Contestations Over Gender in Asia

Lyn Parker, Laura Dales, Chie Ikeya

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138906822
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317442639
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book brings together the work of scholars from around the world in a consideration of how gender is contested in various parts of Asia – in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines.

Part I of this collection explores notions of agency in relation to women's domestic and everyday lives. While 'agency' is one of the key terms in contemporary social science, scholarship on women in Asia recently has focussed on women's political activism. Women's private lives have been neglected in this new scholarship. This volume has a special focus on women's relational and emotional lives, domestic practices, marriage, singlehood and maternity. Papers consider how women negotiate enhanced space and reputations, challenging negative representations and entrenched models of intra-family and intimate relations. There is also a warning about too free feminist expectations of agency and the repercussions of the exercise of agency.

The three essays in Part II examine the historical construction of masculinities in colonial and postcolonial South and Southeast Asia, and the ways that manhood is interpreted, experienced and performed in daily life in the past and in present times. They highlight the centrality and continued relevance of masculinity to analyses of empire and nation and underscore the highly gendered and (hetero)sexualized nature of political, military, and economic institutions.

Collectively, the essays explore a wide range of competing articulations and experiences of gender within Asia, emphasising the historical and contemporary plurality and variability of femininity and masculinity, and the dynamic and intersectional nature of gender identities and relations.

This book was published as a special issue of Asian Studies Review.

Introduction: The Everyday Agency of Women in Asia

LYN PARKER and LAURA DALES

The University of Western Australia

This issue of Asian Studies Review includes a themed section that addresses agency in relation to women’s everyday lives and experiences in Asia. Four papers follow this Introduction: Siti Aisyah and Lyn Parker (2014) study domestic violence in Makassar, Sulawesi, Indonesia; Laura Dales (2014) explores singlehood for women in Japan; Tamara Jacka (2014) challenges stereotypes around older rural women in China; and Wanning Sun (2014) examines literary representations of rural migrant women in southern China.

Building on a discussion begun in the edited collection, The Agency of Women in Asia (Parker, 2005), this collection revisits theoretical questions and explores some of the issues posed in that volume, but with a special focus on ordinary, everyday social practice in contexts of work, marriage, singlehood and maternity. In particular the papers in this collection contribute to the theorisation of agency, exploring not only the ways in which women express agency, but also feminist expectations of agency, the repercussions of the exercise of agency, the effect of negative representations of women on women’s agency, and the ways in which scholars can understand and assess agency.

Acknowledging the important theoretical work that already exists on agency (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997; Mahmood, 2001 and 2005; Ortner, 2001 and 2006), and the minor spate of edited books on women’s public activism in Asia recently (e.g. Burghoorn et al., 2008; Iwanaga, 2008; Roces and Edwards, 2010), this collection takes a different tack. Women’s everyday lives, on the ground in lived situations, have been neglected in this new scholarship. In this collection, we focus on women’s relational and emotional lives, their experience of domestic practices and daily social and sexual interactions, on the way they build relationships, and their involvement in forms of interdependence and mutual aid. Some pictures are intimate and intensely personal; others are of public behaviour – of women shouting out, or publishing on the internet. Some agency is transient, as when women are carried along with the ebb and flow of family relationships or economic ups-and-downs; some is more permanent in its effects, as when the agency of women enacts legislation against domestic violence, or when new literary forms effect new images of working-class migrant women.

The focus on women in Asia addresses the continuing marginality of women as subjects in disciplines outside feminist studies, and the marginality of Asia within feminist studies. We aim to contribute to the study of the “Other” – that is, the study of “Asia” and of “women”, of subalterns and of alternatives to the hegemony of the West. Ahearn (2001) posited that agency is culturally mediated. In grounding our collection in Asian cultures, we are testing the concept of agency in non-Western cultural environments. This position raises many theoretical challenges, such as ideas of personhood cross-culturally, different understandings of the value of personal autonomy, the nature of ideal femininity and the meaning of family. These are significant themes not just because they demand re-thinking of the subject, her personhood and profile, but also because of movements in the social and political landscape. Asian societies are undergoing rapid social change, which includes phenomena such as shifts from arranged marriages to love marriages, a decline and delay in marriage in some countries, the emergence of new forms of intimacy, as well as new patterns of work and mobility, that impact on women’s everyday lives.

This selection of articles provides the opportunity to explore the ramifications of such transformations and to assess their significance for women. The papers challenge the assumption that globalisation, greater mobility and autonomy automatically enhance women’s agency, or that women’s increased agency is uniformly evaluated as a social good. The papers, taken together, show the enduring strength of local cultures, and the need to always take into account the specificity of local histories, while never presuming an unchanging essence.

