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Example research essay topic: Women In Southeast Asia - 2,400 words

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Women in Southeast Asia An Indonesian activist writing in 1996 claimed the male-dominated regimes and masculine political cultures encouraged by these men created a politics that is competitive, heavily dependent on military force and infused with aggressive macho political habits. Feminine political culture, in contrast, reflects the legitimacy of the people. It is a political culture of calm, radiating, listening tolerance. He goes on to ponder why Cory, Suu Kyi and Megawati, managed to become important opposition leaders (Peletz 89). His explanation or answer is two-pronged. On the one hand, a spirit of resistance slowly arose as a result of living under the siege of a political culture which glorifies supremacy and violence.

On the other, the fear and insecurity, which becomes an overweening feature of life under authoritarian regimes was momentarily harnessed by women who appear to represent alternative past and future regimes. While Rachlands claims are certainly exaggerated, his point is clear: there are enormous differences in the key political values and styles of male and female politicians. I wish to argue that these differences can be traced to female subordination within the state and the family. I will turn now to the formal and academic part of my argument.

I wish first of all to say a few things about the exclusion of women from government and politics. For centuries, men ran governments and wrote political philosophy, the experience of women (having) little influence on democratic practice or thought. (Peletz) These are the words of a feminist scholar opening a debate on the ways we think about democracy. Her point was not merely that men dominate the worlds of politics and scholarship or that democracy theorists are wrong to think that citizens are sex-less, but that males and females understand and experience politics in dramatically different ways. To make this point in yet another way, every political system or polity displays an unequal ordering of relations among its male and female citizens, a structure or a constitutional order that R. W. Connell describes as a gender regime.

In American colloquial usage, this word regime has a negative connotation. In political science, however, it is a neutral term which denotes constitutional structure or composition. For example, we say the UK has a parliamentary regime, or that the USA, has a presidential regime. The idea of a gender regime means that everyday behavior is ordered or organized around sexual distinctions and role expectations embedded in coupled relationships between wife-husband, boss-secretary or mother-father.

Connell argues that all of our institutions have gender regimes. The state has a gender regime, so does the family and the University. Even the street has a gender regime. The character of the gender regime of each institution is determined by three things: (1) there is a distinct, though not often mandatory or rigid, division of labor between men and women who staff the organization or institution. (2) there is an explicit, if often subtle, ideology that seeks to normalize or naturalize the hegemony of masculine values, power and leadership. (3) there is conflict and tension between everyday political assumptions of human equality and mutual respect between men and women and the reality of masculine hegemony. For example, and it is often said, women in many societies in Southeast Asia enjoy fairly high social status. As wives, mothers and daughters they are treated well, even honored and respected.

Nevertheless, in decision-making, they are everywhere subordinated to their husbands, fathers and, in widowhood, their brothers, that is, kept in their place. Gender roles in the family are not only different and complementary in many respects, they are highly undemocratic. In the realm of politics, there are similar fusions and conflicts arising from the sharp division of labor by sex, the fusion of personal emotional-professional obligations and responsibilities, and inequalities in shares of power. Like the family, the state has an institutional form or structure. Its gender regime may be mapped or traced by examining three key structures which I will examine in turn. There is a sharp, sexist division of labor among the personnel of the state.

While all civil servants may wear uniforms, the men are armed, and the women are not. Most of the top jobs are distributed by men to other men with most deals for jobs and contracts being cut in wholly male networks. The men in gray suits (British) or the backroom boys (USA) really are almost exclusively men, the exceptional female interloper, for example, Imelda Marcos, serving to prove the rule. The twenty to thirty per cent of Southeast Asian women who have succeeded in obtaining civil service appointments are concentrated in the lower ranks with limited promotion prospects. The masculine assumption of rights to dominance is so ubiquitous, strong and ordinary that it sometimes has curious effects. In 1993, the coalition government formed in the wake of UN-sponsored elections had no women ministers (Peletz 94).

