Organizer: Chie Ikeya, National University of Singapore
Chair: Tamara L. Loos, Cornell University
Discussants: Tamara L. Loos, Cornell University; Judith A. N. Henchy, University
of Washington
The panel seeks a broad regional perspective and understanding
of the history of sex and intimacy in colonial Southeast Asia. Since Ann Stoler’s work
on Dutch Indonesia and French Indochina revealed that “matters of intimacy”—i.e.,
sex, sentiment, domestic arrangements, and child rearing—were “matters
of state,” there has been increased scholarly attention to the history
of sex and intimacy in colonial Southeast Asia. This panel brings together historians
of Southeast Asia with varied country-specific expertise who share a common
research interest in “matters of intimacy.” It brings into dialogue
their recent scholarship on the intimate links between sex and (anti-)colonial
politics and the impact of colonialism on indigenous ideas, discourses, and
practices related to sex. Papers examine scientific and medical interest in
the sexual life of women in late 19th-century Spanish Philippines; the role
of feminism, nationalism, and internationalism in the re-framing of early 20th
century prostitution policy in the American Philippines and the Netherlands
East Indies; and colonial and anti-colonial policies and discourses concerning
intermarriage between Burmese women and “foreign”—i.e., non-Buddhist,
non-Burmese—men in early 20th-century British Burma. These papers show
that sex served as a site of colonial as well as anti-colonial anxiety, exploitation
and regulation, and they consider the extent to which both sides of the colonial
struggle depended on the control of sex and intimacy as a key instrument
of social order.
Andrew Abalahin, San Diego State University
In the late 19th-century Netherlands East Indies and the Spanish Philippines,
regulating prostitution was one of the many ways in which colonial states
sought to increase control over subject societies convulsed by integration into
the global capitalist economy. By the early 20th century, however, international
movements had succeeded in pressuring governments to abolish the state regulation
of prostitution: the Philippines' new (from 1898) American masters never
formally instituted "regulationism" and the Dutch ended their regulatory regime
in 1914. This paper will examine how these colonial governments confronted the
prostitution problem without the aid of a formal regulatory regime while under
increased pressure from new publics, national (Indonesian and Filipino) and
international (the post-WWI League of Nations), much provoked by the persistence
of prostitution. In this new environment, colonial bureaucracies shifted their
attention from policing prostitution within their territories to combating human
trafficking across international borders. Meanwhile, Indonesian and Filipino
nationalist leaders, mostly men but also increasingly women, began to fixate
on the figure of the prostitute, seeing her both as a symbol of the degradation
of colonized nation as a whole and as a threat to the "reawakening" nation's
health (even portraying traditional morality as "eugenic"). At the
same time, as in the case of popular protest against the 1918 deportation
of prostitutes from Manila's red-light district to plantations on Mindanao,
this patriarchal perspective was challenged by the introduction of a discourse
on civil rights that sought to protect the freedom of the prostitute as a fellow
citizen.
Raquel Reyes, University of London
In October 1899, José de Vera y Gómez, a Spanish student of medicine,
successfully presented his doctoral dissertation to his examiners at the Universidad
de Madrid. His fieldwork in the Philippines, he wrote in his preface, had been
fraught with difficulty. This was not due mainly to the revolution against Spain
that had broken out in 1896, or to the American occupation of 1898 that had
heralded the end of Spanish sovereignty in the Islands. His biggest challenge,
he acknowledged, was that he had chosen to investigate a very delicate subject:
the intimate details of the Filipino woman’s sexual life. His dissertation,
which is the only monograph written prior to the 20th century on any aspect
of Filipino women’s health, was entitled “Vida genital de la mujer
Filipina”. This paper seeks to situate José de Vera’s interest
in the sexual life of women in the Philippines in the wider field of colonial
medicine in the tropics, specifically in the area of medical geography, which
in the 19th century was preoccupied with scientifically establishing how differences
in climate, culture, and race influenced the ways in which the human body functioned
well or became ill. A woman’s reproductive life – fecundity, menstruation,
childbirth and so forth - provided medical geographers with an excellent
area of investigation in which to test and develop their scientific theories
and methods of comparison.
Chie Ikeya, National University of Singapore
Historians of Burma have claimed that intermarriage between Burmese women
and foreign men were common practices since at least the 19th century, and
have noted that such unions were even encouraged by the local population. Yet,
intimate relationships between Burmese women and “foreign”—i.e., non-Buddhist,
non-Burmese—men became a topic of heated public discussion in 1920s and
1930s colonial Burma. The critics portrayed Burmese women’s intermarriage
with British and Indian men as dangerous temporary liaisons that were harmful
not only to the Burmese women but to the Burmese society as a whole. Why did
intermarriage become a topic of public discussion at the time that it did and
how do we account for its critique as a morally and culturally reprehensible
practice? Barbara Andaya has pointed out that in early modern Southeast Asia,
rise of patriarchal states, expansion of urban center, and the growth of prostitution
transformed attitudes toward sexuality and eroded the status of the “temporary
wife.” Did Burmese attitudes towards sexual relations between foreign
men and local women experience a similar change, except at the turn of the
20th century? This paper addresses these questions and examines the impact of
colonial rule on local notions and practices of sex and intimacy. It argues
that neither economic transformation nor the changing tides of Burmese nationalism
sufficiently explain the criticisms of the intimate relationships between Burmese
women and foreign men, and suggests that the discourse on intermarriage needs
to be analyzed as stemming from a crisis within dominant masculinity under colonialism.
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