Gender and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific

Seminar Room 442

New Law School Annexe
Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney

Programme, December 13

9am Welcome and Project Introduction

(with coffee/tea)

9.45am Session 1 (Chair, Catherine Driscoll)

Meaghan Morris, “‘The Great Australian Loneliness’; on writing an
Inter-Asian biography of Ernestine Hill”
Laleen Jayamanne, “To derail thinking: on shuttling between
Australia and India as a former Ceylonese”

11.15am Morning tea break

11.30am Session 2 (Chair, Tess Lea)

Fran Martin and Tania Lewis (presented by Fran Martin), “Joining
the ‘Office Tribe’ and ‘Marrying into a Grand Household’: Aspirational
femininity on lifestyle television in Taiwan”
Jane Park, “Fighting Female Otaku: The Celebration of the Inauthentic
in Chocolate”

1pm Lunch break

Session 3 (Chair, Adrian Vickers)

2.15pm
Peter Jackson, “Is a History of Gender Possible? Notes from
Modernising Siam/Thailand”
Catherine Driscoll, “Subjects of Distance: the modernity of the
country girl”

3.45pm Break

4pm Film Screening: Kim Soyoung, New Woman: Her First Song

Session 4 (Chair, Natalya Lusty)

5pm
Keynote: Kim Soyoung, “Affective Labour: Vampire, Mother and
Housemaid”

6.30
 Drinks: with W.U.N. Politics of World Cinema Symposium.
Law Annexe Bar. Symposium nametag required.

Gender and Modernity in the Asia-Pacific

Seminar Room 442
New Law School Annexe
Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney

Programme, December 14

9.30am Coffee/tea.

9.45am Session 5 (Chair, Meaghan Morris)

Keynote: Neelam Hussain, ‘Modernity, tradition and the Women’s
Mediation of Space in Today’s Pakistan”

11.15am Morning tea break

Session 6 (Chair, Anna Hickey-Moody)

11.30am Yiyan Wang, “Feminism, National Identity and the Chinese Mother-in-
Law”
Rebecca Suter, “Gender bending and religion in Japanese girls’
comics”

1pm Lunch break

Session 7 (Chair, Kane Race)

2.15pm
Qiu Zitong, “Feizhuliu Styles among China's Urban Youth”
Georgina Isbister, “Across Borders: Activist Feminisms in the 21st
Century”

3.45pm Break

4pm Roundtable: Future plans and directions

 Abstracts

Catherine Driscoll (Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney)

“Subjects of Distance: The Modernity of the Country Girl”

The rural is widely associated with traditions modernity is presumed to disrupt or

displace. But rurality is an idea produced by modernity, and endlessly engaged
in and by dialogues about modernization. This paper considers the particular
figure of the Australian country girl as an image of distance from modernity.
Insofar as she is always coming from the outside of a presumed modern identity
and experience that is fixed by its urbanity, the country girl in Australian popular
culture clearly has parallels in other places and other cultures. My focus here is
on the difference the country girl articulates. The country girl is always arriving
at an encounter with modernity that identifies what modernity costs and what it
offers. Her difference is not only a dramatic foil that throws the subject of
modernity into sharp relief but offers up stories about modernity as something
that must be learned.

Neelam Hussain (SIMORG, Pakistan)

“Modernity, Tradition and the Women’s Mediation of Space in Today’s
Pakistan”

This presentation will be based on an examination of modern and traditional

religious practices in today’s Pakistan with regards to the extent that they
empower/disempower women. Women’s Dars meetings and related activities,
that comprise readings and explications of Quranic texts constitute modern
practices and represent the Islamic world’s very contentious encounter with
modernity and draw their inspiration from Wahahbi or Saudi based Islam.
Traditional practices that today form part of popular or peoples’ religion are
associated with the Sufis and represent the syncreticism that played a central
role in the making of Indo-Muslim culture in South Asia. Highlighting the class
and socio-economic dimensions of this interaction, and taking into account
factors such as notions of singular religion based identity, upward social mobility
and the impact of new technologies and global consumerism this presentation
will focus on the spaces both modern and traditional practices provide women
and the ways in which they impact on women’s lives in the exercise of agency
and mediation of desire.

As the presentation is based on research findings of two different though

interrelated projects, a brief overview of research methodology employed will
also be provided.