A man was named to head the newly created State Secretariat for Women. This decision was treated by dismay by the Cambodian womens movement which had an obvious candidate for the job. When the Secretariat was upgraded to a Ministry in 1998, it became a Ministry for Womens and Veterans Affairs. Womens affairs are not easily or ideologically linked to veterans affairs but viewed from within the states gender regime, there is a paternalist, protectionist urge to care for the nations women who should in turn help to care for the nations heroes.

There are official ideologies asserting the superiority of masculine ways. State leaders typically advertise or advocate actions deemed forceful, tough, and virile or strong. Leadership therefore must be strong leadership. Authoritarians often attempt to justify the unlawful use of the army and the policy against unarmed civilians by citing a need to preserve stability.

The destabilizing effects of violence and aggression against society are not recognized. Official gender ideologies denigrate wimps, indecisiveness, incompetence or physical weakness as less than masculine or, absurdly, feminine. They are almost invariably homophobic. The authoritarian New Order in Indonesia actively promoted gender differences in society and attempted to assimilate the family gender regime to the gender regime state. President Suharto became Pak Hard or Father/Protector Suharto, domineering, avuncular and generous in his relationships with friends and family (and certainly his household) but menacing and ruthless with opponents, anyone deemed treacherous within the family and his power networks. Gloria Arroyo, clearly conscious of the hegemonic, masculine values embedded in the gender regime of the Republic of the Philippines has recently demonstrated masculine toughness in suppressing street riots.

Yet she promised to heal the wounds of society as she campaigned for last Monday elections, a decisively feminine and democratic standpoint. Perhaps more significant, recalling that there are multiple masculinities represented among the personnel of most states, and that democratic leaders of either sex must distinguish the masculinities associated with militarism and other authoritarian impulses from those compatible with rule of law, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has several times instructed the military of their duty to be faithful to the Constitution. The machismo factor makes it difficult for most any army in Southeast Asia to accept a woman as commander-in-chief. I interpret President Arroyos reportedly, strong and decisive action against protestors calling for a return of former President Estrada as evidence that she feels threatened on this gender battlefront. The policies of the state both reflect and reinforce the gender regime having diverse and distinctive impacts on men, women and the family gender regime.

It is well understood in political science, that the state intervenes in and regulates much of our lives. Our births are registered, our incomes taxed, our rights to drive cars are licensed and so on. There is less awareness of the fact that public laws promote gender ideals, that is, influence how we identify and recognize good feminine and good masculine behavior. For example, marriage and divorce laws in Southeast Asia often fail to award equal rights to women and men. Government campaigns against HIV/AID stigmatize prostitutes who fail to persuade their clients to engage in safe sex; does anyone know of a government that campaigns against the presumed masculine right to engage in extra-marital or pre-marital promiscuity? Similarly, family planning and birth control legislation usually assume wives and mothers will do most of the cooperating, husbands and fathers receiving tacit ideological support for their desires for unfettered expression of masculine sexuality.

Labor laws, especially those fixing minimum wages, hours and conditions of service, often fail to protect women workers whose income is often consumed by her family and whose skills are high and are valued not least because they can be purchased cheaply. Feminist research among women workers in rural Java shows that fathers sometimes cooperate with local entrepreneurs to fix wages such that worker-daughters will be economically obliged to continue to live at home. This is an example of the gender regime of the family intersecting nearly with the gender regime of the marketplace as well as that of the state. Ideologies and practices favoring masculine subordination of women within their gendered roles as dutiful daughters or loving wives and mothers make these intersections and possible. As masculine interests are hegemonic in most gender regimes, economically driven intersections of this kind would appear to be especially harmful and exploitative for women. From a feminist perspective, democratization of governing institutions and of state gender regimes is of urgent importance in Southeast Asia.

Many questions and issues are raised by this realization. Who will do it? What is to be done? Must (or can? ) women acting as a class of citizens, make a difference? Or are the legacies of exclusion, marginalization and conditioning possibly too overwhelming. It perhaps goes without saying that gender regimes and gender relations are invisible in mainstream debates about democratization.

