Gender Politics in the Asia-Pacific Region

Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Peggy Teo, Shirlena Huang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134624508
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Amidst the unevenness and unpredictability of change in the Asia-Pacific region, women's lives are being transformed. This volume takes up the challenge of exploring the ways in which women are active players, collaborators, participants, leaders and resistors in the politics of change in the region. The editors focus attention on the politics of gender as a mobilizing centre for identities, and the ways in which individualized identity politics may be linked to larger collective emancipatory projects based on shared interests, practical needs, or common threats. Collectively, the chapters illustrate the complexity of women's strategies, the diversity of sites for action, and the flexibility of their alliances as they carve out niches for themselves in what are still largely patriarchal worlds. This book will be of vital interest to scholars in a range of subjects, including gender studies, human geography, women's studies, Asian studies, sociology and anthropology.

1 Introduction

Women’s agencies and activisms in the Asia-Pacific region

Brenda S.A. Yeoh, Peggy Teo and Shirlena Huang

Introduction

The anticipated dawn of what has been termed the Pacific Century saw a spate of literature (for example, Das 1996; Robison and Goodman 1996; Sen and Stivens 1998) on the Asia-Pacific region focusing on the ‘new affluence’ and runaway success of East and Southeast Asian ‘miracle’ economies. This was suddenly brought up short as the region floundered in crisis in the closing years of the old century. A volume such as Krishna Sen’s and Maila Stivens’ (1998) Gender and Power in Affluent Asia began asking interesting and innovative questions around the central theme of gender relations surrounding ‘consumption’ in an era of affluence in the pursuit of modernity and global futures in Asia. While these themes continue to be relevant, attention has now veered towards dealing with the depth and crisis of change in the region. Some of this literature has begun to examine the differential role and experiences of men and women in sustaining the reproduction of global capitalism and economic development in the midst of change. Beyond giving attention to women cast as workers, there has been interest in women’s life experiences past the arena of paid work, as well as the broad discourses of power in which women are inserted, formed and reproduced as female subjects within the uneven web of globalisation (Ram and Jolly 1998; Edwards and Roces 2000; Hilsdon et al. 2000; Huang et al. 2000; Wille and Passl 2001).

Amidst the unevenness and unpredictability of change, women’s lives are being transformed – even as they resist or inflect creeping as well as sweeping change – as they become threaded into the intersecting spaces between globalising time–space compression on the one hand, and the particularities of localisms on the other (as well as the multiple liminal spaces ‘betwixt and between’). Thus the subject of this volume is to grapple with the multiple sites women occupy (and from which they are sometimes displaced) within and at the overlapping borderlands among the arenas of industrial society, the state, civil society, community circles and the home.

This volume takes up the challenge of exploring the ways women are active players – not truants but collaborators, participants, leaders and resistors – in the politics of change in the region. Drawing on the current dialogue among feminism, cultural politics and geography, the book focuses on agencies and activisms, insisting on women’s strategic conduct in constructing their own (multiple) identities and navigating their (and often their families’) life paths, though not always under conditions of their own choosing. Indeed, more has been written on how structural forces such as global capital, the state or some other institutional form act to define gender identities, construct gender relations and impact on different groups of women, than the converse effects of women’s agencies and activisms in shaping institutions and structures and altering gender identities and relations. While recognising the inescapable intertwining of structure and agency, the present volume gives weight to the latter in valorising women’s strategies as played out under specific conditions of social materiality, from the little tactics of the habitat to the activisms of organised groups and mass mobilisation on the streets.

The volume provides evidence from a spectrum of localities in the Asia-Pacific region to counter stereotypical discourses which invariably portray women of the region either as silent, domesticised housewives cloistered in the private sphere, or eroticised, exoticised objects of male desire. Constantly framed as ‘the other’ within relations of dominance and dependence, women’s capacity and potential to make a difference and their roles in forging alternative modernities within a globalising whole have not been adequately interrogated. A central concern in this volume is then to endow women as subjects with agency, not simply depict them as passive victims of patriarchy and capitalism, or ‘vehicles for the realization of transcending systems or projects’ (Randall 1998: 185–6).

