Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia

by Aihwa Ong, Michael G. Peletz (Editor)

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 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.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Gender and Sexuality, Ethnography, History

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty and Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Equality and gender roles in Southeast Asia in 1995

This is series of 9 presentations given at sociology conference at Berkley in 1995. It is 9 dissertations on the shock of the modern against traditional world. This presentation give a glimpse into lives of men and women in the phillipinez, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia and Malysian. It brings up the concepts of reason and passion and what is on par and percieved and unintended consequences to government policies. There are roles for men and women but sometimes the males are more passionate and drink and gamble. Sometimes it is the woman does it too. Reason is level headed and provide advice res and foood. It depends on culture a nd time. Women can negate at markets and provide money. There are harsh policies imposed by governments that are male centric. It is the conflict of farm, city. I learned a lot about human nature, revolution, Super it I on and fighting into these realms of the effects of colonial powers on established societies. Water always returns to its source. Perception and reality. Very interesting read from an academic perspective.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This edited volume contains a number of very useful chapters on masculinities and femininities in Southeast Asia--a region where scholars have long noted to display high levels of gender equality. The authors have argued forcefully for the use of ethnography to illuminate social realities on the ground by showing wide disparities between hegemonic gender ideologies and actual gender practices. I particularly enjoyed the theoretically robust chapters by Brenner, Peletz, and Margold.