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Reading Gender Trouble in Southeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2020

Tamara Loos Open the ORCID record for Tamara Loos [Opens in a new window]
Tamara Loos*
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Tamara Loos (tl14@cornell.edu) is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Cornell University.
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Extract

Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble, published in 1990, enjoyed its thirtieth anniversary in 2020. To that end, the Association for Asian Studies, the United States’ largest association of academics working on Asia, invited scholars to consider the importance of her arguments and ideas for Asian studies and scholarship in Asia, including how scholars have diverged from and expanded their studies of gender and sexuality in ways not anticipated by Butler when she first published the book. In this essay, I examine the impact of Butler's book in Southeast Asia. Out of the abundance of scholarship stemming from and about the region's eleven diverse countries and their histories, I prioritize those works that explicitly engage the theoretical insights in Gender Trouble to elucidate the lives of gender-nonconforming communities in Southeast Asia. I include scholarship that allows me to explore the disjunction between categories of analysis that are foundational to Butler's theory and those at work in Southeast Asia. Far from rendering Butler's theory and methodological intervention inapposite, this mismatch has catalyzed productive rethinking of Gender Trouble and its implications for the region.

Keywords

gendergender performativityhomosexualityJudith ButlertransgendersexsexualitySoutheast AsiaSoutheast Asian studies
Type
Forum—Revisiting Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Reflections and Critiques from Asian Studies
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 79 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 927 - 946
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc., 2020

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References

1 Scott, James, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009)Google ScholarPubMed.

2 Dutton, George, Warner, Jane, and Whitmore, John K., Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 114Google Scholar.

3 Some might include Chinese forms of imperialism in Vietnam.

4 Jackson, Peter A., “Space, Theory and Hegemony: The Dual Crises of Asian Area Studies and Cultural Studies,” Sojourn: Social Issues in Southeast Asia 18, no. 1 (2003): 1–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, Peter A., “Mapping Poststructuralism's Borders: The Case for Poststructuralist Area Studies,” Sojourn: Social Issues in Southeast Asia 18, no. 1 (2003): 42–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; J. Neil C. Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture: Binabae to Bakla, Silahis to MSM, 3rd ed. (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 420–56; Hendri Yuilius, “Queer Theory: A Note from Indonesia,” New Mandala, February 22, 2009, https://www.newmandala.org/queer-theory-a-note-from-indonesia/ (accessed February 2, 2020).

5 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), xix–xx. (Originally published in 1990.)

6 Butler, Gender Trouble, xx.

7 A search of Cornell University's library and WorldCat.org, which is a catalog that “itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories,” reveals that Butler's Gender Trouble has not been translated into any Southeast Asian language unless you count English and Chinese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldCat, accessed August 16, 2019). I am grateful to Sarah E. Howe, reference librarian at Cornell University, who aided in this search.

8 Chinese and English are among the national languages of Singapore. Southeast Asians educated in former colonial languages can read Gender Trouble in English, French, Dutch, or Spanish.

9 Chairat Polmuk, lecturer, Faculty of Arts at Chulalongkorn University, personal email communication, August 18, 2019.

10 Sura Intamool, “Mediations on Thai Queer Identity through Lakhon Nok” (master's thesis, Miami University, 2011); Tinnaphop Sinsomboonthong (ติณณภพจ์ สินนสมบูรณ์ทอง), “Collective Identity of ‘Page-Nongng’ as Queer Epistemology” [อัตลักษณ์รวมกลุ่ม ของสมาชิก ‘เพจน้องง’ ในฐานะญาณวิทยาเคว๊ยร์], Journal of Social Anthropology [สังคมวิทยามานุษยวิทยา] 36, no. 2 (2017), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324495711_Collective_Identity_of_Page-Nongng_as_Queer_Epistemology_In_Thai_xatlaksnrwmklumkhxngsmachik_phecnxngng_nithanayanwithyakhewiyr (accessed October 9, 2020); Narupon Duangwises (นฤพนธ์ ด้วงวิเศษ), “Ta-Khian Goddess: Bodily Feminization of Sacred Superstition in Thai Consumer Culture” [เจ้าแม่ตะเคียน:การสร้างเรือนร่างหญิงให้กับสิ่งศักดิ์สิทธิ์ในวัฒนธรรมบริโภคแบบไทย], Journal of Social Sciences (Naresuan University) 13, no. 2 (2017): 65–98; Saran Mahasuphap (ศรัณย์ มหาสุภาพ), “The Construction of Gay Identity in Contemporary Gay Autobiography” [การสร้างอัตลักษณ์เกย์ในงานเข๊ยนแนวอัตช๊วประวัติเกย์ร่วมสมัย] (master's thesis, Chulalongkorn University, 2008).

