Asia Institute - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableMaking Spaces in Malaysia: Women's Rights and New Muslim Religiosities(Oxford University Press, 2017)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGendering cosmopolitanisms: Hospitality and the asylum seeker Other(PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD, 2018-03-01)Debates about cosmopolitanism have pointed both to its exclusionary character as a problematic child of western modernity, analytically and politically dubious, and to the possibilities offered by the new cosmopolitanisms stressing cosmopolitan practice and ethics. This paper suggests that a gendering of such arguments can add important dimensions to these debates. Exploring the gendered character of the hospitality at the heart of cosmopolitanism's founding arguments, the discussion is grounded in an examination of the situated cosmopolitan hospitality offered by several prominent women-centred asylum seeker and refugee support and advocacy groups in Australia. These groups have created significant spaces of hospitality welcoming “Others,” deploying explicitly feminine imaginaries against the counter-cosmopolitanisms of the increasingly securitized and militarized border politics of the Australian state, and xenophobic anti-refugee nationalisms. The situated cosmopolitan hospitality and affective politics of these practices are linked to feminist arguments about political mobilizations of the feminine, especially the maternal, in social movements.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGender and modernity revisited: Dialogues with Joel Kahn(SAGE Publications, 2019-09-01)This article revisits theorising about the relationships between concepts of gender and modernity, drawing on long-term anthropological research on Southeast Asia. From the 1990s on, now well-known feminist critiques pointed to the profound androcentrism of much theorising about modernity, the many lacunae in such work, and the ways in which masculinity has operated as a core constitutive category of the social. Most theorising about modernity, feminists argued, was gendered both by the exclusion of women and a neglect of gender in explorations of the modern. In their turn, feminists have argued strongly for the centrality of genders and sexualities in the making of modern social and cultural forms and pointed to the crucial place of gendered imaginaries within modern social orders, with women being frequently identified and deployed as bearers of nation, ‘tradition’, and ‘civilisation’. Unpacking and challenging the received categories and paradigms – not least ‘woman’ – has proved demanding, however. Problems have been intensified by prevailing Eurocentrisms, and conceptual divisions of the world into essentialised binaries like ‘modern' and ‘traditional', ‘West' and the 'Rest', and latterly Islam and the West. With increased contests around the concept of modernity – feminist and non-feminist – some writers have argued for a pluralisation of modernity, with such concepts as multiple modernities or alternative modernities, or through conceiving of a global modernity. Engaging critically with such ideas, and grounding the discussion in empirical work on Malaysia carried out in dialogue with Joel Kahn, this article looks to possible further developments in framing debates about gender and the modern, exploring the contributions that locally based, anthropological scholarship can make to theorisations of modernity and its relationship(s) with gender.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableElite Malay Polygamy: Wives, Wealth and Woes in Malaysia(Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2020-03-01)Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen’s richly detailed study of contemporary elite Malay polygamy in Malaysia is a welcome addition to scholarship on the country and beyond. Based on fieldwork stretching over twenty-five years, the book is organized thematically around narratives from seventeen key female informants drawn from elite circles in Kuala Lumpur (KL). ...
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ItemGender, Rights and Cosmopolitanisms(Berg Publishers, 2008)