There is no doubt that agency has become an “indispensable theoretical category” (Ortner, 2001, p. 77) – arguably the keyword of both practice theory in anthropology and feminist anthropology and sociology. A focus on agency enables us to see that in the face of dominant power and discourses, subordinated and marginalised groups and individuals make room to move. They are not passive recipients, captives of dominant discourses. Agency is this capacity to negotiate with power in whatever form – as complicity, compromise, deviance or resistance – and with whatever motivation – whether it be intentional or unintentional, voluntary or involuntary, self-expression, self-interest or group interest. Women exercise agency in the interstices of power, and for this reason a focus on women’s agency in everyday life seems particularly apposite.

The papers’ focus on the minutiae of everyday life does not mean that the authors are blind to the dominant discourses, politics and economic forces that shape the contemporary world. In fact, it is these broader structures that delimit the discussions of the everyday. But these dominant forces do not just trickle down to the level of the individual and determine her social relations. Rather, the papers show how relations of power and wider discourses interplay with individual subjectivities, how women make their everyday lives meaningful through discursive practices, how women’s agency feeds back, shaping the contexts of family, friendship, courtship or community. The papers also show, at a higher level, the importance of interrogating how women’s agency is represented: who defines agency, to what end, and with what motivation?

For readers who might not normally read feminist work, we want to point out that these papers are not just about women. Women almost always exist in the real everyday world within gendered social relations; because of this, the authors attend to gender relations, not just to women. It is not tenable to only focus on women: mature single women in Japan who want to marry are thinking about marriage to a man; grandmothers in China are embedded within families; women getting beaten at home in Indonesia are getting beaten up by men. The point is therefore that these papers might be for women, but that the issues need to be addressed with men, and the construction of masculinities, in mind.

In this collection, the category of “women” is diverse. The subjects of our papers are old women, grandmothers, singles in their 30s and 40s, married women, poor rural women, comfortable middle-class women, and urban women. These different ages, life stages, marital statuses, socioeconomic classes and geographic, ethnic and religious identities bear in different ways on the construction of women. The intersections are many and complex, but almost always these non-gender characteristics of women shape their identity as women, just as gender characteristics shape other identities. It is useful to remember that well-worn feminist image of who we see in the mirror: is it “just” a woman? Or is it a woman who has just been bashed up by her husband? Or is it an old woman, whose body bears witness to the hard life of farming in north-west China? While it is obvious that different sorts of inequalities (e.g. of class and race) cannot be treated in the same way, and it is probably impossible to design a study that captures this complexity, a focus on the agency of women certainly serves to highlight more than just gender inequality. The papers in this issue reveal a great deal about social conditions in China, Japan and Indonesia – particularly issues of class, ethnicity, geographic location, age and marriage.

The first article is by Wanning Sun (2014) and it examines agency in the context of literary representations of rural migrant women in southern China. Sun proposes that the semi-autobiographical or self-ethnographic literary works that detail the lives of northern migrant women effect agency in the form of cultural politics. These works offer a re-configuration of the term “northern girl”, a label that typically ascribes promiscuity and moral abjectness, depicting women instead as pragmatic and sexually autonomous actors. Sun argues that migrant subaltern literature provides an alternative avenue to understanding women’s experiences as sexual agents, and challenges dominant constructions of migrant women that ignore the interrelation of gender, class and geography.

The paper by Tamara Jacka (2014) on “left-behind” older women in rural China demonstrates that a discourse of vulnerability does not encapsulate older women’s capability. Jacka notes that the construction of a “vulnerable group” can undermine women’s agency by diminishing the contribution of older women as social actors. Furthermore, the categorisation “masks a great deal of diversity among older women in the ways in which their lives are shaped by a range of practices, relationships, norms and institutions”. In this case, the strategic promotion of older women’s special needs for welfare benefits can ultimately erode the self-esteem of women, and reinscribe their marginality as perceived non-productive social actors.

Siti Aisyah and Lyn Parker (2014) show that women’s expressions of agency can come at a high price. In their examination of domestic violence in Makassar, Indonesia, Aisyah and Parker note that wives’ transgressive behaviour, resistance and criticism of their husbands can provoke domestic violence, and furthermore these acts can be construed as justification for violence by the broader society. Thus, within the unequal power relationship of marriage in Indonesia, women’s expressions of agency do not necessarily and always serve women well. On the other hand, it was through a careful expression of women’s agency that the Law on Domestic Violence was passed in 2004; and since then women’s groups have been working to change the discourse on domestic violence.

Laura Dales (2014) addresses the possibilities of agency in singlehood for Japanese women. Within the context of demographic changes, discourses of singlehood such as the ohitorisama (the single woman or “singleton”) remain tied to the ideal of marriage. The potential for this discourse to engender agency is delimited by factors beyond marital status, including the health, economic capacity and familial support available to the single woman. Shifts in the discursive construction of singlehood may assist in the creation of a legitimate social space for women, but women’s agency requires structural as well as symbolic foundations.

