Gender Pluralism

Gender Pluralism

Author: Michael G. Peletz

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-06

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 1135954895

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


Women in Asia

Women in Asia

Author: Barbara N. Ramusack

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1999-06-22

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780253212672

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Barbara N. Ramusack writes on South and Southeast Asia, surveying both the prescriptive roles and the lived experiences of women, as well as the construction of gender from early states to the 1990s. Although both regions are home to Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim religious traditions and had extended trade relations, they reveal striking differences in the status and roles of women and the processes of cultural adaptation. Sharon Sievers presents an verview of women's participation in the histories of China, Japan, and Korea from prehistory to the modern period that provides a framework for incorporating women into world history classrooms. It offers analyses on major issues derived from recent research and discusses such stereotypical cultural practices as footbinding (long seen as "exotic" in the West) in the context of women's lives. Book jacket.


Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia

Cultural Politics of Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Asia

Author: Tiantian Zheng

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2017-07-31

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0824852974

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In globalizing Asia, sexual mores and gender roles are in constant flux. How have economic shifts and social changes altered and reconfigured the cultural meanings of gender and sexuality in the region? How have the changing political economy and social milieu influenced and shaped the inner workings and micro-politics of family structure, gender relationships, intimate romance, transactional sex, and sexual behaviors? This volume offers up-to-date, grounded, critical analysis of the complex intersections of gender, sexuality, and political economy across a diverse array of Asian societies: China, Japan, Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Taiwan. Based on intense ethnographic fieldwork, the chapters disentangle the ways in which gendered and sexual experiences are impinged upon by state policies, economic realities, cultural ideologies, and social hierarchies. Whether highlighting intimate relationships between elite businessmen and their mistresses in China; nightclub performances by Thai men in Bangkok; single women’s views of romance, motherhood, and marriage in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo; or male same-sex relationships in Pakistan—each chapter centers around the stories of the gendered subjects themselves and how they are shaped by outside forces. Taken together they provide a provocative entrée into the cultural politics of gender and sexuality in Asia. By foregrounding cross-cultural ethnographic research, this volume sheds light on how configurations of gender and sexuality are constituted, negotiated, contested, transformed, and at times, perpetuated and reproduced in private, intimate experiences. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology, political science, and women’s and LGBTQ studies.


Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia

Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia

Author: Kyunghee Pyun

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2018-10-25

Total Pages: 429

ISBN-13: 3319971999

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This edited volume on radical dress reforms in East Asia takes a fresh look at the symbols and languages of modernity in dress and body. Dress reform movements around the turn of the twentieth century in the region have received little critical attention as a multicultural discourse of labor, body, gender identity, colonialism, and government authority. With contributions by leading experts of costume/textile history of China, Korea, and Japan, this book presents up-to-date scholarship using diverse methodologies in costume history, history of consumption, and international trade. Thematically organized into sections exploring the garments and uniforms, accessories, fabrics, and fashion styles of Asia, this edited volume offers case studies for students and scholars in an ever-expanding field of material culture including, but not limited to, economic history, visual culture, art history, history of journalism, and popular culture. Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia stimulates further research on the impact of modernity and imperialism in neglected areas such as military uniform, school uniform, women’s accessories, hairstyles, and textile trade.


Queer Asia

Queer Asia

Author: J. Daniel Luther

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-05-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1786995832

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Queer studies is now a rapidly expanding field, as scholars from a variety of disciplines seek to address the long-running marginalisation of queer perspectives and experiences. But there has so far been little effort to unify the study of queer communities outside the West, and much of the current writing views these communities through a narrowly Western lens. Building on the work of the annual Queer Asia conference, which the editors helped to establish, this collection represents the most comprehensive work to date on queer studies in an Asian context. Featuring case studies and original research from across the continent, covering the Middle East, South and East Asia, and Asian diasporas, the collection offers a genuinely pan-Asian perspective which places queer Asian identities and movements in dialogue with each other, rather than within a Western framework. By considering how queerness is imagined within plural Asian experiences and contexts, the contributors show a that re-envisioning of 'queer' through Asian perspectives has the potential to challenge existing discourses and debates in the wider field of contemporary gender, sexuality, and queer studies.


Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

Author: Mytheli Sreenivas

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2021-05-03

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0295748850

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Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.


The Body in Asia

The Body in Asia

Author: Bryan S. Turner

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2009-11-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1845459660

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The past few decades have seen growing interest in the study of the body. However, the increasing number of exciting and influential publications has primarily, if not exclusively, focused on the body in Western cultures. The various works produced by Asian scholars remain largely unknown to Western academic debates even though Asia is home to a host of rich body cultures and religions. The peoples of Asia have experienced colonization, decolonization, and now globalization, all of which make the ‘body in Asia’ a rewarding field of research. This unique volume brings together a number of scholars who work on East, Southeast and South Asia and presents original and cutting edge research on the body in various Asian cultures.


Bewitching Women, Pious Men

Bewitching Women, Pious Men

Author: Aihwa Ong

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1995-09-07

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0520915348

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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.


Sexual Diversity in Asia, c. 600 - 1950

Sexual Diversity in Asia, c. 600 - 1950

Author: Raquel A.G. Reyes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-07-26

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1136297219

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Non-reproductive sex practices in Asia have historically been a source of fascination, prurient or otherwise, for Westerners, who being either Catholic or Protestant, were often struck by what they perceived as the widespread promiscuity and licentiousness of native inhabitants. Graphic descriptions, and pious denunciations, of sodomy, bestiality, transvestitism, and incest, abound in Western travel narratives, missionary accounts, and ethnographies. But what constituted indigenous sexual morality, and how was this influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity over time and place? What sex practices were tolerated or even encouraged by society, community, and religious ritual, and what acts were considered undesirable, transgressive and worthy of punishment? Sexual Diversity in Asia, c. 600-1950 is the first book to foreground same- sex acts and pleasure seeking in the histories of India, China, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. Drawing on a range of indigenous and foreign sources, the contributors, all renowned experts in their fields, shed light on indigenous notions of gender and the body, social hierarchies, fundamental ideas concerning morality and immorality, and episodes of seduction. The book illuminates - in striking case studies – attitudes toward non-procreative sex acts, and representations and experiences of same-sex pleasure seeking in the histories of Asia. This path-breaking book is an important contribution to the study of gender and sexuality in Asian cultures and will also interest students and scholars of world history.