Georgina Isbister (Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney)

“Across Borders: Feminist Activisms in the 21st Century”

The late 20th century marked a critical shift in interpretations of feminism both
within the feminist academy as well as across broader feminist activist practices.
Universal ideals of a global sisterhood of ‘women’ united under a single banner
of feminism were replaced with more inclusive notions of feminisms: feminisms
shaped by multiple, diverse and, at times, contradictory contexts. Yet in
acknowledging the different contexts that shape the many manifestations of
feminism across the globe, an interesting and rather paradoxical dilemma has
arisen. On the one hand, feminisms incorporate a rich diversity of perspectives
and attitudes and have and continue to empower a multiplicity of women and
men. On the other hand, however, such a feminist mélange appears to have
diluted the power of feminist discourses and praxis, at times calling into question
their relevance and meaning.

This paper is part of a larger project that examines feminist activisms across
borders. Using several feminist activist projects conducted by participants of the
Oxfam International Youth Partnerships (OIYP is a three year international youth
activist program which brings together young activists from over 100 countries)
questions about the current state and play of feminisms across a range of
cultural contexts will be explored.

These questions are manifest, moreover, in the November 2010 OIYP

Kaleidoscope event in New Delhi. The event marked the beginning of OIYP’s
three year program and brought 300 participants from around the world
together. Over the ten day event I conducted short courses on gender and
media, and took part in several forums on feminist activism organized by the
OIYP participants. Participants discussed what ‘feminism’ means to them as
individuals and within their cultural contexts, and shared their experiences of
feminist praxis. Importantly, participants discussed ways they could learn from
and support each others different feminist projects and contexts. This paper will
thus give a brief overview of these discussions.

Peter Jackson (Culture, History & Language, Australian National University)

“Is a history of gender possible? Notes from modernising
Siam/Thailand”

“Does sex have a history? Does each sex have a different history, or
histories? Is there a history of how the duality of sex was established, a
genealogy that might expose the binary options as a variable
construction?”
Judith Butler

To date, there remains something of a qualitative difference between the history

of sexuality and the history of gender. Since Foucault, we have been familiar
with the idea that the very category of sexuality, not merely forms of sexual
behaviour or varieties of sexuality identity, emerged comparatively recently as a
consequence of changing forms of power over human bodies and lives. Indeed,
over the past three decades a great deal of historical research has gone into
tracing precisely when and how contemporary notions of sexuality, and with it
categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality, emerged as part of the
transition to modernity in different societies in the West, Asia, and beyond. In
comparison, however, despite Judith Butler’s still timely questions above, the
history of gender by and large remains the study of changing forms of
masculinity and femininity, rather than an investigation of when and how the
very cultural division of masculinity and femininity, that is, gender, came into
being in different times and places.
This difference between the history of sexuality and the history of gender is
perhaps understandable. A central finding of comparative ethnographic and
historical research in the 20th century was that every known contemporary and
ancient society has shown divisions between masculine and feminine roles based
on some form of hierarchised power relations. Despite enticing hints here and
there of a possible epoch before patriarchy, the origins of gender seemed to be
so remote in time as to be beyond the scope of historical research and limited to
the deconstruction of myth.

In my presentation I want to consider how evidence from 19th and early 20th
century Siam/Thailand may provide the possibility of a more fundamental history
of the emergence of gender along the lines of Foucault’s project in his history of
sexuality. Premodern Siam was without doubt a strongly patriarchal society,
with women culturally excluded from religious ordination in Theravada
Buddhism, barred from holding the highest political rank of monarch, and
subordinated within a sexual culture that valorized male sexual prowess (and
conquests) while stigmatizing all expressions of female sexual agency.
Nonetheless, 19th century English and French visitors trenchantly criticized the
“androgyny” of the Siamese population (in fashion, hair styles, given names, the
everyday lives of the labouring masses) as a signal indicator of the society’s
“semi-barbarous” lack of “civilization”. Stung by the savagery of European
criticisms, especially of Siamese women as ugly, overly masculine viragos, the
absolute monarchy embarked on a project of self-modernisation that included
ordaining clearly visible (to Westerners) differentiation of the forms of Siamese
masculinity and femininity.

While Siam/Thailand does not provide evidence of the origins of gender, a self-
modernising project of power has nonetheless led to an expansion, and
intensification, of the masculine/feminine binary across the modern cultural body
of the nation. In this we may perhaps catch glimpses of an emergence of gender
in specific cultural sites and contexts where it has not previously existed, and
with this the possibility of a genuinely historiographic project that takes Judith
Butler’s questions as its starting point.

