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 particular gender regimes that create gender binaries, as well as specific forms and processes of nationalisms, fundamentalisms, (neo)colonialisms and globalization,” (Chapter 1, p. 7, this original collection is a major contribution to scholarship on the postcolonial sexual subjectivities of Asian women and transgendered females in the context of globalization, national and religious state practices, and transnational feminist movements.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty Series Editor Ithaca, New York Preface

Self-styled lesbian groups are hesitantly appearing in many Asian capitals. They are only the latest form that women’s same-sex communities and relationships take and they mostly belong to the educated middle classes. The history of women’s sexualities and masculinities in Asia and the diver- sity of their communities are mostly unknown. This collection brings together a wide range of contributions from several parts of Asia to fill that gap in our knowledge of sexualities and genders. The introduction provides the setting in which women’s sexualities and masculinities appear in Asia, focusing on the present-day process of globalization and the discourses that come with it. The first section addresses historical legacies, both in Japan and in India. The two contributions provide glimpses of literary, religious, and other transgendered practices the echoes of which reverberate into present times. In the second section we present three chapters dealing with the liminal and shifting spaces between heterosexual normativity and lesbian and transgender identities in Sri Lanka, Japan, and India. The next four chapters deal with one of the most typical forms women’s same-sex sexualities take in Asia, that of butch-femme relations. The focus here is on the performativity of masculinity, both historically and in contemporary settings, in Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong. In the final section, the silence and invisibility in which women and masculine females express their affections for each other are discussed, focusing on India and Japan. This issue takes on particular salience in view of the growing visibility of lesbian activist groups and their connection to global lesbian and gay discourse. This collection had a long period of gestation. Two of the editors, Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia E. Wieringa, organized a session on women’s same- sex practices in Asia for the third conference of the International Association for the Study of Sexuality, Culture and Society (IASSCS) in Melbourne, Australia, in 2001. Both academics and activists joined the panels; the debates were lively, as this was the first time women’s same-sex sexualities and female masculinities were discussed comparatively across various Asian contexts. Together with Abha Bhaiya, who joined us at the conference, we began work toward bringing out an anthology. In the long editing process, several activists dropped out, as the demands of activism and academic writing often clashed. Some new authors joined at the next IASSCS conference that was held in Johannesburg in 2003. To complete the book, we also xii Preface invited contributions from other authors. The result is an anthology that draws from various disciplines (literary theory, anthropology, and history) and combines academic work with that of scholar activists. During the long editing process the editorial team, working in three continents, managed to meet regularly, not only in Melbourne and Johannesburg, but also in Jakarta, Delhi, New York, Lafayette, Amsterdam, Dublin, and San Francisco. We are most indebted to all contributors who stayed with us in this process and who patiently kept revising their chapters. We thank each other for the continued faith in the project and for the strong support we gave each other. We are also grateful for the helpful and supportive comments received from the anonymous reviewers, which helped us in tightening the structure and in refining our arguments. The Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Purdue University provided support for travel and assistance in the preparation of the manuscript. In addition, Evelyn Blackwood would like to thank her partner, Diana Hardy, for her patience and unfailing support during this process and for being hostess during a long weekend in which Saskia and Evelyn developed the introductory chapter. Abha Bhaiya notes that some of her work has drawn its inspiration from the Single Women’s action research project that was initiated by Jagori, a feminist group. Shanti and Maya have been significant in exploring issues of sex and sexualities in multiple workshops, night meetings, and intimate conversations with many single women, including poor and marginalized women from slums and villages. This volume will be of interest to academics working on sexuality, transgender females, and women’s same-sex relations in general and on Asia in particular. Activists will find many chapters of value that address the specifically Asian context in relation to the global rights discourse. The focus on indigenous and “local” practices and discourses may help counter those voices that accuse present day lesbians of importing Western values.