11 Masha Gessen, “Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape our Rage,” New Yorker, February 9, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/judith-butler-wants-us-to-reshape-our-rage (accessed October 13, 2020); Butler, Gender Trouble, vii.

12 Rosalind Morris, “All Made Up: Performance Theory and the New Anthropology of Sex and Gender,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 567–69.

13 Butler, Gender Trouble, 24.

14 Butler, Gender Trouble, 191; emphasis in original.

15 Butler, Gender Trouble, 195.

16 Butler, Gender Trouble, xxiii.

17 J. Neil C. Garcia, Performing the Self: Occasional Prose (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2003).

18 Garcia, Performing the Self, 4; emphasis added.

19 Peter Jackson makes a similar argument with regard to biomedical and psychological texts in Thailand since the 1960s, when they first begin to appear. See Peter A. Jackson, “An Explosion of Thai Identities: Global Queering and Re-Imagining Queer Theory,” Culture, Health and Sexuality 2, no. 4 (2000): 405–24; Peter A. Jackson, “Performative Genders, Perverse Desires,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 9 (August 2003), http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue9/jackson.html (accessed May 12, 2020). Historically speaking, this is a comparatively shallow “archive” and, in addition, is not as powerful an explicator of the origins of sexual and gender nonconformity among Thais as explanations derived from everyday understandings of Buddhism.

20 Garcia, Performing the Self, 4.

21 In addition to origin tales and cosmologies, one must also mine quotidian religious practices and doctrinal texts, which are a crucial part of Southeast Asia's archives. Because this essay is concerned with the region as a whole, it is not possible to include the Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, and customary religious discourses specific to each place.

22 Shelly Errington's prescient overview of gender, sex, and power, which was written at about the same time as Gender Trouble, includes insights similar to Butler's about the cultural meanings of the corporeal body and performance of sex and gender. Shelly Errington, “Recasting Sex, Gender, and Power: A Theoretical and Regional Overview,” in Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia, eds. Jane Monnig Atkinson and Shelly Errington (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 1–58.

23 Jane Atkinson and Shelly Errington, eds., Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); Michael Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism in Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 2 (2006): 309–40; Michael Peletz, Gender Pluralism: Southeast Asia since Early Modern Times (New York: Routledge, 2009); Sharyn Graham Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia: Sexuality, Islam and Queer Selves (London: Routledge, 2010); Rosalind Morris, “Three Sexes and Four Sexualities: Redressing the Discourses on Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Thailand,” Positions 2, no. 1 (1994): 15–43.

24 Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism”; Peletz, Gender Pluralism.

25 The Philippines is an exception. See Carolyn Brewer, “Baylan, Asog, Transvestism, and Sodomy: Gender, Sexuality and the Sacred in Early Colonial Philippines,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 2 (May 1999), http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/ (accessed October 9, 2020); Grace Nono, Babaylan Sing Back: Philippine Shamans and Voice, Gender, and Place (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, forthcoming).

26 Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism,” 310.

27 Peletz, “Transgenderism and Gender Pluralism,” 313.

28 Peletz, Gender Pluralism, 38.

29 Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 178.

30 Mark Johnson, Beauty and Power: Trangendering and Cultural Transformation in the Southern Philippines (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 25. Many places evidenced this: Sulawesi Buginese and Makassarise bissu; Ngadju of Kalimantan's basir and balian, who were male and female priestly types. In the Philippines, before the Catholic conversion, there were babaylan, or “effeminate/transvestite” male priests, who in one area in the south were felicitously called labia (Johnson, Beauty and Power, 26–27).

31 Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 71–79.