Gender politics and resistances

While recognising that it is no longer sufficient to theorise power relations as the expression of any one singular dimension of oppression and that, instead, social inequalities along axes of race, class, gender and citizenship rights are mutually reinforcing, this book focuses attention on the politics of gender as a mobilising centre for identities, and the ways in which, and under what circumstances, individualised identity politics woven into the fabric of the everyday may be linked to larger collective emancipatory projects based on shared interests, practical needs or common threats. By drawing together the politics of gender and group identifications (whether at the level of the family/household, the nation-state or global capitalism) and the ways they engage the rapidly changing material conditions of the biosphere in which women live, this book provides a different angle to ‘seeing’ and ‘understanding’ emerging socio-political power relations in the region. By ‘politics’, then, we include a wide range of activities undertaken by women ‘which fall outside the boundaries of conventional politics and therefore not usually deemed to be “political” ’ (Waylen 1998: 1).

Stivens (2000: 24) argues that feminist attempts to relocate gender politics in the region ‘appear to have homed in on human rights’ as claims for women’s rights as human rights have been facilitated by ‘spectacular growth of a global feminist public’. Our conclusions in this volume are more tentative in nature: while some struggles and projects have clear engagements with the global human rights framework, there are myriad others which emerge in spaces somewhat disconnected to, or dislocated from, the ‘global’ or even ‘public’ platform. These fragmentary, less-than-completely articulated, and possibly unintended, struggles written into the interstitial spaces of everyday life should not be dismissed. Given that there are multiple oppressions at work in women’s lives at different scales, we argue that emancipatory politics can rely on no one single, universal formula but draw on multiple identifications and diverse strategies, sometimes working the ground ‘locally’, sometimes collapsing the personal and the political in opposing an exclusionary nation or the discriminatory practices of the state, and sometimes by drawing on transnational or global frameworks or discourses. By demonstrating the possibilities, and the difficulties, involved in these variegated enterprises with different spatial reaches, this volume provides further grist to the mill to debunk essentialist notions of and transhistorical claims about gender, and instead argues for the need for ‘situated’ knowledge and contextualised evaluations in unravelling gender relations in the region.

As has been argued by others, the domain of ‘resistance’ and ‘politics’ must be expanded beyond ‘heroic acts by heroic people or heroic organisations’ (Thrift 1997: 125) (without detracting from the power and poetics of such acts or suggesting that they are scissored out of the fabric of everyday contexts) and reconfigured to include resistant postures, ploys, tactics and strategies woven into ‘the practice of everyday life’ (de Certeau 1984). Scott’s (1985) work, in particular, was highly influential in valorising ‘weapons of the weak’ as ‘everyday forms of resistance’, but also attracted the attention of critics like Abu-Lughod (1990: 42) who cautioned against the ‘tendency to romanticize resistance, to read all forms of resistance as signs of the ineffectiveness of systems of power and the resilience and creativity of the human spirit in its refusal to be dominated’. While we need to guard against trivialising women’s ‘resistance’ by discerning it in all situations everywhere, removing it from its macropolitical status allows us to appreciate the fluid, unstable nature of power relations. This creates the conceptual and creative space to rewrite the everyday world that women inhabit on its own terms. As Vidler (1978: 28) points out (albeit in a different context), it is often ‘[b]etween submission to the intolerable and outraged revolt against it’ that ordinary people ‘somehow defined a human existence within the walls and along the passage of their streets’.

