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Transnational Gender, Deterritorialization, and Political Subjects in Mainland Southeast Asia
Organizer: Jane M. Ferguson, Cornell University
Chair: Katherine A. Bowie, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Discussant: Penelope Van Esterik, York University
While many scholars of gender and gender studies have looked at the ways in which gender is practiced in Southeast Asia, a region that has long been pointed to by scholars as an area where women have 'relatively high status,' gendered transnationalism demands greater attention. The need for critical examination of issues such as displacement, deterritorialization, and globalized political movements is imperative, as more and more people in Southeast Asia are contending with these issues on a daily basis. This panel situates gender practices within the radical changes in global political and economic structures. In so doing, it will rethink the issues of statelessness, national consciousness, identity, and marginality. For example: in what ways has modern politics affected classed and gendered understandings of religious practice, and are these so‑called 'gendered reactions' symptomatic of deeper historical processes glossed over by caricature representations of Thai Buddhism? How can we situate and interpret the changing sexual division of labor within a Shan ethnic insurgent movement? Does gender as a concept factor prominently in the rhetoric of legitimation for the (sub)nation‑state? What kinds of gender negotiation can be examined through the study of an explicitly hybrid spirit‑possession ritual performed by a Burmese migrant woman in Tokyo? Can Thai Gay and Lesbian movements effectively address local gender and sexuality issues and still be in dialogue with increasingly global notions of sexual politics? Drawing from multiple ethnographic examples in the context of mainland Southeast Asia, this panel interrogates larger categories of politics, nationalism and gender.
Gender Negotiation and Ritual Invention of a Burmese Migrant Woman in Tokyo
Naoko Kumada, Stanford University
Scholars of gender in Southeast Asia have emphasized the ‘high status of Southeast Asian women,’ especially compared to that of women in East and South Asia. These scholars have also emphasized the fluid and changing nature of gender in Southeast Asia. What, then, are the challenges Southeast Asian women are facing, as a significant number of them have begun to migrate to and settle in Japan? How is gender negotiated, and how does it evolve in such a context? This paper explores some of the new questions recent Southeast Asian migration poses to our understanding of Southeast Asian women. In particular, it examines a Burmese immigrant woman’s performance of a Burmese-Japanese hybrid spirit possession ritual in the heart of Tokyo. Spirit possession rituals are highly gendered in specific ways in both Burma and Japan. The ambivalent nature of spirit medium ship makes the mediums controversial figures, raising questions of authenticity, power, and marginality. What led the Burmese immigrant woman to become a spirit medium in Tokyo? This paper looks at the complex process in which her marginality and subjectivity are constructed and negotiated within the dominant Japanese discourses of cultural and ethnic purity.
Polluted Identities: Of Gender, War Captives and Border Crossings in the Constitution of Northern Thai Beliefs
Katherine A. Bowie, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Although historians have noted the movements of diverse populations across the region of mainland Southeast Asia over the centuries, recognition of such population movements provides an uneasy fit with Thailand’s national narrative of cultural homogeneity. In July 2004 a controversy erupted over a sign at a famous temple in northern Thailand; the sign forbad women from entering the sacred stupa compound. When a female senator from a northeastern province challenged the sign as a violation of the equal rights clause in the 1997 Thai constitution, conservative northerners organized a petition drive to expel the senator from office and held a cursing ceremony to damn her. They argued that women had been banned from northern temples for some 800 years since menstrual blood was considered polluting. The conflict abated after the senator issued an apology, however it has revealed lingering fault lines in the national narrative. Although the factors underlying the controversy are complex, this paper will explore the origin of the northern taboo against women. I will argue that the taboo emerges from a complex historical process in which northern Thai rulers integrated large numbers of war captives and other immigrants of diverse ethnic backgrounds from regions in contemporary Burma and Laos. An understanding of northern internal history necessarily engages an international history, revealing northern irredentist claims to be polluted not simply by menstruation, but by the historical contamination caused by the transnational origins of many of their beliefs.
Transnationalism and Sexuality in Thailand: The Intersections of Buddhism, Gay and Lesbian Rights, and Feminism
Megan Sinnott, Georgia State UniversityIn the cannon of literature on global sexualities, Thailand has represented an apparent paradox in which thriving lesbian and gay communities exist in a context with little or no visible gay rights movements. However, this commonly held image does not account for the complex and pervasive ways in which sexual formations in Thailand are engaged with transnational forces, including discourses of gay rights, feminism, and human rights. By focusing on two Thai organizations that are based on issues of sexual and gender rights, this paper explores the ways these transnational discourses and movements are incorporated into local expressions of sexuality and self. One group, Rainbow Sky, a recently formed gay and lesbian rights organization in Bangkok, explicitly engages Buddhist discourses as it performs and produces a political and social positions regarding sexuality. These discourses are embedded in larger transnational engagements with commercial gay culture and human rights movements. Rainbow Sky and its leaders have astutely recognized the importance of relying on discourses that have particular relevance for their local constituency. Buddhist concepts of suffering, compassion, and the transient quality of earthly experiences—concepts frequently evoked in interviews and discussions with local men and women engaged in same-sex sexuality—are deployed in a national and transnational-level social movement that both parallels and disturbs dominant transnational narratives of human rights. Rainbow Sky’s approach to sexuality and social organizing are contrasted with Anjaree, a lesbian feminist organization that has operated both in conjunction with transnational feminist and developmental NGO’s, and local communities of women.
Gender Insurgency: Women's Labor in the Politics of Shan National Resistance to the Burmese State
Jane M. Ferguson, Cornell University
When the forces of the Shan United Army merged with those of the Shan United Revolutionary Army (SURA) in the mid-1980s, a unity of Shan ethnic resistance created one of the strongest sub-national forces in recent Southeast Asian history. The lion's share of work on ethno-nationalism in the region has tended to sidestep gender issues in and amongst the rank-and-file insurgent troops. Although women had served as active soldiers in the SURA before the merger, in the years following, the new leadership, Khun Sa in particular, dismissed women from active duty. Instead, women served the national liberation cause by working in sundry other positions, such as typesetters for their Shan moveable type press, or as teachers in any of the primary schools in the Shan liberated area east of the Salween River. Based on interviews carried out amongst former soldiers of the SURA who experienced this reassignment, as well as textual analysis of Shan insurgent media articles about the role of women in the resistance armies, this paper will not only examine how this particular sub-national army has dealt with the issue of a sexual division of labor, but also the ways in which transnational conceptions of gender have affected notions of modernity, gender, and nation building in this ethnic liberation movement.