32 Morris refers to this hermaphrodite as a kathoey, but this is an anachronism at best. The actual term used in the Pathamamulamuli was not kathoey, which arguably has a long history that predates the adoption of Theravada Buddhism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but napungsaka. See Peltier Anatole-Roger Peltier, Pathamamulamuli: The Origin of the World in the Lan Na Tradition (Chiang Mai: Suriwong Book Centre Ltd., 1991), 4. The differences between terms and the translations related to napungsaka, such as pandaka, kathoey, hermaphrodite, transgender, and transvestite need not detain us here. See Terdsak Romjumpa, “Wathakamkiaokap ‘ke’ nai sangkhom thai ph. so. 2508-2542” [Discourses on “Gays” in Thai Society, 1965–1999] (master's thesis, Chulalongkorn University, 2002); Peter A. Jackson, “Male Homosexuality and Transgenderism in the Thai Buddhist Tradition,” in Queer Dharma: Voices of Gay Buddhists, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1998), 55–89.

33 Peletz, Gender Pluralism.

34 Morris, “Three Sexes and Four Sexualities,” 21–22.

35 Morris, “All Made Up,” 583, 585.

36 Gayatri Reddy, With Respect to Sex: Negotiating Hijra Identity in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), cited in Megan Sinnott, “Borders, Diaspora, and Regional Connections: Trends in Asian ‘Queer’ Studies,” Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 1 (2010): 21.

37 Morris, “All Made Up,” 581.

38 Alexandra Dalferro, “‘Framing’ Paa Laai Inside and Outside of the Museum: Historical Significances and Contemporary Resonances of Textiles Made in India for the Thai Market” (paper presented at the Symposium on “Traded Treasure: Indian Textiles for Global Markets Symposium,” Johnson Museum of Art. Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., April 18–19, 2019); Katherine Bowie, “Assessing the Early Observers: Cloth and Fabric of Society in 19th-Century Northern Thai Kingdoms,” American Ethnologist 20, no. 1 (1993): 138–158; Susan Conway, Silken Threads, Lacquer Thrones: Lan Na Court Textiles (Bangkok: River Books, 2002); Matthew Reeder, “Categorical Kingdoms: Innovations in Ethnic Labeling and Visions of Communal States in Early Modern Siam” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2019); Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia.

39 Davies makes a compelling argument in favor of integrating gender into status concerns. She argues against the common refrain in Southeast Asian studies that status distinctions are marked (linguistically, sartorially) and therefore important, but gender distinctions are not marked and so not significant. Instead, she maintains that gender is “not subservient to status but rather gender inflects status.” Gender ideals “circumscribe appropriate means by which individuals can gain or lose social standing. Notions of idealized masculinity and femininity are perhaps nowhere clearer than in efforts to accumulate and maintain social location. Only by epitomizing gender ideals can people realize increased social status” (Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 92).

40 Judith Butler, “Gender in Translation: Beyond Monolingualism” philoSOPHIA 9, no. 1 (2019): 2.

41 Phet-saphap (phet-condition/status) is most commonly accepted as gender and phet-withi (phet- orientation) as sexuality. Kham-phet, or “crossing phet,” is the neologism for transgender and transsexual, coined in 2005 by the trans-identified scholar-activist Prempreeda Na Ayutthaya. See Peter A. Jackson, “Queer Bangkok after the Millennium,” in Queer Bangkok, ed. Peter A. Jackson (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011), 5.

42 Peter A. Jackson, “Gay Adaptation, Tom-Dee Resistance, and Kathoey Indifference: Thailand's Gender/Sex Minorities and the Episodic Allure of Queer English,” in Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language, eds. William Leap and Tom Boellstorff (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 207.

43 I came across materials that referred to lakkaphet in the late nineteenth century when conducting research for Subject Siam (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006); see also Megan Sinnott, Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2004), 7.

44 Evelyn Blackwood, Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010), 40.

45 Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 9.

46 Garcia, Performing the Self, 10.

47 Johnson, Beauty and Power, 33.

48 Morris, “Three Sexes and Four Sexualities.”

49 Morris, “Three Sexes and Four Sexualities,” 31–32.

50 Garcia, Performing the Self, 9–10.

51 Garcia, Performing the Self, 66.

52 Megan Sinnott, “The Semiotics of Transgendered Sexual Identity in the Thai Print Media,” in Sexualities in Anthropology: A Reader, eds. Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 323; Jackson, “Gay Adaptation, Tom-Dee Resistance, and Kathoey Indifference,” 203.

