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

Ong, Aihwa; Peletz, Michael G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520088611 ISBN 13: 9780520088610

Publisher: University of California Press, 1995

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

"This collection presents new ethnographic research, framed in terms of new theoretical developments, and contains fine scholarship and lively writing."--Janet Hoskins, University of Southern California

"This is a wonderful collection of essays. At one level they tell us about the transformation and often painful fragmentation of gendered selves in post-colonial states and a speeded-up transnational world. At another level they display the continuing power of ethnography to surprise and move us."--Sherry Ortner, University of California, Berkeley

About the Author:

Aihwa Ong is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (1987). Michael G. Peletz is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colgate University and author of A Share of the Harvest (California, 1988).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0520088611
• ISBN 13: 9780520088610
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 324