This provocative book seeks to redress inaccuracies in Western perceptions of gender relations in Southeast Asia by bringing to the fore the area's ethnic and cultural variance and showing how women and men explain the informal and psychological dimensions of relationships as vital in holding family, neighbourhood and kinship ties together. Although there are differences between male and female perceptions of sex roles in society, women perceive their situation as disadvantaged rather than less significant. Male-female interpretations of power and status tend to converge usually towards the understanding that the contributions of men and women are equally important in the formation of family and society.

Essential reading for scholars of gender and sexuality and anyone interested in Asia.

The Handbook on Gender in Asia critically examines, through a gender perspective, five broad themes of significance to Asia: the ‘Theory and Practice’ of researching in Asia; ‘Gender, Ageing and Health’; ‘Gender and Labour’; ‘Gendered Migrations and Mobilities’; and ‘Gender at the Margins’. With each chapter providing an overview of the key intellectual developments on the issue under discussion, as well as empirical examples to examine how the Asian case sheds light on these debates, this collection will be an invaluable reference for scholars of gender and Asia.

This Element examines gender in Southeast Asia by focusing on two main themes. The first concerns hegemonic cultural constructions of gender and Southeast Asian subjects' responses to these dominant discourses. Roces introduces hegemonic discourses on ideal masculinities and ideal femininities, evaluates the impact of religion, analyses how authoritarian regimes fashion these ideals. Discussion then turns to the hegemonic ideals surrounding desire and sexualities and the way these are policed by society and the state. The second theme concerns the ways hegemonic ideals influence the gendering of power and politics. Roces argues that because many Southeast Asians see power as being held by kinship alliance groups, women are able to access political power through their ties with men-as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters and even mistresses. However, women's movements have challenged this androcentric division of power.

A Thai foodseller on the streets of Bangkok, a cyclo driver in a Vietnamese village, a Pahari migrant laborer in the Himalayas, a Parsi-Christian professional social worker shuttling back and forth between London and Calcutta—Trans-Status Subjects examines how these and other South and Southeast Asians affect and are affected by globalization. While much work has focused on the changes wrought by globalization—describing how people maintain foundations or are permanently destabilized—this collection theorizes the complex ways individuals negotiate their identities and create alliances in the midst of both stability and instability, as what the editors call trans-status subjects. Using gender paradigms, historical time, and geographic space as driving analytic concerns, the essays gathered here consider the various ways South and Southeast Asians both perpetuate and resist various hierarchies despite unequal mobilities within economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia, and the United States. In investigating issues of power, mobility, memory, and solidarity in recent eras of globalization, the contributors—scholars and activists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States—illuminate various facets of the new concept of trans-status subjects. Trans-Status Subjects carves out a new area of inquiry at the intersection of feminisim and critical geography, as well as globalization, postcolonial, and cultural studies. Contributors. Anannya Bhattacharjee, Esha Niyogi De, Karen Gaul, Ketu Katrak, Karen Leonard, Philippa Levine, Kathryn McMahon, Andrew McRae, Susan Morgan, Nihal Perera, Sonita Sarker, Jael Silliman, Sylvia Tiwon, Gisele Yasmeen

This impressive array of essays considers the contingent and shifting meanings of gender and the body in contemporary Southeast Asia. By analyzing femininity and masculinity as fluid processes rather than social or biological givens, the authors provide new ways of understanding how gender intersects with local, national, and transnational forms of knowledge and power. Contributors cut across disciplinary boundaries and draw on fresh fieldwork and textual analysis, including newspaper accounts, radio reports, and feminist writing. Their subjects range widely: the writings of feminist Filipinas; Thai stories of widow ghosts; eye-witness accounts of a beheading; narratives of bewitching genitals, recalcitrant husbands, and market women as femmes fatales. Geographically, the essays cover Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. The essays bring to this region the theoretical insights of gender theory, political economy, and cultural studies. Gender and other forms of inequality and difference emerge as changing systems of symbols and meanings. Bodies are explored as sites of political, economic, and cultural transformation. The issues raised in these pages make important connections between behavior, bodies, domination, and resistance in this dynamic and vibrant region.

This collection intervenes in key areas of feminist scholarship and activism in contemporary South Asia, particularly India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, while asking how this investigation might enrich feminist theorizing and practice globally.