GENDERED ENTANGLEMENTS Lund-book.indd 1 26/05/2015 12:08 GENDERING ASIA A Series on Gender Intersections Gendering Asia is a well-established and exciting series addressing the ways in which power and constructions of gender, sex, sexuality and the body intersect with one another and pervade contemporary Asian societies. The series invites discussion of how people shape their identities as females or males and, at the same time, become shaped by the very societies in which they live. The series is concerned with the region as a whole in order to capture the wide range of understandings and practices that are found in East, Southeast and South Asian societies with respect to gendered roles and relations in various social, political, religious, and economic contexts. As a multidisciplinary series, Gendering Asia explores theoretical, empirical and methodo- logical issues in the social sciences. Series Editors: Wil Burghoorn, Gothenburg University and Cecilia Milwertz, NIAS (contact details at: http://www.niaspress.dk). 1. Working and Mothering in Asia. Images, Ideologies and Identities, edited by Theresa W. Devasahayam and Brenda S.A. Yeoh 2. Making Fields of Merit. Buddhist Female Ascetics and Gendered Orders in Thailand, by Monica Lindberg Falk 3. Gender Politics in Asia. Women Manoeuvring within Dominant Gender Orders, edited by Wil Burghoorn, Kazuki Iwanaga, Cecilia Milwertz and Qi Wang 4. Lost Goddesses. The Denial of Female Power in Cambodian History, by Trudy Jacobsen 5 Gendered Inequalities in Asia. Configuring, Contesting and Recognizing Women and Men, edited by Helle Rydstrøm 6. Submitting to God. Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia, by Sylva Frisk 7. The Authority of Influence. Women and Power in Burmese History, by Jessica Harriden 8. Beyond the Singapore Girl. Discourses of Gender and Nation in Singapore, by Chris Hudson 9. Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Gender, Career, City by Catherine Earl 10. Gendered Entanglements: Revisiting Gender in Rapidly Changing Asia, edited by Ragnhild Lund, Philippe Doneys and Bernadette P. Resurrección 11. Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures, edited by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and William F. Schroeder (with Hongwei Bao) 12. Cultivating Gender: Meanings of Place and Work in Rural Vietnam, by Cecilia Bergstedt NIAS Press is the autonomous publishing arm of NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, a research institute located at the University of Copenhagen. NIAS is partially funded by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden via the Nordic Council of Ministers, and works to encourage and support Asian studies in the Nordic countries. In so doing, NIAS has been publishing books since 1969, with more than two hundred titles produced in the past few years. UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN Nordic Council of Ministers Lund-book.indd 2 26/05/2015 12:08 GENDERED ENTANGLEMENTS Revisiting Gender in Rapidly Changing Asia edited by Ragnhild Lund, Philippe Doneys and Bernadette P. Resurrección Lund-book.indd 3 26/05/2015 12:08 Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Gendering Asia series, no. 10 First published in 2015 by NIAS Press NIAS – Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Øster Farimagsgade 5, 1353 Copenhagen K, Denmark Tel: +45 3532 9501 • Fax: +45 3532 9549 E-mail: [email protected] • Online: www.niaspress.dk © NIAS Press 2015 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, copyright in the individual chapters belongs to their authors. No material may be reproduced in whole or in part without the express permission of the publisher. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-87-7694-156-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-87-7694-157-4 (pbk) Typeset in Arno Pro 12/14.4 Typesetting by Lene Jakobsen Cover design: Rita Hokseggen Printed in Great Britain by Marston Book Services Limited, Oxfordshire Lund-book.indd 4 26/05/2015 12:08 Contents Preface vii Contributors xii 1. Introduction 1 Ragnhild Lund, Philippe Doneys and Bernadette P. Resurrección 2. Change and Continuity: Revisiting the Field and Changing Analytical Positioning in Understanding Gender 13 Merete Lie and Ragnhild Lund with Zaireeni Azmi 3. Translating Gender through Time and Theories: a Case Study of Living, Thinking and Rethinking 41 Rashidah Shuib and Ingrid Rudie 4. Lost in Translation? Gender and Empowerment in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region 69 Donna L. Doane and Philippe Doneys 5. The Gender Coding of Modernity: Reflections on Creating a Modern Gender and Development NGO in the PRC 97 Cecilia Milwertz and Wang Fengxian 6. Women Fish Border Traders in Cambodia: Intersectionality and Gender Analysis 121 Kyoko Kusakabe and Prak Sereyvath 7. Struggling Bodies and Spaces of Resistance – Adivasi Women Activists in Odisha, India 147 Ragnhild Lund and Smita Mishra Panda 8. Material Feminism and Multi-local Political Ecologies: Rethinking Gender and Nature in Lampung, Indonesia 177 Rebecca Elmhirst and