53 Richard Quang-Anh Tran, “An Epistemology of Gender: Historical Notes on the Homosexual Body in Contemporary Vietnam, 1986–2005,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 9, no. 2 (2014): 16; emphasis in original.

54 Butler's theory of gender performativity was critiqued for undermining the materiality of the body: the body is there, but only to perform gender. She responded to these critiques in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (London: Routledge, 1993) and other publications.

55 Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 23.

56 Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 21.

57 Unlike waria and lesbis, calalai and calabai do not claim to be women in men's bodies or vice versa. As a result, it is not culturally intelligible for them to feel like they are caught in the wrong body.

58 Blackwood, Falling into the Lesbi World; Tom Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007).

59 Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 24.

60 There is a burgeoning literature on normative and non-normative gender and sexualities in Burma/Myanmar, Malaysia, Laos, and Vietnam, but most of it does not cite Gender Trouble. In addition, there are many scholarly works that cite Butler but do not significantly engage the arguments or theory in Gender Trouble. See, for example, Sharon Bong, Becoming Queer and Religious in Malaysia and Singapore (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); John Andrew G. Evangelista, “On Queer and Capital: Borrowing Key Marxist Concepts to Enrich Queer Theorizing,” Philippine Sociological Review 61, no. 2 (2013): 349–70; John Andrew G. Evangelista, “Gaze in the Dark: Sexual Discourses and Practices in Gay Bathhouses,” Philippine Sociological Review 62 (2014): 39–64; David Gilbert, “Categorizing Gender in Queer Yangon,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 28, no. 2 (2013): 241–71; Tamara Ho, Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015); Tamara Ho, “Transgender, Transgression, and Translation: A Cartography of Nat Kadaws Notes on Gender and Sexuality within the Spirit Cult of Burma,” Discourse 31, no. 3 (2009): 273–317; Alicia Izharuddin, Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Ward Keeler, “Shifting Transversals: Trans Women's Move from Spirit Mediumship to Beauty Work in Mandalay,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 81, no. 5 (2016): 792–820; Ward Keeler, The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and its Others in Buddhist Burma (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2017); Bliss Chua Lim, “Queer Aswang Transmedia: Folklore as Camp,” Kritika Kultura 24 (2015): 178–225; Jacqueline Lo, Staging Nation: English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press), 109–35.

61 Sinnott, Toms and Dees; Evelyn Blackwood, “Trans Identities and Contingent Masculinities: Being Tombois in Everyday Practice,” Feminist Studies 35, no. 3 (2009): 454–80; Blackwood, Falling into the Lesbi World; Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia.

62 Lila Abu-Lughod, “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 1 (1990): 41–55, cited in Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 128.

63 Sinnott, Toms and Dees.

64 Sinnott, Toms and Dees, 135–37.

65 Sinnott, Toms and Dees, 140; see also Blackwood, Falling into the Lesbi World, 60.

66 Blackwood, “Trans Identities and Contingent Masculinities,” 476.

67 Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 134.

68 Davies, Gender Diversity in Indonesia, 128–29.

69 Martin Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 46, 50.

70 Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires.

71 Transpuan is the Indonesian term for transgender. Boellstorff considers waria male not transgender, because no one denies their embodiment. But Rodriguez argues that the waria he interviewed now see themselves as trangender and identify as “real women,” with the spirit (jiwa) of a woman, even though they have a male body. Boellstorff, A Coincidence of Desires, 82, 90, 109–11; Diego Garcia Rodriguez, “The Muslim Waria of Yogyakarta: Finding Agency within Submission,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 3 (2019): 372–74.

72 Johnson, Beauty and Power, 216.

73 Morris, “Three Sexes and Four Sexualities.”

74 Jackson, “Performative Genders, Perverse Desires,” paragraphs 96, 103.

75 In the preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, Butler notes that she would include a discussion of racialized sexualities if she were to revise the book.

76 Morris, “All Made Up,” 585.

77 Manalansan, Global Divas, 15.

78 Manalansan, Global Divas, 14.

79 Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture, 439.

80 Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture, 440.

81 Garcia, Performing the Self, 14.

82 Rick Bonus, Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000).

83 Bonus, Locating Filipino Americans, 26–27.

84 Bonus, Locating Filipino Americans, 189n36.

85 Jordy Rosenberg, “Gender Trouble on Mother's Day,” Avidly: A Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books, May 9, 2014, http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/ (accessed February 16, 2020).