Laleen Jayamanne (Art History & Film Studies, University of Sydney)

“To Derail Thinking: on shuttling between Australia and India as a
former Ceylonese”

An epic mode of address derived from an Indian Avant-garde director, Kumar

Shahani might teach us something about how to address each other across
national boundaries and create flexible linkages. This is so because this mode of
address has the capacity to continually shift the enunciation among three key
performative registers, namely, the lyric, the dramatic and narration as story-
telling. These are all modes of address which historiography as a scientific
discipline, articulating national histories and identities tend to shy away from as
the realm of “poetry”. I will demonstrate how this South Asian epic optic helped
me to think between a modern Indian epic film and the Australian camp-epic film
Australia, by Baz Luhrmann, which are in fact worlds apart.

Kim Soyoung (Korean University of the Arts, Republic of Korea)

“Affective Labour : Vampire, Mother and Housemaid”
I would like to begin a talk on modernity and gender with presenting a couple of
sequences from my documentaries Women’s History Trilogy which deal with
eulogies, Korean cinema and New Woman and Modern girl. Then, I want to show
a part of a feature length fiction film Viewfinder where the non-place such as the
rest-up on the highway in the South is transformed into a virtual and a real place
with a presence of various people who are there to work, sojourn , drift and
search . This is what people are immersed in this age called either super-modern
or digital age. I was particularly interested in the female service sector in the
place like the rest-up where people are restless and homeless, but connected by
the cyber space in Korea.

This takes us to the issue of female care labor which permeates through the
major contemporary films such Mother, The Housemaid (a remake, 2010) and
Thirst (2009)

A representation of female care/affective labor is a contested site where forces

of neo-liberalizing globalization stage its mise-en-scene of cold intimacies of
emotional capitalism. As provision of intimacy becomes part of the emotional
capital where the public sectors are dominated by the corporate, the
melodramatic sites of the private and the public where the problematic
conundrum of gender, class and race are displaced by the sites of extreme
horror.

A young woman in Thirst when she turns into a vampire, she seems to declare
herself as “I‘d rather become a vampire than a housemaid.”

Fran Martin and Tania Lewis (Culture & Communication, University of

Melbourne; Sociology, Latrobe University)
“Joining the ‘Office Tribe’ and ‘Marrying into a Grand Household’:
Aspirational femininity on lifestyle television in Taiwan”

Lifestyle television is non-fictional programming that aims to instruct its viewer

in everyday life practices, from home decoration and food preparation to fashion
shopping and child-rearing while promising, in the process, to make the viewer
over as a thoroughly modern cosmopolitan subject. Currently proliferating in
various forms across Asian TV markets, lifestyle television provides an apposite
lens through which to analyse questions of gender and cultural modernity. Much
of this programming continues to specifically target female viewers—offering
advice on everything from dressing for work to negotiating the perils of office
gossip, and from effective make-up techniques to the skills required to nab a rich
husband. Acting in effect as feminine etiquette manuals for the 21st century,
these forms of advice-oriented programming provide rich insights into the ways
in which contemporary Asian media cultures are negotiating and promoting
(post)modern models of individualized femininity and ‘enterprising’ (du Gay)
modes of selfhood.

This paper, emerging from our current ARC project on lifestyle TV in Asia,
examines such processes through an analysis of lifestyle television in Taiwan.
We analyse a specific example of popular advice programs targeted at women
viewers: Taiwan’s Woman Queen (女人我最大, TVBS-G). Our analysis focuses on
the contradictions between the ideals of ‘compulsory individuality’ (Cronin) and
reflexive, choice-based selfhood (Giddens) promoted by these shows, and the
structural constraints on this emergent feminine subject in the context of
ongoing gendered social and economic inequities and the continued cultural
potency of older formations of feminine subjecthood tied to patrilineal family
structure and ideology.

Meaghan Morris (Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney / Lingnan

University, Hong Kong)
“‘The Great Australian Loneliness’: on writing an Inter-Asian biography
of Ernestine Hill”

During her lifetime, Ernestine Hill (born Hemmings, 1899-1972) was one of
Australia's best known writers. She is largely forgotten today, but Hill was a key
figure in the mid-twentieth century emergence of a popular media culture in
Australia. She played a role in shaping debate about the great public issues of
her day, especially the status of Aboriginal peoples, immigration from Asia, and
the state’s role in national development. She wrote “action” stories about nation-
building schemes (irrigation, the Flying Doctor service..) to capture the popular
imagination: The Great Australian Loneliness (1937) and The Territory (1951) are
still read today. An intelligent and sensitive writer who counted Mary Gilmore
and Mary Durack among her close friends, she translated into national folklore a
romantic vision of pioneering; a chronicler of the achievements of Aboriginal and
Chinese as well as white women in the outback, she played some part in shaping
myths of Aboriginal people as a “dying race” (a thesis which she did not herself
believe) by publicising Daisy Bates' beliefs in the popular press, later claiming
that she had ghost-written Bates’ memoir, The Passing of The Aborigines (1938).
Hill showed no sympathy for “women’s issues” as defined by urban feminists,
then or now. She wrote very little of a personal nature; the legacy that she left
was all about other people’s lives.