Ari Darmastuti 9. Gender, Floods and Mobile Subjects: a Post-Disaster View 207 Bernadette P. Resurrección and Edsel E. Sajor Lund-book.indd 5 26/05/2015 12:08 10. Mobile and Changing Livelihoods: Constituting Gender among the Hunter-Gatherer Bhuket of Sarawak 235 Shanthi Thambiah 11. Reconstructing Justice for Women in the Courts: an Investigation of Syariah Court Processes in Malaysia 263 Noraida Endut 12. Rethinking Personal Laws and Gender Justice from a Bangladesh Perspective 293 Julaikha B. Hossain 13. Gender entanglements in gender and development: a call for grounded, multi-dimensional and ‘moving’ feminisms 319 Bernadette P. Resurrección, Philippe Doneys, and Ragnhild Lund Index 329 Figures 6.1: Market route of fish between Cambodia and Thailand 2006 126 6.2: Fish production in Tonle Sap 127 6.3: Fish exports 128 7.1: Map of Odisha 154 9.1: Map of Quezon Province 208 11.1: Court Setting 273 Tables 6.1: Profile of respondents 129 7.1: Districts (study area) and adivasi women’s activism 155 8.1: Selected field-site characteristics 185 8.2: Gendered multi-local livelihoods in the sub-districts of Sumberjaya and Negeri Besar 187 11.1: Cases handled in Syariah Courts 275 Lund-book.indd 6 26/05/2015 12:08 Preface This book stems from a Norwegian research project that aims to both revisit and rethink the concept of gender in a rapidly changing Asia. Starting from Cornwall’s call to revisit the ‘gender agenda’, seen as having ‘retained little of the radical promise that was once vested in its promo- tion’ (Cornwall 2007: 69), the project has allowed individual research- ers to grapple with new ways of understanding gender in development contexts in an effort to address the emancipatory and transformative agendas of feminism and development. The book presents some of the findings of their research and represents a conscious effort, borrowing the idea of ‘sciences from below’ from Harding (2008), to incorporate descriptions of how gender is understood and produced in different ways by people in the Asian region. The overall objective of the book is to revisit gender as a concept that can engage simultaneously with change and continuity in today’s Asia, but with greater intellectual reflexivity to examine multiple, intersecting and complex dimensions of identity and difference, and formerly unac- knowledged sources of social power from institutions and their emerg- ing discourses. The book ascertains whether gender as a social analytic has remained true to its earlier feminist promise for emancipatory and empowering outcomes for women and men or whether it has instead blunted this possibility. As Cornwall (2007: 77) suggests: Revisioning the ‘gender agenda’, then, calls both for rupture and re- newal: […] It calls for seeing ‘women’ and ‘men’ as plural categories constituted by social practices, including those of development agen- cies themselves. It calls for paying closer attention to everyday lives and struggles in diverse contexts, understanding and articulating better what it takes to make a real difference to the relations of power that all that euphemistic talk about ‘gender equality’ obscures. vii Lund-book.indd 7 26/05/2015 12:08 Gendered Entanglements Individual chapters, written by gender scholars from Europe and Asia, critically examine the concept of gender in the context of emerg- ing development issues relating to four broad thematic areas: Gender over time, which basically deals with revisiting the field repeatedly or after a substantial period of time, reflecting on the value of conducting longitudinal research; Power, policy and practices, which revisits different dimensions of governance and power, gender mainstreaming and activ- ism involved; Environment and resources, which deals with new ways of examining dispossessions, dams, disasters and mobilities; and Gender justice and rights, which focuses on the often complex and at times contradictory dimensions of religious and secular legal frameworks. In unravelling how revisiting gender has led the authors to rethink gender in multiple ways, some of the chapters revisit areas from previous re- search, while others rethink ways in which gender has been framed and depoliticized in current practices, and therefore address how gender has been changed, both as a normative process influencing social roles and relations and as an object and/or a concept of research. The study and methodology The researchers of the study ‘Revisiting gender in development: com- plex inequalities in a changing Asia’, funded by the Research Council of Norway for the period 2011–2014, worked together in the above- mentioned thematic groups. However, in the course of the work process and during annual meetings in the larger group, issues were identified that cut across the themes of the four groups. It was gradually under- stood how entangled our themes were –methodologically, conceptually and empirically – which called for better understanding of gender as a process, as situated and time-specific, and as entangled with power structures such as legal frameworks and development practices.