Women's Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia

Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia COMPARATIVE FEMINIST STUDIES SERIES Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Series Editor PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE MACMILLAN: Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India by Charu Gupta Twenty-First-Century Feminist Classrooms: Pedagogies of Identity and Difference edited by Amie A. Macdonald and Susan Sánchez-Casal Reading across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance by Shari Stone-Mediatore Made in India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/national Projects by Suparna Bhaskaran Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalization edited by Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos Engendering Human Rights: Cultural and Socio-Economic Realities in Africa edited by Obioma Nnaemeka and Joy Ezeilo Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia edited by Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia Edited by Saskia E. Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya WOMEN’S SEXUALITIES AND MASCULINITIES IN A GLOBALIZING ASIA © Saskia E.Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya, 2007. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-1-4039-7768-7 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-61748-3 ISBN 978-0-230-60412-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230604124 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women’s sexualities and masculinities in a globalizing Asia / edited by Saskia E.Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya. p. cm.—(Comparative feminist studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-61748-3 1. Lesbianism—Asia. 2. Lesbians—Asia—Social conditions. I.Wieringa, Saskia, 1950– II. Blackwood, Evelyn. III. Bhaiya, Abha. HQ75.6.A75W66 2007 306.76Ј63095—dc22 2006051141 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: May 2007 10987654321 Contents List of Figures vii Series Editor’s Foreword ix Preface xi Notes on Contributors xiii One Globalization, Sexuality, and Silences: Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in an Asian Context 1 Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa Part I Historical Legacies Two Silence, Sin, and the System: Women’s Same-Sex Practices in Japan 23 Saskia E. Wieringa Three Desire and Deviance in Classical Indian Philosophy: A Study of Female Masculinity and Male Femininity in the Tamil Folk Legend Alliyarasanimalai 47 Kanchana Natarajan Part II Conditional Subjectivities Four The Spring That Flowers between Women 69 Abha Bhaiya Five Performing Gender along the Lesbian Continuum: The Politics of Sexual Identity in the Seitô Society 77 Peichen Wu Six “But no one has explained to me who I am now . .”: “Trans” Self-Perceptions in Sri Lanka 101 Shermal Wijewardene vi Contents Part III Female Masculinities Seven Gender Subjectivity: Dees and Toms in Thailand 119 Megan Sinnott Eight Hunting Down Love: Female Masculinities in Bugis South Sulawesi 139 Sharyn Graham Davies Nine Lesbian Masculinities: Identity and Body Construction among Tomboys in Hong Kong 159 Franco Lai Ten Transnational Sexualities in One Place: Indonesian Readings 181 Evelyn Blackwood Part IV Silencing and Modes of Invisibility Eleven Flames of Fire: Expressions and Denial of Female Sexuality 203 Abha Bhaiya Twelve Dying to Tell: Sexuality and Suicide in Imperial Japan 217 Jennifer Robertson Thirteen “She Has Come from the World of the Spirits . .”: Life Stories of Working-Class Lesbian Women in Northern India 243 Maya Sharma Index 265 List of Figures 5.1 Tamura Toshiko (1911) 85 5.2 Takamura (Naganuma) Chieko (1912) 86 5.3 Hiratsuka Raichô (1911) 91 5.4 Otake Kôkichi (Tomimoto Kazue) seated in the first row on the far left (1926) 93 12.1 The all-female Takarazuka Revue founded in 1913, in a scene from Rosarita 218 12.2 The lesbian couple dejected at the failure of their suicide mission 235 This page intentionally left blank Series Editor’s Foreword The Comparative Feminist Studies (CFS) series foregrounds writing, organizing, and reflection on feminist trajectories across the historical and cultural borders of nation-states. It takes up fundamental analytic and political issues involved in the cross-cultural production of knowledge about women and feminism, examining the politics of scholarship and knowledge in relation to feminist organizing and social movements. Drawing on feminist thinking in a number of fields, the CFS series targets innovative, comparative feminist scholarship, pedagogical and curricular strategies, and community organizing and political education. It explores and engenders a comparative feminist praxis that addresses some of the most urgent questions facing progressive, critical thinkers and activists today. Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia is an original and much-needed contribution to comparative, postcolonial, and transnational feminist scholarship and praxis. Though over the past many decades, feminists across the globe have been variously successful, we have inherited a number of the challenges our mothers and grandmothers faced. It cannot be denied that there are also new challenges to face as we attempt to make sense of a world indelibly marked by the failure of postcolonial capitalist and communist nation- states to provide for the social, economic, spiritual, and psychic needs of the majority of the world’s population. In the year 2006, we are in the midst of imperial wars in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Globalization has come to represent the interests of corporations and the free market rather than self-determination and freedom from political, cultural, and economic domination for all the peoples of the world. The U.S. Empire building project alongside the dominance of corporate capi- talism kills, disenfranchises, and impoverishes women everywhere. War and militarization, environmental degradation, heterosexist State practices, religious fundamentalisms, and the exploitation of women’s labor by capital, all pose profound challenges for feminists at this point in time. Recovering and remembering insurgent histories have never been so important as now—at a time marked by social amnesia, global consumer culture, and the worldwide mobilization of fascist notions of “national security.” These are some of the challenges the CFS series addresses. The series takes as its fundamental premise the need for feminist engagement with x Series Editor’s Foreword global as well as local ideological, economic, and political processes, and the urgency of transnational dialogue in building an ethical culture capable of withstanding and transforming the commodified and exploitative practices of globalized culture and economics. Individual volumes in the CFS series provide systemic and challenging interventions into the (still) largely Euro-Western feminist studies knowledge base, while simultaneously highlighting the work that can and needs to be done to envision and enact cross-cultural, multiracial feminist solidarity. Intervening in a “global queer discourse” often predicated on northern definitions of gay, lesbian, and transgender identities and movements, Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia crafts a transnational feminist praxis anchored in globalizing processes and the specificities of women’s same-sex experiences in Asia. The collection thus carves an epistemological space for new definitions and analyses of women’s same-sex experiences in the context of colonial legacies, cultural and geopolitical particularities, national and religious state practices, and gendered and sexual subjectivities. The volume centralizes the experiences, histories and socioeconomic realities of the everyday lives and sexual subjectivities of contemporary women and transgendered females identified in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Japan, India, Thailand, and Hong Kong. As the editors state in the Introduction, “This intervention is an attempt to integrate into global sexualities discourse not only the experiences and practices of urban, educated women, but also the experiences of working-class lesbians and transgendered females, whose voices are rarely heard” (p. 2). The collection as a whole is explicitly grounded in a critique of the homogenizing use of the term “queer” in global queer studies, choosing to focus on the production of queer sexualities in the interstices of globalizing processes in contemporary Asian countries. Arguing that “rather than constituting a ‘national imprint’ or a ‘global subculture,’ same-sex communities and relationships are a product of historical legacies, for instance, folk tales of transgendered beings and deities who join male and female in one body (Natarajan; Wieringa, this volume), and par- ticular gender regimes that create gender binaries, as well as

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