Table Of ContentBewitching Women, Pious Men
0 500
Location of research sites in Southeast Asia
Bewitching Women,
Pious Men
Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia
EDITED BY
Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley Los Angeles London
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
New material© 1995 by the Regents of the University of California.
Parts of this book were published in earlier versions.
Chapter 3: "Neither Reasonable Nor Responsible: Contrasting
Representations of Masculinity in a Malay Society," Cultural Anthropology 9,
no. 2 ( 1994): 135-78. © 1994 by the American Anthropological Association. Reprinted
by permission. Not for sale or further reproduction.
Chapter 5: "State versus Islam: Malay Families, Women's Bodies, and the
Body Politic in Malaysia," American Ethnologist 17, no. 2 (May 1990): 2 58-76.
©by the American Anthropological Association. Reprinted by
permission. Nor for sale or further reproduction.
Chapter 6: ''State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race
in Singapore," in Nationalisms and Sexualities, ed. Andrew Parker et al.
(Routledge, 1991), pp. 344-64. Reprinted by permission.
Chapter 9: "Narratives of Masculinity and Transnational Migration: Filipino
Workers in the Middle East," masculinities 2, nv . .; (fall1994): 18-36.
Reprinted by permission.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bewitching women, pious men : gender and body politics in
Southeast Asia I edited by Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz.
p. em.
ISBN 978-o-520-08861-o (pbk.)
1. Sex role-Asia, Southeastern. 2. Power (Social sciences)
Asia, Southeastern. 3· Asia, Southeastern-Social life and
customs. I. Ong, Aihwa. II. Peletz, Michael G.
HQ1075·5·A785B49 1995
305.3'0959-dC20 94-22740
CIP
Printed in the United States of America
10 og o8 07
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z3g.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).@
CONTENTS
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS I vii
PREFACE I ix
INTRODUCTION
Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz I I
1. Why Women Rule the Roost: Rethinking Javanese
Ideologies of Gender and Self-Control
Suzanne A. Brenner I I9
2. Narrating Herself: Power and Gender in a
Minangkabau Woman's Tale of Conflict
Jennifer Krier I 5 I
3· Neither Reasonable nor Responsible: Contrasting
Representations of Masculinity in a Malay Society
Michael G. Peletz I 76
4· Senior Women, Model Mothers, and Dutiful Wives: Managing
Gender Contradictions in a Minangkabau Village
Evelyn Blackwood I I24
5· State Versus Islam: Malay Families, Women's
Bodies, and the Body Politic in Malaysia
Aihwa Ong I I 59
6. State Fatherhood: The Politics of Nationalism,
Sexuality, and Race in Singapore
Geraldine Heng and Janadas Devan I I 9 5
vi CONTENTS
7· Alternative Filipina Heroines: Contested
Tropes in Leftist Feminisms
Jacqueline Siapno I 2 I 6
8. Attack of the Widow Ghosts: Gender, Death,
and Modernity in Northeast Thailand
Mary Beth Mills I 244
g. Narratives of Masculinity and Transnational Migration:
Filipino Workers in the Middle East
Jane A. Margold I 2 7 4
INDEX I 299
CONTRIBUTORS
Evelyn Blackwood is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Anthropol
ogy at Purdue University. She has published articles on Native American
berdache/two-spirit people and lesbian relations cross-culturally, and is the
editor of The Many Faces of Homosexuality: Anthropology and Homosexual Be
havior ( 1986) .
Suzanne A. Brenner is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University
of California, San Diego. Her research has focused on gender, hierarchy,
and social change in Java. She is currently working on a book that analyzes
gendered discourses of tradition, modernity, and social order in contem
porary Indonesia.
Janadas Devan is a lecturer in English at the Nanyang Institute of Technol
ogy, Singapore. His scholarship concerns neo-Confucianism and national
ism in Southeast Asia.
Geraldine Heng is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas,
Austin. She is writing a book on medieval romance called Empire of Magic:
Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy.
Jennifer Krier wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on gender, power, and state
region relationships among the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, Indonesia.
She is currently working on issues of property, gender, and citizenship as a
Liberal Arts Fellow at Harvard Law School.
Jane A. Margold is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Humanities, Wesleyan
University. Her research deals with the transnational emergence of new
vii
viii CONTRIBUTORS
political subjectivities; with masculinities; and with the persistence of servi
tude in the postcolonial world.
Mary Beth Mills is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. Her
most recent research examines changing gender and household relations
as a result of .rural-urban labor migration in Thailand. She is presently
working on a book entitled ''We Are Not Like Our Mothers": Modernity and
Identity among Thai Migrant Workers.
Aihwa Ong is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cali
fornia, Berkeley. She is the author of Spirits ofR esistance and Capitalist Disci
pline: Factory Women in Malaysia (1987). Her research concerns new Asian
immigrants in California and overseas Chinese in the Asia-Pacific region.
Michael G. Peletz is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of
Asian Studies at Colgate University. His publications include A Share of the
Haroest: Kinship, Property, and Social History Among the Malays of Rembau
(1988), and Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society
(1995).
Jacqueline Siapno is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of South and
Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her re
search and writing focus on literature-traditional Malay, modern Indone
sian, and Philippine.
PREFACE
This book had its beginnings in a conference on gender in Southeast Asian
cultures that was held at the University of California, Berkeley, in the win
ter of 1992. The meetings were sponsored by the University's Center for
Southeast Asian Studies as part of its annual conference series, and were
organized by Aihwa Ong of the Department of Anthropology. Sylvia Tiwon
of the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies helped put to
gether the program for the meetings. We appreciate the support and en
couragement of Robert Reed, Director of the Center; we are also grateful
to Eric Crystal and CynthiaJoysama, who made many of the administrative
arrangements for the conference and were instrumental in its success.
Although we were not able to include in the present volume all the
papers presented at the meetings, we would like to take this opportunity to
express our gratitude to all the participants for the intellectual energy and
excitement they brought to the formal sessions and the dialogues that fol
lowed. We are especially grateful to AnnaL. Tsing and Vincente Rafael
who (along with Michael Peletz) served as discussants, and not only raised
provocative questions, but also sharpened our theoretical contributions.
Subsequently, Michael Peletz agreed to be coeditor of the present volume,
and jointly imagined how the entire collection would come together. One
of our early decisions was to "round out" the collection by including two
previously published papers (Ong, and Heng and Devan) that were not
presented at the conference.
We would like to thank Naomi Schneider and William Murphy of the
University of California Press, for their encouragement and support in pub
lishing the book. We are also grateful to anonymous readers for the Press,
who provided helpful comments, and to Herbert P. Philips, who drew our
attention to the modernist Thai painting that graces the cover of the book.
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