166-105 Gender and Politics in Southeast Asia

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Usually 25 points of first year politics, first year Asian studies, see Prerequisites, or first year women's studies, see Prerequisites.

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

This subject examines the multiple ways of theorising gender and its relation to other axes of social differentiation such as class, religion, nationality, sexuality, rank, place and ethnicity in Southeast Asia. The subject introduces students to historically specific and ethnographic ways in which theorising about sexual politics can interrogate political institutions (e.g. the military, educational systems, health care, public services and development projects) and practices (e.g. democracy, authoritarianism and grass roots activism). The subject will explore articulations of women's voices, while at the same time critically examine the construction of masculinity, femininity, and other forms of sexuality in Southeast Asian societies. On completion of the subject students should have a better understanding of nuanced, non-universalising ideas about power, patriarchy, the family, critiques of development, and women's activism in the following countries of Southeast Asia: East Timor, the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Malaysia.

Assessment

Two 2000 word essays.

Prescribed Texts

• L Manderson & M Jolly (eds), Sites of Desire/Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• L Sears (ed), Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia. Duke University Press, 1996.
• B Anderson & R Mendiones (eds), In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era.