Bewitching Women, Pious Men

Aihwa Ong, Michael G. Peletz, Aihwa Ong, Michael G Peletz

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN:
  9780520088603
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520915343
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 Why Women Rule the Roost: Rethinking Javanese Ideologies of Gender and Self-Control
• 2 Narrating Herself: Power and Gender in a Minangkabau Woman's Tale of Conflict
• 3 Neither Reasonable nor Responsible: Contrasting Representations of Masculinity in a Malay Society
• 4 Senior Women, Model Mothers, and Dutiful Wives: Managing Gender Contradictions in a Minangkabau Village
• 5 State Versus Islam: Malay Families, Women's Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia
• 6 State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race in Singapore
• 7 Alternative Filipina Heroines: Contested Tropes in Leftist Feminisms
• 8 Attack of the Widow Ghosts: Gender, Death, and Modernity in Northeast Thailand
• 9 Narratives of Masculinity and Transnational Migration: Filipino Workers in the Middle East
• INDEX