Gender Politics in Asia: Women Manoeuvring with Dominant Gender Orders

by NIAS

Edited by Wil Burghoorn, Kazuki Iwanaga, Cecilia Milwertz & Qi Wang

2008, 221 pp, 15x23 cm.

This book demonstrates the great diversity in gender politics and women’s strategies to negotiate and change gender relations individually or collectively. It examines cultural complexities of gender by focusing on gender politics in Asia, with case studies from China, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia. It examines multiple aspects of gender politics (dress, healing, religious ordination, NGO activism, etc.), bringing to bear interdisciplinary approaches of inquiry based on in-depth empirical data.

About the Editors

Wil Burghoorn is a social anthropologist, lecturer and researcher at the School of Global Studies at Göteborg University. She has done research on gender and development related issues, forms of relatedness and expressions of belonging, in Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh. She has coordinated several interdisciplinary research projects, involving institutes in Sweden, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Bangladesh. Currently she is co-coordinating a research project on Rural Families in Transitional Vietnam.

Cecilia Milwertz has an MA in Chinese studies and cultural sociology and a PhD in Chinese Studies from Copenhagen University. She is engaged in studies of non-governmental organizing to address gender issues in the People’s Republic of China. Her current projects include a study of activism against gender-based violence by Beijing women’s organizations and a project on interaction between three gender and development NGOs based in Hebei, Shaanxi and Yunnan province with non-Chinese development aid NGOs and Chinese party-state institutions.

Qi Wang is a PhD in political science, postdoc. at the University of Aarhus (2000–2002) and Lund University in Sweden (2002–2003). Her main publications include Gender Politics in Asian (with Cecilia Milwertz, Wil Brughorn and Kazuki Iwanaga), NIAS Press 2008; a working paper “Renegotiating Gender and Power: Women’s Organizations and Networks in Politics—The China Women Mayors’ Association”, working paper series, Center for East and Southeast Asian Studies at Lund University 2003; and a book chapter, “State-Society Relations and Women's Political Participation” in Jackie West, Zhao Minghua, Chang Xiangqun, and ChengYuan (ed). Women of China: Economic and Social Transformation, London: Macmillan Press LTD1999.