Only a few scholars, primarily feminist ones, have attempted to correct our professional perspectives. Georgina Wales, who has studied womens movements struggling against military dictatorships in Latin America, stresses that as popular movements in favor of democracy emerge and develop, women participate on the basis of the social roles associated with their gendered identities (for example, as mothers and household providers (Kintanar 49). The Argentine women, who demonstrated every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo while carrying photographs of the disappeared, did not demand democracy: they demanded as mothers the release of their missing children, presumed to be political prisoners or dead. By their acts, they brought the gender regime of the family into conflict with that of the state. Adopting a related, but slightly different approach, Jean Betake Elshtain argues that women who are sisters, daughters, wives or mothers can sometimes find themselves well-placed to assert the primacy of traditional (family) rights and authority (Kintanar 45). Women, more than men, she argues will assert and exercise traditional authority when there is sharp conflict with the machinery of arrogant public power.

She cites the example of Antigone, who in ancient Greece defied an edict of the tyrannical Creon, King of Thebes who ordered that her brothers dead body should lie in the fields as food for flesh-eating vultures. At the risk of death and against the warning of her sister that women cannot fight against men or the laws of the state, Antigone insisted upon the necessity of honoring her brother and the immorality of the state daring to deny this. Two things are happening here. First, state violence has brought the gender regime of the family into sharp conflict with the rulers expectation that family regimes are subordinate. Secondly, both daughters in this tale demonstrated through their loyalty and fear their subordination to male kin and both generally accepted their state of powerlessness (or their place in the gender order).

In spite of this, Antigone was enabled in a moment of crisis, to transform her political weakness into moral authority, to mobilize visions of solidarity and to use both of these as a means of chastening public power. The idea that women, as the primacy reproducers and carers of human life might have a special or privileged role in the task of chastening the state in matters of life-supporting moral decency are rather pleasing. This suggests a possible link between peoples power which typically lacks a unifying political ideology and the rise to prominence of female opposition leaders who represent alternative pasts and futures. The active engagement of women in peoples movements is what makes them truly legitimate, morally uplifting and emancipatory as democratic movements. I do not agreed with Richland, the Indonesian activist cited at the beginning of my remarks, that the leadership of a woman immediately substitutes an entirely different and feminine political culture in place of the macho political habits of male authoritarians.

The calming, facilitating role of women students is nevertheless well documented in the film evidence of the 1973 student-led uprising in Thailand and in the 1980 peoples uprising in Gwangju. In the reforms movement in Indonesia in 1998, young women formed a cordon between armed soldiers and peaceful demonstrators placing flowers in the barrels of upturned rifles. Official gender ideologies continue nevertheless to remain prominent in the thinking of Cory Aquino, Gloria Arroyo, Aung San Suu Kyi and Megawati Sukarnoputri. Bibliography: Bewitching women, pious men: gender and body politics in Southeast Asia edited by Aihwa Ong and Michael G. Peletz.

Berkeley: University of California Press, c 1999. Cultural identity and urban change in Southeast Asia: interpretative essays / edited by Marc Askew and William... Geelong, Vic. : Deakin University Press, 1994. Daughters in industry: work, skills, and consciousness of women workers in Asia / edited by Noeleen Header. Kuala Lumpur: Asian and Pacific Development Centre, 1998.

Development and displacement: women in Southeast Asia / edited by Glen Chandler, Norma Sullivan and Jan Branson; edited on behalf of the Melbourne Branch, Women's Caucus, Asian Studies Association of Australia. Clayton, Vic. : Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University. Education for rural development: a portfolio of studies. Bangkok, Thailand: Unesco Regional Office for Education in Asia and the Pacific, 2001. Emergent voices: Southeast Asian women novelists. / Thelma B.

Kintanar... [et al. ]. Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press; [s. l. ]: distributed outside the Philippines by the University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Geography of gender in the Third World edited by Janet Hen shall Moment and Janet G. Townsend. U.

S. ed. Albany, N. Y. : State University of New York Press, c 1987.


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Research essay sample on Women In Southeast Asia

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