Routledge (1997: 69) further reminds us of the variegated nature of resistance:

Resistances may be interpreted as fluid processes whose emergence and dissolution cannot be fixed as points in time [or space]. … [They are] rhizomatic multiplicities of interactions, relations, and acts of becoming … Any resistance synthesizes a multiplicity of elements and relations without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearrangement. As rhizomatic practices, resistances take diverse forms, they move in different dimensions, they create unexpected networks, connections, and possibilities. They may invent new trajectories and forms of existence, articulate alternative futures and possibilities, create autonomous zones as a strategy against particular dominating power relations.

Women’s ‘politics’ and strategies of resistance may thus be ‘assembled out of the materials and practices of everyday life’ (Routledge 1997: 69). Thinking of resistance as ‘rhizomatic practices’ – the metaphor appropriately insists on a certain ‘grounding’ of such practices and at the same time conceives of resistance as sprouting both ‘above’ and ‘below ground’ – points to the contingent nature of power. At the same time, it allows us to transcend the dichotomy between treating resistant spaces as purely autonomous, ‘uncolonised’ spaces exterior to or dislocated from the spatial parameters of domination, or as purely ‘underside’ spaces of social life confined to and reacting against authorised spaces of domination in a ‘strategic’ fashion where ‘each offensive from one side serves as leverage for a counter-offensive from the other’ (Foucault 1980: 163–4). Treating resistance as ‘rhizomatic’ emphasises its creative and elusive nature, as a subjectivity which is ‘ “polyphonic”, plural, working in many discursive registers, many spaces, many times’ (Thrift 1997: 135). It is thus important not only to recognise that ‘politics’ take on many different hues and inhabit different spaces, but also to underscore the way they connect, collide, diverge, transmute, sometimes in unexpected ways, and often moving ‘in’ and ‘out’ of spaces of domination.

Body politics

Geographers in particular have insisted on the value of a spatial understanding of ‘politics’ and ‘resistance’, and in grounding geographic metaphors of space, place and positionality (currently all the rage in cultural studies) in situated practices and local contexts. In considering the ‘site’ of women’s agency – that is, the spaces from which women act – many have argued that it is from marginal spaces and liminal interstices that women find multiple resourceful ways to exercise and express agency. Various authors have written about these spaces – the ‘space of radical openness’ and the ‘profound edge’ (hooks 1990); the ‘margins’, ‘periphery’ and ‘underclass of formal power structures’ (Hays-Mitchell 1995); ‘counter-spaces’ (Lefebvre 1991) – and drawn on metaphors of spatiality to demonstrate how women struggle to ‘create, conserve and re-create political spaces’ (Keith and Pile 1993).

Spaces at the margins are hence not only produced by dominant groups intent on securing conceptual or instrumental control, but also simultaneously drawn upon by subordinate groups resisting exclusionary definitions or tactics and advancing their own claims. They are ‘battleground[s] within which and around which conflicting socio-ecological forces of valuation and representation are perpetually at play’ (Harvey 2000: 116). The most ‘irreducible locus for the determination of all values, meanings, and significations’ within these marginal spaces is the human body, ‘the measure of all things’ (Harvey 2000: 97–8). Not only are different kinds of bodies produced, both materially and representationally, by different processes, and in the course of it all marked by class, race, gender and other distinctions – these bodies are not ‘passive products of external processes’ – but ‘active and transformative in relation to the processes that produce, sustain, and dissolve [them]’ (Harvey 2000: 99).

The politics of the gendered body is given central focus in a number of chapters in this volume. Tatjana Haque observes that in contrast to the multiple ways in which ‘the body’ is analysed in western discourses – she lists ‘healthy bodies’, ‘sexed bodies’, ‘technobodies’, ‘virtual bodies’, ‘third bodies’, ‘cyborg bodies’, ‘hybrid bodies’ and ‘raced bodies’ – the mainstream development literature focusing on the non-western world tends to view women’s bodies in rather circumscribed ways, either as human resources for productive purposes or targets for population control. Margaret Jolly (1998a: 3, cited in Leckie, this volume) adds that the ‘maternal subject position’, and by implication the reproductive body, has been given more attention by Asia-Pacific feminists compared to their western counterparts ‘often to distinguish themselves from what are perceived to be anti-family tendencies in western feminism or as part of anti-colonial or nationalist movements’. Even within these parameters, however, it is clear that women’s bodies are not necessarily passive or docile objects, but also conduits which enable transgression and resistance (Callard 1998: 387).