Saskia E. Wieringa Evelyn Blackwood Abha Bhaiya Notes on Contributors

Abha Bhaiya is one of the founding members of Jagori, a feminist resource center founded in 1984 and based in Delhi, India. She has been active in women’s movements for the last 25 years as an activist, feminist trainer, researcher, and campaigner for women’s dignified place in society. She has actively contributed to the strengthening of feminist consciousness by training women from the most oppressed, marginalized, and subjugated class, caste, and marital backgrounds as feminist activists to work within their communities. Her engagement with issues of women’s right to dig- nity, bodily integrity, sexuality, and freedom from all kinds of violence, including communal and military violence, have contributed to the discourse and practices around these issues within women’s movements in the South Asian subcontinent. Community mobilization and building women’s grassroots leadership has been central to her work. Evelyn Blackwood is Associate Professor in Anthropology and Women’s Studies at Purdue University. She has produced a number of works in areas ranging from Native American female two-spirits, theories of sexualities, gender and power, and matrilineal kinship. She has published a monograph on the Minangkabau of West Sumatra entitled Webs of Power: Women, Kin and Community in a Sumatran Village (Rowman and Littlefield 2000). She coedited with Saskia Wieringa Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures (Columbia University Press 1999) and edited The Many Faces of Homosexuality: Anthropology and Homosexual Behavior (1986). She is currently working on a book on tombois and their partners in West Sumatra, Indonesia. Sharyn Graham Davies is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Auckland University of Technology. Her research focuses on issues of gender and sexuality in Indonesia. Sharyn has published in the Journal of Gender Studies, Journal of Bisexuality, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, and has forthcoming monograph publications with RoutledgeCurzon and Wadsworth/Thompson. Franco Lai is a lesbian from a small city, Hong Kong, China. She believes that sexuality is not just something private in bed but an important mat- ter that reveals the power dynamics and cultures of our societies. It is also important for all of us to think about. She obtained her Master of xiv Notes on Contributors

Philosophy degree, majoring in Gender Studies/Anthropology from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2003. Kanchana Natarajan teaches Indian Philosophy at Delhi University, Delhi. She is interested in Sanskritic and Tamil folk traditions where she looks at the compelling views on gender that are articulated in the two traditions. Jennifer Robertson is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Among her books are Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City (University of California Press 1991); Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan (University of California Press 1998). She is the editor of Same-Sex Cultures and Sexualities: An Anthropological Reader (Blackwell 2004) and A Companion to the Anthropology of Japan (Blackwell 2005). Her book-in-progress, Blood and Beauty: Eugenic Modernity and Empire in Japan (University of California Press), focuses on the colonial history and present circumstances of eugenics and ideologies of “blood.” She is the originator and General Editor of Colonialisms, a new book series from the University of California Press. Maya Sharma is a scholar and activist in the Indian Women’s Movement. Born in the desert state of Rajasthan, where girls rarely get the opportu- nity to go to university, Sharma completed postgraduate work. Her life changed radically when she came in contact with the women’s movement. Instead of being the staid housewife in an urban middle-class home, she chose to be an activist. Within that identity she found the space to grow and nurture her skills of listening, observing, and writing. She worked for many years with Jagori, a feminist group, and the NGO Campaign for Lesbian Rights, both located in Delhi, India. Most of her writing stems from her work as an activist. She has cowritten a book on single women’s lives, women’s labor rights, and several articles and reports. The chapter in this book is based on research she undertook in response to develop- ments in the women’s movement and the growing gay movement. Currently she is working with a grassroots women’s organization, Vikalp in Baroda, Gujarat, India. Megan Sinnott is Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Her research interests include globalization and sexuality, queer theory, and geography of sexuality. She has taught women’s studies and anthropology at Yale University, University of Colorado- Boulder, and Thammasat University in Thailand. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Thailand. Her publications include Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand, published by University of Hawaii Press in 2004. Notes on Contributors xv

Shermal Wijewardene was educated in Delhi and Oxford and is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her main interests are in Virginia Woolf studies, gender studies, and film theory. She is a member of the Women’s Support Group, a lesbian organization linked to the gay organization Companions on a Journey. Saskia E. Wieringa is an anthropologist who has mainly worked in Indonesia. She is the Professor of Women’s Same-sex Sexuality Cross- culturally at the University of Amsterdam and director of the International Women’s Center and Archives, Amsterdam, Netherlands. She has published widely on issues ranging from women’s labor, gender policy and planning, gender indicators, and women’s same-sex practices. She also works as a consultant on gender planning and monitoring and women’s sexual empowerment. Her recent publications include two coedited anthologies: Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives (Jacana Press 2005) (with with Ruth Morgan), Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures (Columbia University Press 1999) (with Evelyn Blackwood), and her monograph Sexual Politics in Indonesia (PalgraveMacmillan 2002). Peichen Wu is Assistant Professor of the Department of Japanese Language and Culture at Soochow University, Taipei, Taiwan. She received her PhD in Modern Japanese Literature from University of Tsukuba, Japan. Some of her recent publications include “Struggles between national identity and gender: The double-bond structures in Satô Toshiko’s novels on Nisei” in The Regions of Translation: Culture, Colonialism, and Identity (2004); “Prospects for Escape from Domestic Ideology: Tamura Toshiko’s “Writing Woman” and “Performing Woman” in Observing Japan from Within (2004).