideology which cast women as biological reproducers and cultural guardians. This conflation of familyism and nationalism was refracted through state institutions and public policy after Cambodia gained independence in 1953.
Under Sihanouk’s Sangkum Reastr Niyum regime, numerous associations exhorted women to serve the national economy and by extension, head of the state/family, "Father" Sihanouk. After Lon Nol ousted Sihanouk in 1970, women joined the Khmer Rouge as teachers, soldiers, messengers, and porters; in return, Khmer Rouge propaganda promised them liberation from traditional oppression. Khmer Rouge rule (1975–78) cast women as guardians of racial purity and defenders of nation. Their sexual lives policed, women became the site of political struggles between corrupt capitalist loving and communist clean living. Harnessed in the service of the state, women were cut loose from traditional family structures, but were commonly assigned to work for the larger state/family as launderers, cooks, and child-carers.
Diverse Cambodian regimes have intensified, weakened, but never fundamentally altered the political roles of women. Racial survival, the leitmotif of Khmer nationalism, has placed an onerous burden on women as the Khmer nation’s reproducers, ideological protectors and cultural guardians. This paper explores that process and its sometimes tragic results.
Judy Ledgerwood, Northern Illinois University
Tens of thousands of young people from Cambodia migrated to the U.S. as refugees in the last twenty-five years. They often lived simultaneously in different worlds; the cultural realm of the home where language, art, entertainment and religion were Khmer, and in the larger American world of the school. Now, as they reach college, they are creating their own cultural milieu in cyberspace; networks of homepages, bulletin boards, chat rooms and newsgroups link them as a new kind of "community."
These young people assert the "Khmerness" of this community and of the various sites through the use of key symbols and scenarios that include: Angkor Wat, Apsaras (celestrial dancers), images of the infamous Khmer Rouge years from 1975–79; the use of codes switching to communicate in transliterated Khmer for certain topics and specific situations, and by regular references to Khmer gender ideals. This paper discusses the use of the term "Srey Krup Leakh" or "perfectly virtuous woman" in the daily exchanges in cyberspace. To do this is to explore Khmer conceptions of gender as multi-faceted—employed for the restatement of "tradition," as a lament about what has been lost in the new world, and as a reassessment and reassertion of Khmer femaleness in the U.S.
Vaddey Mom, Independent Scholar
First published in 1947, Nou Hach’s Phka Srabon (The Wilted Flower) caused a furor in urban and rural Cambodia. This tale of a young woman caught between tradition and modernity broke new ground in Khmer literary form while challenging old mores. Symbolizing Cambodia’s troubled colonial passage, the central character Vitheavy is torn between the conflicting demands and values of her custom-bound mother and her French-educated lover. Beautiful, serene and virginal, Vitheavy masks her inner turmoil with the exemplary conduct of the srey-krup-leakh (perfectly virtuous woman). Hostage to an arranged marriage, she is deferential to her dreaded future in-laws, and places her mother’s feelings before her own.
In a break with traditional Khmer love stories where unhappy heroines’ dilemmas are resolved by valiant men, and virtuous feminine conduct rewarded with positive outcome, Vitheavy takes her own life. Nou Hach’s novel is thus a strident condemnation of the social strictures imposed on a new generation of Cambodian women by the leaden weight of tradition, and a passionate appeal to society to redefine these hidebound notions of female propriety. In this context, Vitheavy’s suicide becomes a metaphor for the cultural asphyxia that will face Cambodia if it fails to adapt to modernity.
Now incorporated into the Cambodian cultural canon, Phka Srabon’s impact has long outlived its author, who died under Khmer Rouge rule. This paper explores how text became a tool for refiguring popular notions and expectations of womanhood.