Women in Asia, (4 Volume Set)

The academic study of women in Asia developed in the 1970s as a result of the convergence of the then emerging disciplines of Asian Studies and Women’s Studies. Initially, work on women in Asia grew from traditional branches of learning such as history, anthropology, politics, and literary studies. More recently, it has incorporated cutting-edge areas of academic endeavour, including critical theory and new thinking on sexuality, labour, health, media, and material culture. As research in and around the area flourishes as never before, this new four-volume collection from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of scholarly literature.

Drawing together in four volumes the key research which has shaped the dynamic academic field that explores women’s lives in the Asian region over the past four decades, and edited by two leading scholars, Women in Asia provides users with a comprehensive survey of all the major issues relating to women in the world’s fastest changing and most culturally diverse region.

Volume I (‘Women and Political Power’) brings together material which explores the engagement by women in Asia with the law (e.g. struggles to acquire equal pay and inheritance rights), formal political power (e.g. structural blocks to their participation in government), and education. This volume also gathers vital contributions on women’s activism (e.g. feminist groups, comfort women’s groups, housewives’ unions, and transnational activism).

Volume II (‘Redefining Working Women’) collects research around topics including: women and unions; women in paid and unpaid labour (e.g. the gendered division of labour in Asian households); women as migrant workers; women in development; prostitution and trafficking; and women as carers.

Volume III (‘Health and Sexuality’) brings together the best - and most influential - scholarship on contentious themes such as the increasing imbalance in sex ratios in the region as a result of female infanticide, sex-selective abortions, and the kidnapping of wives. Research gathered in this volume also covers reproductive health; violence against women (e.g. female genital mutilation, dowry burnings, and honour killings); same-sex attraction and diverse gender identity; and medicine and health care (including work on traditional medicine and mental-health problems specific to women in the region, such as the high suicide rates in China and South Asia).

The material collected in Volume IV (‘Constructions of the Feminine’) focuses on women in the family (e.g. gendered role expectations); women in religion; Western perceptions of Asian women (e.g. stereotypes of passivity); women in the arts; and official discourses on the feminine (such as the promotion by Asian governments of gender roles).

Women in Asia is fully indexed and each of the four volumes has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which provides extended reading lists and places the material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students - as well as policy-makers and community activists - as a vital one-stop research resource.

Volume I : Women and Political Power

Chapter 1 : Violence’, Women and The State in Modern Indonesia
Chapter 2 : Power Outside The Symbols of Power’, Women, Power and Kinship Politics : Female Power in Post-War Philippines
Chapter 3 : MoThers of Buddhas, MoThers of Nations : Kumaranatunga and Her Meteoric Rise to Power in Sri Lanka’, Feminist Studies, 1999
Chapter 4 : Women’s Suffrage in China : Challenging Scholarly Conventions’, Pacific Historical Review, 2000
Chapter 5 : Citizenship and Suffrage in Interwar Japan, Women’s Suffrage in Asia : Gender, Nationalism and Democracy
Chapter 6 : Being a Feminist Means …’, A State of Ambivalence : The Feminist Movement in Singapore
Chapter 7 : Coexistence in a Heterogeneous Political Culture’, Fields of Protest : Women’s Movements in India
Chapter 8 : KAMMI’s Local Politics of Resistance’, Filipino Peasant Women Exploitation and Resistance
Chapter 9 : Women’s Organizations and Civil Society in China’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2003
Chapter 10 : Political Representation and South Korean Women’, Journal of Asian Studies, 1999
Chapter 11 : Islam, Gender, and Politics in Indonesia, Islamic Perspectives on The New Millennium
Chapter 12 : Sex or Sangha? Non-Normative Gender Roles for Women in Thai Law and Religion, Mixed Blessings : Laws, Religions, and Women’s Rights in The Asia-Pacific Region
Chapter 13 : Belated Narrating : GrandmoThers’ Telling Stories of Forced Sexual Servitude During World War II, Just Advocacy : Women’s Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and The Politics of Representation
Chapter 14 : Body Politics in Bangladesh, Gender Politics in The Asia-Pacific Region
Chapter 15 : Evocations of Equality : Female Education and Employment’, Women, Man, Bangkok : Love, Sex, and Popular Culture in Thailand

