[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Individual Papers: Shifting Representations of Gender in South and Southeast Asia
Organizer and Chair: Nancy J. Smith-Hefner
Fashion as Politics in Late Colonial Burma
Organizer: Chie Ikeya, College of the Holy Cross
Beginning in the late 1920s and increasingly through the 1930s, articles, editorials, cartoons, and letters in the Burmese popular press criticized what they represented as khit san or “modern” women’s fashion. The critics portrayed the khit san thami, the “modern girl,” as a willing agent of an anti-nationalist, Western modernity who flaunts tradition by wearing high-heels, smoking cigarettes, and openly cavorting with men, and denounced her consumer practices and fashion sensibilities as unethical and unpatriotic. In this paper I discuss the nature of these criticisms, their motivations, and origins in several chronologically and thematically distinct yet fundamentally nationalistic and chauvinist discourses on anti-colonial struggle, including traditional ideologies of Buddhist piety, Gandhian non-violence, and Marxism. My examination of the connections between the sartorial practices of Burmese women and the nationalist appeal for a rejection of colonial temptations shows how the controversial figure of the modern girl was essential to and constitutive of the conceptualizations of the Burmese nation-state and national identity.
Mae Nak as Comedy: Excavating the Plebeian Thai Cinema Public
May Adadol Ingawanij, Independent Scholar
The widow ghost legend of Mae Nak has been remade many times in Thai cinema. Nonzee Nimibutr’s recent version, Nang Nak (1999), has reinvented the legend as a heritage romance for middle-class Bangkok consumers, by purging the formulae of its bawdy comedy elements. This paper takes as its departure point the comical stylistic elements missing from Nonzee’s now canonical version. It highlights the centrality of the slapstick ‘widow ghost chases grown men’ sequences and the irreverent dubbed soundtrack of the Mae Nak remakes popularized between the late 1950s to early 1970s, the period when low-brow 16mm Thai feature filmmaking targeting provincial, plebeian viewers was at its height. The films the paper discusses are the versions of the Mae Nak tale produced by Saneh Komarachoon, especially Mae Nak Phra Khanong (1959), starring the comedians Lor Tok and Chusee. The stylistic pattern of bawdy physical comedy, spontaneous and often nonsensical dialogue dubbing, culminating in a digressive narrative structure, suggests that the Mae Nak films of this period were premised on a kind of film viewing experience now lost or under erasure. Through a combination of stylistic analysis, interview with the film crew and exhibitors, and archival research into the reception of the Mae Nak films in cheap movies and stars magazines of the period, the paper attempts to reconstruct the film-theatre experience of viewing the ‘plebeian’ Mae Nak films. The hypothesis is that such viewing experience was, in its structure, participatory, unpredictable and rowdy; and that it thus provided an opening for viewers to constitute themselves as part of a plebeian public. The paper is in this sense beginning of a cultural history research project on the plebeian public sphere in Thailand.
Closing the Gender Gap with Progressive Social and Educational Policies in India
Christy Boscardin, University of California, Los Angeles; Kin Bing Wu, World Bank; Pete Goldschmidt, California State University, Northridge
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on education re-affirm not only the importance of education for all, but also promotion of gender equality by eliminating gender disparity in enrollment in primary and secondary education by 2005. In 2001, India accounted for about a quarter of the world’s 104 million out-of-school children, with girls constituting a majority. India’s progress in girls’ education not only will have a positive impact on its own social and economic development, but also will affect the achievement of the education MDGs worldwide. The gender bias intersected with social exclusion makes reaching girls, SC and ST a persistent challenge to the nation even after sixty years of independence. Despite deep-seated prejudice, progressive public policy and actions in recent years have been transforming the educational scenario and social landscape. Government interventions to overcome these barriers focus mainly on the supply-side issues, and, to some extent, also on the demand-side factors. The District Primary Education Program (DPEP) of the 1990s which intervened in half of India’s 600 districts with low female literacy rates, and the National Program for Universal Elementary Education of the 21st Century, have been financing school and classroom construction and establishment of alternative schools to ensure distance does not pose a problem for physical access. This paper reviews the current status of girls’ enrollment and achievement, as well as the key factors contributing to the continuing gender and social gaps, and the strategies needed to close the remaining gaps.
Marital Discord and Private Testimonies in Public Forums: An Ethnography of a Women’s Arbitration Court in New Delhi
Shalini S Grover, Sussex University
This paper presents an analysis of how poor women from slums and working class neighbourhoods of Delhi routinely approach Women’s Arbitration Courts (Mahila Panchayats) thereby seeking marriage-counselling, dispute settlement and conflict resolution services. Drawing on PhD fieldwork that was conducted in the largest Women’s Arbitration Court in Delhi, the paper will illustrate the types of marital grievances that women register with Women’s Courts and how marriage-counsellors mediate solutions on behalf of women. It will explicate how Women’s Courts emblematize an alternative women-centered justice system as they provide functional alternatives to state structures. The paper’s central focus however lies in analyzing the transformatory character of Women’s Courts i.e. whether they have the potential for democratizing marriage and gender relations and how they operate in the regulation of marriage and domestic life. I will demonstrate how Women’s Courts are transforming and regulating the institution of marriage in paradoxical ways. Accordingly, the discourses that counsellors articulate on marital roles, different marriages (e.g. love marriages, arranged marriages and re-marriage) and sexuality will be discussed in detail. The paper will emphasis how Women’s Courts do not advocate equality or radical shifts in marriage. They negotiate on behalf of women within the existing patriarchal framework thus deliberating ‘patriarchal bargains’ and ‘compromises pacts’ within marriage. Yet despite their endorsement of patriarchal bargains, Women’s Courts are creating new and important spaces of symmetries for women whilst democratizing marriage in contradictory ways.
“I’ve Done Nothing Wrong:” Feminine Ideals and Betrayal among Baul Women
Lisa I Knight, Furman University
Baul women living in West Bengal, India, and Bangladesh are members of a small religious group that includes both men and women and draws its membership from the regional Hindu and Muslim society. In contrast to the local dominant religions, Baul ideology asserts a high status for women, a disregard for caste hierarchy, and a suspicion of institutional religions. Bauls also claim that women are the gurus of men and should be respected. Unlike traditional rural Hindu and Muslim women who remain secluded in the home, Baul women travel to sing for alms or to perform at large public functions. While these women clearly value the Baul tradition and the freedom they gain as Bauls, they argue that their lives and reputation are not protected by the larger Hindu and Muslim society in which they live. For instance, Muslims in Bangladesh tend to view Baul women as uneducated, sexually loose, and threatening to the status of the “good Muslim woman.” Faced by such scorn for their controversial public roles, Baul women engage in a variety of tactics—such as denying their role as religious preceptor and engaging in practices of purdah (especially veiling)—in order to ensure their livelihood, wellbeing, and dignity. In the process, they place the blame on society for not protecting them while at the same time they assert that they have done nothing wrong. Based on ethnographic research, this paper examines the pressures on Baul women to conform to dominant religion and the strategies employed by Bauls to maintain their own identity.