This book brings together the work of scholars from around the world in a consideration of how gender is contested in various parts of Asia - in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines. Part I of this collection explores notions of agency in relation to women's domestic and everyday lives. While 'agency' is one of the key terms in contemporary social science, scholarship on women in Asia recently has focussed on women's political activism. Women's private lives have been neglected in this new scholarship. This volume has a special focus on women's relational and emotional lives, domestic practices, marriage, singlehood and maternity. Papers consider how women negotiate enhanced space and reputations, challenging negative representations and entrenched models of intra-family and intimate relations. There is also a warning about too free feminist expectations of agency and the repercussions of the exercise of agency. The three essays in Part II examine the historical construction of masculinities in colonial and postcolonial South and Southeast Asia, and the ways that manhood is interpreted, experienced and performed in daily life in the past and in present times. They highlight the centrality and continued relevance of masculinity to analyses of empire and nation and underscore the highly gendered and (hetero)sexualized nature of political, military, and economic institutions. Collectively, the essays explore a wide range of competing articulations and experiences of gender within Asia, emphasising the historical and contemporary plurality and variability of femininity and masculinity, and the dynamic and intersectional nature of gender identities and relations. This book was published as a special issue of Asian Studies Review.

This book brings together the work of scholars from around the world in a consideration of how gender is contested in various parts of Asia - in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, and the Philippines. Part I of this collection explores notions of agency in relation to women's domestic and everyday lives. While 'agency' is one of the key terms in contemporary social science, scholarship on women in Asia recently has focussed on women's political activism. Women's private lives have been neglected in this new scholarship. This volume has a special focus on women's relational and emotional lives, domestic practices, marriage, singlehood and maternity. Papers consider how women negotiate enhanced space and reputations, challenging negative representations and entrenched models of intra-family and intimate relations. There is also a warning about too free feminist expectations of agency and the repercussions of the exercise of agency. The three essays in Part II examine the historical construction of masculinities in colonial and postcolonial South and Southeast Asia, and the ways that manhood is interpreted, experienced and performed in daily life in the past and in present times. They highlight the centrality and continued relevance of masculinity to analyses of empire and nation and underscore the highly gendered and (hetero)sexualized nature of political, military, and economic institutions. Collectively, the essays explore a wide range of competing articulations and experiences of gender within Asia, emphasising the historical and contemporary plurality and variability of femininity and masculinity, and the dynamic and intersectional nature of gender identities and relations. This book was published as a special issue of Asian Studies Review.

Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the woman of the khit kala-""""the woman of the times""""-who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s. Educated and politicised, earner and consumer, """"Burmese"""" and """"Westernised,"""" she embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. In Refiguring Women Chie Ikeya interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in colonial Burma. She marshals a wide range of hitherto unexamined Burmese language sources to analyse both the discursive figurations of the woman of the khit kala and the choices and actions of actual women who-whether pursuing higher education, becoming political, or adopting new clothes and hairstyles-unsettled existing norms and contributed to making the woman of the khit kala the privileged idiom for debating colonialism, modernisation, and nationalism. The first book-length social history of Burma to utilise gender as a category of sustained analysis, Refiguring Women challenges the reigning nationalist and anticolonial historical narratives of a conceptually and institutionally monolithic colonial modernity that made inevitable the rise of ethnonationalism and xenophobia in Burma. The study demonstrates the irreducible heterogeneity of the colonial encounter and draws attention to the conjoined development of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Ikeya illuminates the important roles that Burmese men and women played as cultural brokers and agents of modernity. She shows how their complex engagements with social reform, feminism, anticolonialism, media, and consumerism rearticulated the boundaries of belonging and foreignness in religious, racial, and ethnic terms. Refiguring Women adds significantly to examinations of gender and race relations, modernisation, and nationalism in colonised regions. It will be of interest to a broad audience-not least those working in the fields of Southeast Asian studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and women's and gender studies.

Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma presents the first study of one of the most prevalent and critical topics of public discourse in colonial Burma: the woman of the khit kala-""the woman of the times""-who burst onto the covers and pages of novels, newspapers, and advertisements in the 1920s. Educated and politicised, earner and consumer, ""Burmese"" and ""Westernised,"" she embodied the possibilities and challenges of the modern era, as well as the hopes and fears it evoked. In Refiguring Women, Chie Ikeya interrogates what these shifting and competing images of the feminine reveal about the experience of modernity in colonial Burma. She marshals a wide range of hitherto unexamined Burmese language sources to analyse both the discursive figurations of the woman of the khit kala and the choices and actions of actual women who-whether pursuing higher education, becoming political, or adopting new clothes and hairstyles-unsettled existing norms and contributed to making the woman of the khit kala the privileged idiom for debating colonialism, modernisation, and nationalism. The first book-length social history of Burma to utilise gender as a category of sustained analysis, Refiguring Women challenges the reigning nationalist and anticolonial historical narratives of a conceptually and institutionally monolithic colonial modernity that made inevitable the rise of ethnonationalism and xenophobia in Burma. The study demonstrates the irreducible heterogeneity of the colonial encounter and draws attention to the conjoined development of cosmopolitanism and nationalism. Ikeya illuminates the important roles that Burmese men and women played as cultural brokers and agents of modernity. She shows how their complex engagements with social reform, feminism, anticolonialism, media, and consumerism rearticulated the boundaries of belonging and foreignness in religious, racial, and ethnic terms. Refiguring Women adds significantly to examinations of gender and race relations, modernisation, and nationalism in colonised regions. It will be of interest to a broad audience-not least those working in the fields of Southeast Asian studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and women's and gender studies.