Volume II : Redefining Working Women

Chapter 16 : Workers’, Creating Socialist Women in Japan
Chapter 17 : Spirits of Resistance’, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline : Factory Women in Malaysia
Chapter 18 : The Factories’, Factory Daughters : Gender, Household Dynamics and Rural Industrialization in Java
Chapter 19 : The Dislocation of Nonbelonging : Domestic Workers in The Filipino Migrant Communities of Rome and Los Angeles’, Servants of Globalization : Women, Migration and Domestic Work
Chapter 20 : Gender and Manufacturing Employment’, Women of a Lesser Cost
Chapter 21 : GAD with Chinese Characteristics’, The Chinese Women’s Movement Between State and Market
Chapter 22 : The Gender and Environment Debate : Lessons from India’, Feminist Studies, 1992
Chapter 23 : Approaches to Women and Development in Rural China’, Journal of Contemporary China, 2006
Chapter 24 : Culture, Social Class and Income Control in The Lives of Women Garment Workers in Bangladesh’, Gender and Society, 1995
Chapter 25 : Becoming Dagongmei (Working Girls) : The Politics of Identity and Difference in Reform China’, The China Journal, 1999
Chapter 26 : Big Companies Don’t Hire Us, Married Women : Exploitation and Empowerment among Women Workers in South Korea’, Feminist Studies, 1996
Chapter 27 : Indonesian Women at Work, Gender and Power in Affluent Asia
Chapter 28 : Hidden Managers at Home : Elite Javanese Women Running New Order Family Firms, Women and Households in Indonesia : Cultural Notions and Social Practices
Chapter 29 : Dutiful Daughters, Estranged Sisters, Gender and Power in Affluent Asia

Volume III : Health and Sexuality

Chapter 30 : Domestic Lives : Reproduction, The MoTher and The Child’, Sickness and The State : Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940
Chapter 31 : Claiming The Fetus’, Colonizing Sex : Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan
Chapter 32 : Discourses of Sexuality Since 1949’, Women and Sexuality in China
Chapter 33 : Globalization, Sexuality and Silences : Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in and Asian Context’, in Saskia Wieringa, Evelyn Blackwood, and Abha Bhaiya, Women’s Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia
Chapter 34 : Science, Modernity and The Making of China’s One-Child Policy’, Population and Development Review, 2003
Chapter 35 : From Sanas to Dapat : Negotiating Entitlement in Reproductive Decision-Making in The Philippines, Negotiating Reproductive Rights : Women’s Perspectives Across Countries and Cultures
Chapter 36 : Rationalizing Fecund Bodies : Family Planning Policy and The Modern Indian Nation-State, Borders of Being : Citizenship, Fertility and Sexuality in Asia and The Pacific
Chapter 37 : Corrupt Girls, Victims of Men, Desperate Women’, Abortion, Sin and The State in Thailand
Chapter 38 : "Vectors" and "Protectors" : Women and HIV/AIDS in The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Maternity and Reproductive Health in Asian Societies
Chapter 39 : Gender Issues in Revolutionary Praxis’, Philippine Left Review, 1991
Chapter 40 : Feminist Prostitution Debates : Are There any Sex Workers in China?, Chinese Women : Living and Working
Chapter 41 : Loss of Face : Violence against Women in South Asia, Violence against Women in Asian Societies
Chapter 42 : Subversive Stories and Feminist Strategies’, Sexual Violence and The Law in Japan
Chapter 43 : Violence against Women’, Personal Voices : Chinese Women in The 1980s

Volume IV : Constructions of The Feminine

Chapter 44 : Gender and Morality in The Making of Race’, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power : Race and The Intimate in Colonial Rule
Chapter 45 : The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia, Fantasizing The Feminine in Indonesia
Chapter 46 : The Status of Women in a Patriarchal State : The Case of Singapore, Women in Asia : Tradition, Modernity and Globalisation
Chapter 47 : State FaTherhood : The Politics of Nationalism, Sexuality, and Race in Singapore, Nationalisms and Sexualities
Chapter 48 : Vietnam’s Women in The Renovation Era, Gender and Power in Affluent Asia
Chapter 49 : Re-examining The Impact of The 1950 Marriage Law : State Improvisation, Local Initiative and Rural Family Change’, The China Quarterly, 2000
Chapter 50 : The Cultural Assumption of Virtuous Wife and Good MoTher’, Accepting Population Control : Urban Chinese Women and The One-Child Family Policy
Chapter 51 : Why Women Rule The Roost : Rethinking Javanese Ideologies of Gender and Self Control, Bewitching Women, Pious Men : Gender and Body Politics in SouTheast Asia
Chapter 52 : Women in Between : Becoming Religious Persons in Thailand, Women’s Buddhism
Chapter 53 : The Power Paradox in Muslim Women’s Majales : North-West Pakistani Mourning Rituals as Sites of Contestation over Religious Politics, Ethnicity and Gender’, Signs : Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1998
Chapter 54 : Umma and Citizenry : Civil Society in The New World Order, Shari’a Law and The Modern Nation-State : A Malaysian Symposium
Chapter 55 : Controlled or Autonomous : Identity and The Experience of The Network, Women Living under Muslim Laws’, Signs : Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1994
Chapter 56 : Modernizing The Malay MoTher, Maternities and Modernities : Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and The Pacific
Chapter 57 : Producing MoThers, Reimaging Japanese Women
Chapter 58 : NeiTher Reasonable nor Responsible : Contrasting Representations of Masculinity in Malay Society’, Cultural Anthropology, 1994