These papers all advocate a re-examination of agency that is sensitive to factors beyond individual control and personal impact. The conceptualisation of agency as relational empowerment, cultural practice or capability allows us to consider the meanings of a variety of micro-level practices, beliefs and interpersonal engagements. These discussions note the marginalising effects of ageing, rurality, singlehood, domestic violence and economic dependence on women’s lives, but do not necessarily see agency as the cure-all for these issues. Rather, the authors advocate care in the construction and evaluation of agency. A cautious approach recognises both the limitations of the term – what it can mean for women’s lives concretely, to exercise agency – and the limitations of existing definitions of agency that attract the attention of scholars, states and communities. If agency is multifarious, it is also not unlimited. This collection explores the boundaries of agency, specifically looking to map the areas that women traverse in their daily lives.

References

Ahearn, Laura (2001) Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology 30 [accessed through ProQuest].

Aisyah, Siti and Lyn Parker (2014) Problematic conjugations: Women’s agency, marriage and domestic violence in Indonesia. Asian Studies Review 38(2), pp. 205–23.

Burghoorn, Wil, Kazuki Iwanaga, Cecilia Milwertz and Qi Wang, eds. (2008) Gender politics in Asia: Women manoeuvring within dominant gender orders (Copenhagen: NIAS Press).

Comaroff, John L. and Jean Comaroff (1997) The dialectics of modernity on a South African frontier. Volume II of Of revelation and revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Dales, Laura (2014) Ohitorisama, singlehood and agency in Japan. Asian Studies Review 38(2), pp. 224–42.

Iwanaga, Kazuki, ed. (2008) Women’s political participation and representation in Asia: Obstacles and challenges (Copenhagen: NIAS Press).

Jacka, Tamara (2014) Left-behind and vulnerable? Conceptualising development and older women’s agency in rural China. Asian Studies Review 38(2), pp. 186–204.

Mahmood, Saba (2001) Feminist theory, embodiment, and the docile agent: Some reflections on the Egyptian Islamic revival. Cultural Anthropology 16(2), pp. 202–36.

Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

Ortner, Sherry (2001) Specifying agency: The Comaroffs and their critics. Interventions 3(1), pp. 76–84.

Ortner, Sherry (2006) Anthropology and social theory: Culture, power and the acting subject (Durham and London: Duke University Press).

Parker, Lyn, ed. (2005) The agency of women in Asia (Singapore: Marshall Cavendish).

Roces, Mina and Louise Edwards, eds. (2010) Women’s movements in Asia: Feminisms and transnational activism (Abingdon and New York: Routledge).

Sun, Wanning (2014) “Northern girls”: Cultural politics of agency and South China’s migrant literature. Asian Studies Review 38(2), pp. 168–85.

“Northern Girls”: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature

WANNING SUN

University of Technology Sydney

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the cultural politics of agency, and explores the relationship between cultural form, migrant experience and social change. It traces the emergence of a range of literary forms in south China and how these new cultural forms provide hitherto unavailable space to contest the state- and market-driven narratives, which tend to link dagongmei’s (rural migrant women’s) sexuality with inexperience and vulnerability on the one hand, and criminality, immorality and incivility on the other. The paper suggests that these newly emerging cultural forms present alternative perspectives on the practical circumstances, moral rationalities and emotional consequences that condition and shape migrant women’s sexual experience, and for this reason, they constitute important points of intervention.

Introduction

Quite a few girls in my factory have a moonlighting job earning money that way. But we do not call them er nai (mistress) or xiao jie (bar girl); we call them an chang (undercover hooker). More lenient requirements apply with undercover hookers, in terms of age and looks, and of course, they earn less than mistresses or bar girls. I did not sell myself in the hard times, and I am even less inclined to do so now, especially given that my life has improved a bit. What’s more, there is another pathway – finding a man who is prepared to help me pay for my brother’s education. For suitable candidates, I have to rule out any ordinary worker on the assembly lines; with what little wages they earn, he can hardly feed himself, let alone provide a stipend to his future brother-in-law. So my thoughts turn to Wang Lei again. As ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: The Everyday Agency of Women in Asia
• 2. “Northern Girls”: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature
• 3. Left-behind and Vulnerable? Conceptualising Development and Older Women’s Agency in Rural China
• 4. Problematic Conjugations: Women’s Agency, Marriage and Domestic Violence in Indonesia
• 5. Ohitorisama, Singlehood and Agency in Japan
• 6. Masculinities in Asia: A Review Essay
• 7. A Collision of Masculinities: Men, Modernity and Urban Transportation in American-Colonial Manila
• 8. Obscenity, Moral Contagion and Masculinity: Hijras in Public Space in Colonial North India
• Index