Gender Pluralism

Description

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2009!

This book examines three big ideas: difference, legitimacy, and pluralism. Of chief concern is how people construe and deal with variation among fellow human beings. Why under certain circumstances do people embrace even sanctify differences, or at least begrudgingly tolerate them, and why in other contexts are people less receptive to difference, sometimes overtly hostile to it and bent on its eradication? What are the cultural and political conditions conducive to the positive valorization and acceptance of difference? And, conversely, what conditions undermine or erode such positive views and acceptance? This book examines pluralism in gendered fields and domains in Southeast Asia since the early modern era, which historians and anthropologists of the region commonly define as the period extending roughly from the 15^th to the 18^th centuries.

Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments (3)

Note on Spelling, Transliteration, and Names (5)

Chapter 1 -- Introduction (6)

Chapter 2 -- Gender Pluralism and Transgender Practices in Early Modern Times (38)

Some Gendered Themes in the Political Cultures of Pre- and Early Modern States

Transgender Practices and Gender Pluralism

Iban

Ngaju Dayak

Bugis

Malays

Burmese

Thais

Conclusion

Chapter 3 -- Temporary Marriage, Connubial Commerce, and Colonial Body Politics (146)

Temporary Marriage

From Temporary Wives to Concubines and Prostitutes

Colonial Body Politics and the Constriction of Pluralism

Concubinage, Prostitution, and "Sworn Sisterhood"

Desires That Dare Not Speak Their Names

Conclusion

Chapter 4 --Transgender Practices, Same-Sex Relations, and Gender Pluralism Since the 1960s (216)

Some Insular Southeast Asian Cases

Iban

Ngaju Dayak

Bugis

The Case of Burma

Deeper into the Labyrinth(s)

Women and Femininity at the Turn of the 21^st Century

Conclusion

Chapter 5 -- Gender, Sexuality, and Body Politics at the Turn of the 21^st Century (311)

Transgendered Ritualists and Pondan

"Asian Values" and New Types of Criminality

Narratives of "Asian Values" and the Rise of Social Intolerance

New Types of Criminality: Azizah, Anwar, and Beyond

The Pink Triangle, the Urban/Sexual Underground, and the Struggle

for Sexual Equality

Background and Context

The Pink Triangle and the Urban/Sexual Communities It Serves

Official Discourses on Communities in the Urban/Sexual Underground

The Struggle for Sexual Equality

Engaging "Tolerance", Open Secrets, and Governmentality

Conclusion

Epilogue: Asylum, Diaspora, Pluralism (450)

Bibliography (483)

Index (534)

Author Bio

Michael G. Peletz is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. His specialties include social theory, gender, sexuality, Islam, and modernity, particularly in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton, 2002), Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society (California, 1996), A Share of the Harvest: Kinship, Property, and Social History among the Malays of Rembau (California, 1988). He is also the co-editor with Aihwa Ong, of Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (California, 1995).

Related Subjects

1. Asian Culture & Society
2. South Asian Studies
3. South East Asian Studies
4. Gender
5. East Asia
6. South Asia
7. Gender Politics
8. Sexuality - Gender Studies
9. Cultural Theory