This is demonstrated in Lily Phua and Brenda Yeoh’s chapter, which highlights the salience of the pregnant body, a bodily form which only women assume and, as such, represents a fraught terrain criss-crossed by political strategies on the one hand claiming complete gender equality and neutrality (and hence risking incorporation into a men’s world as ‘lesser’ beings) and, on the other, demanding recognition that women’s bodies are different (and hence risking relegation to a different sphere from men’s). For example, while some Singaporean Chinese women insist that their pregnant bodies are not ‘weak’ or ‘sick’ but ‘normal’ in order to legitimise continuing their daily routines, others draw on the power that the embodiment of procreational ability confers as a means to elevate their status and wrest a number of ‘gains’ (for example, special treatment from usually more powerful others, or legitimation of ‘irrational’ demands such as food cravings). The politics of sameness vis-à-vis the politics of difference is being played out in the context of a regulatory regime in Singapore which simultaneously works a number of discursive registers – procreation as nation-building, medicalisation of pregnancy and the legitimacy of the medical gaze, and cultural understandings of the pregnant body as the embodied continuity of male lineage – in order to produce compliant bodies. In countering the web spun out of these discourses around the pregnant body, Singaporean Chinese women show themselves capable of both discursive negotiations – legitimising their own positionings by drawing on counter-discourses (for example, western medical advice as a means to oppose traditional medical prognosis, and vice versa) or exploiting contradictions between competing discourses (for example, the state’s 180-degree turnaround from an anti- to a pro-natalist policy) – as well as ‘little’ tactics of avoidance and non-compliance.

As a terrain of control and transgression, the salience of the body goes beyond issues of reproduction, as several other contributors show. Using the specific case study of Bangladeshi women involved in the Gonoshasthaya Kendra (translated as The People’s Health Centre), a non-government organisation (NGO) with a holistic approach to health care and rural development, Haque shows how ‘women’s bodily landscapes’ and ‘bodily conduct’ are transformed as they ‘practise empowerment through their bodies’. Embodied empowerment is a process which occurs as women ‘act and are acted upon’, ‘see and are seen’, ‘speak and are spoken to’. It is experienced in and through the way women change their body language, behaviour and presentation of self as a result of their involvement in Gonoshasthaya Kendra: for example, in presenting their bodies in front of unrelated men, or moving about in public spaces with an air of assurance. From the ‘landscape’ of the individual body, Haque goes on to show that physical solidarity and visibility conferred by the coming together of many women’s bodies in street marches have the inherent potential of transforming not just the public landscape but, in turn, local power relations.

In highlighting the centrality of the body as ‘a site at which all strategies of control and resistance are registered’ (Ong 1991: 307, cited in Weix, this volume), G.G. Weix’s chapter unravels the discursive processes and mythologising work transforming a rape and murder victim, Marsinah, a young Indonesian female worker and trade union activist, into ‘a shining symbol for workers’ rights’. The rape and torture of a violated female body became ‘a sign of defeat for labour activism’ as well as a galvanising moment for collective action, while an obsession with repeated autopsies performed on the body ‘mark[ed] this death as a [continuing] source of anxiety’. Marsinah’s ‘face’, from realistic images to surrealist distortions, was relentlessly reproduced in both material and metaphorical form on magazine covers and as artistic renditions for exhibition. Her gravesite in East Java has been elevated to an honoured place of pilgrimage for young women workers who continued to ‘engage her in conversation’. As Weix points out, the Marsinah case resonates with contemporary audiences because ‘violence against workers could be condensed in the figure of a single woman violated and left for dead’. In death as in life, the body continues to be drawn upon in the politics of representation and the struggle over cultural meaning.

