Trans-Status Subjects

Trans-Status Subjects

Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia

  • Author: Sarker, Sonita; De, Esha Niyogi; Levine, Philippa; Perera, Nihal
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822329558
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822384236
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2002
  • Month: November
  • Pages: 360
  • DDC: 305.3/0954
  • Language: English
A Thai foodseller on the streets of Bangkok, a cyclo driver in a Vietnamese village, a Pahari migrant laborer in the Himalayas, a Parsi-Christian professional social worker shuttling back and forth between London and Calcutta—Trans-Status Subjects examines how these and other South and Southeast Asians affect and are affected by globalization. While much work has focused on the changes wrought by globalization—describing how people maintain foundations or are permanently destabilized—this collection theorizes the complex ways individuals negotiate their identities and create alliances in the midst of both stability and instability, as what the editors call trans-status subjects. Using gender paradigms, historical time, and geographic space as driving analytic concerns, the essays gathered here consider the various ways South and Southeast Asians both perpetuate and resist various hierarchies despite unequal mobilities within economic, social, cultural, and political contexts.

The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia, and the United States. In investigating issues of power, mobility, memory, and solidarity in recent eras of globalization, the contributors—scholars and activists from South Asia, Southeast Asia, England, Australia, Canada, and the United States—illuminate various facets of the new concept of trans-status subjects.

Trans-Status Subjects carves out a new area of inquiry at the intersection of feminisim and critical geography, as well as globalization, postcolonial, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Anannya Bhattacharjee, Esha Niyogi De, Karen Gaul, Ketu Katrak, Karen Leonard, Philippa Levine, Kathryn McMahon, Andrew McRae, Susan Morgan, Nihal Perera, Sonita Sarker, Jael Silliman, Sylvia Tiwon, Gisele Yasmeen

  • CONTENTS
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Marking Times and Territories Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De
  • I FIGURING GENDERS IN THE COLONY AND NATION: NATIVE AND FOREIGN
    • Designing Woman, Designing North Borneo Susan Morgan
    • The Cordon Sanitaire: Mobility and Space in the Regulation of Colonial Prostitution Philippa Levine
    • Feminizing the City: Gender and Space in Colonial Colombo Nihal Perera
    • Failure of the Imaginary: Gendered Excess of the Indonesian Nation Sylvia Tiwon
    • Gender, Paradoxical Space, and Critical Spectatorship in Vietnamese Film: The Works of Dang Nhat Minh Kathryn McMahon
  • II TRANSPORTING GENDERS BETWEEN THE VILLAGE AND CITY: REPRESENTATIONS AND RESISTANCES
    • Traveling High and Low: Verticality, Social Position, and the Making of Pahari Genders Karen K. Gaul
    • Nurturing, Gender Ideologies, and Bangkok’s Foodscape Gisèle Yasmeen
    • Place and Displacement: Figuring the Thai Village in an Age of Rural Development Andrew McRae
    • The City between the Global State: Architecture and the People in Singapore’s Gendered Imaginations Esha Niyogi De
  • III GENDERING LOCAL-GLOBAL CIRCUITS: LABOR, CAPITAL, AND SUBJECTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
    • South Asian Women in the Gulf: Families and Futures Reconfigured Karen Leonard
    • Diasporic Alienness and Belonging: Selected Indian-American Cultural Expressions Ketu H. Katrak
    • Jewish Diaspora through Colonial Spaces: Negotiating Identity and Forging Community Jael Silliman
    • Unruly Subjects: Cornelia Sorabji and Ravinder Randhawa Sonita Sarker
    • Immigrant Dreams and Nightmares: South Asian Domestic Workers in North America in a Time of Global Mobility Anannya Bhattacharjee
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

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