Identity politics

As David Harvey (2000: 118–19) explains, the body cannot be construed as the locus of political action without a notion of what concepts such as ‘personhood’, ‘a sense of self ’ and ‘identity’ mean. We follow Harvey (2000: 119) in arguing that ‘identity’ is relational and socially constructed and that the politics of identity constitutes an important mapping of the basic contours of politics and struggle within the social body – the aims, flashpoints and effects – for ‘the assumptions that are made about how people are constituted have profound effects not only on the kind of radical politics people can be expected to make but also on the kind of effects that can ultimately be hoped for through political action’ (Keith and Pile 1993: 34). As such, identity politics is not ‘some sort of surface froth that floats around on top of more important social processes, but something that strikes deep into our ability to transform the social world into concrete knowledges’ (Keith and Pile 1993: 31).

The focus on ‘politics’ puts the emphasis on the contested ‘social processes whereby people articulate, assert, challenge, suppress, realign, and co-opt varying hierarchies of identity’, often through claims and counter-claims about ‘self ’ and the ‘other’ (Dickey and Adams 2000: 10). As Appadurai (1996: 14) notes, not all identity claims are motivated by the pursuit of economic, political, or emotional gains as ‘the mobilization of markers of group difference may itself be part of a contestation of values about difference, as distinct from the consequences of difference for wealth, security or power’. For example, following Aihwa Ong (1991: 306, cited in Weix, this volume), Weix argues that the politics of representation around Marsinah and ‘her unquiet death’ had less to do with class interests than a ‘cultural struggle’ on the part of young women workers striving for ‘a politics of social memory in which they are actors as well’. In a different context, Ruth Panelli’s chapter shows that in order to resist stereotypical images of ‘farm women’ being automatically identified as ‘farmers’ wives’, participants in the Women in Agriculture movement in Australia explicitly make strategic identity choices in articulating ‘ensembles’ of subject positions as, in one instance, ‘a farmer, a mother, the acting farm accountant, the secretary of a local farming organisation, the member of an industry co-operative, and the committee member of a regional environmental body’.

Recent feminist theory in search of alternative and emancipatory accounts of human subjectivity has highlighted how women are active agents in negotiating and deploying their own identities not only for strategic purposes in resisting or challenging aspects of patriarchy, capitalism, technology and even feminism, but also in order to valorise ‘difference’. While some argue that ‘identity politics’ are individualistic and inward-looking and have come to replace political struggles aimed at social change with a degraded arena of politics where only the personal is deemed legitimate, others see identity politics as indispensable (Yuval-Davis 1994). Far from a withdrawal from politics, identity politics locate ‘grids of power which are horizontal and not just vertical’, and recognise the diversity of identities and circumstances, and the complexity and contradiction inherent in many struggles (Rosalind Brunt cited in Yuval Davis 1994: 420). As Panelli shows, it is by accommodating multiple identities and drawing on their creative tensions that the Women in Agriculture movement successfully mobilises across great diversity to effect considerable change at different scales. At the same time, identity ‘reconstructions’ at the personal level are also important evidence of women...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Women’s agencies and activisms in the Asia-Pacific region
• 2 Nine months: Women’s agency and the pregnant body in Singapore
• 3 Body politics in Bangladesh
• 4 The politics of resistance: Working-class women in rural Taiwan
• 5 Negotiating land and livelihood: Agency and identities in Indonesia’s transmigration programme
• 6 Gendered surveillance and sexual violence in Filipina pre-migration experiences to Japan
• 7 Resisting history: Indonesian labour activism in the 1990s and the ‘Marsinah’ case
• 8 Contradictory identities and political choices: ‘Women in Agriculture’ in Australia
• 9 The complexities of women’s agency in Fiji
• 10 ‘Asia’ in everyday life: Dealing with difference in contemporary Japan
• 11 Sites of transnational activism: Filipino non-government organisations in Hong Kong