Among the many reasons why her life is interest to me is that in her role as a
purveyor of colonialist “knowledge” and a practitioner of sensationalist
journalism, she relayed toxic stories without needing to believe them (a
professional formation that needs more attention today). Another is that she
supported herself by writing at a time when this was difficult for women.
However, in this paper I will focus on her principled insularity as an Australian
writer, in order to discuss the methodological challenge of writing about her life
for readers (Australians included) who have never heard of her and may have no
reason to care.

Jane Park (Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney)

“Fighting Female Otaku: The Celebration of the Inauthentic in
Chocolate”

Following in the footsteps of Thai director Prachya Pinkaew’s first two

internationally recognized films, Ong Bak (2003) and Tom-Yum Goong (2005),
Chocolate (2008) stars a poor, young and socially marginalized character who
seeks and gets justice through the use of her extraordinary martial arts skills.
The first two films explicitly promote a particular image of Thai nationalism
through the muscular masculinity of the male star, Tony Jaa, and his use of
indigenous muy thai against corrupt foreigners and westernized Thais. In
contrast, Chocolate seems to propose a different mode of representing Thailand
and its future in its choice of heroine: Zen, an autistic young woman (played by
ingénue, JeeJa Yanin) of Thai-Japanese parentage who learns how to fight by
watching martial arts stars, Bruce Lee and Tony Jaa on television. This paper
examines how the film deploys these differences around gender and disability
and in the process reworks traditional models of masculinity in the transnational
martial arts film genre.

Qiu Zitong (Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney)

“Feizhuliu Styles among China's Urban Youth”

The twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of feizhuliu (non-

mainstream), a particular form of contemporary online youth culture among the
Chinese post-90s generation. While it is popular to argue that the Internet plays
an important role in facilitating the shift of contemporary Chinese youth culture
away from the 'local' and its past to identify more with the 'globalised'
consumerist and cultural formations, however, through the examination of
feizhuliu styles, this paper throws light on how feizhuliu features various
expressions of sexuality which represent multiple-dimensional discourses of
sexuality. In other words, I want to explore how feizhuliu has been shaped and
produced by the intertwined relationship between official discourses of sexuality
such as sex education implemented by the schools and university authorities and
the discourse of the 'opening-up' of sex and sexuality brought about by Deng
Xiaoping's open-door policy, the latter representing one perspective of Chinese
modernity.

Rebecca Suter (Japanese Studies, University of Sydney)

“Gender bending and religion in Japanese girls’ manga”

Japanese girls’ comics (shôjo manga) have long been concerned with issues of
gender and modernity. Relying on a combination of Occidentalism (expressed
through romanticized fictional Western settings) and gender ambiguity (be it in
the form of cross-dressing girls or in the highly popular subgenre of Boys’ Love,
male gay romances written by female authors for female readers), the comics
have become a platform for a critique of Japanese society as well as of Western
modernity. A particularly intriguing instance is what I have defined their “creative
misreading of Christianity.” From Catholic girls’ school horror comics of the 1970s
to recent works like Nakamura Hikaru’s series Saint Young Men (2010, ongoing),
girls’ comics have appropriated Western religion in creative and often irreverent
ways.

A fascinating example is the rise to pop icon status of a historical character from
the seventeenth century, Amakusa Shirô. Masuda Shirô Tokisada, also known as
Amakusa Shirô, was the teenage samurai leader of Shimabara rebellion of 1638,
the last Christian revolt before the final ban on foreign religion and the cessation
of all contacts with the West. Starting in the mid-1990s, a number of works of pop
culture have portrayed him as an increasingly gender-ambiguous bishônen
(“beautiful boy”) figure. The phenomenon reached its climax in 1999, when the
renowned drag queen Miwa Akihiro declared that a spiritualist has revealed to
her/him that s/he was the reincarnation of Amakusa.

In my paper, I will analyse the “Amakusa boom” phenomenon by focusing on

three comics, Toba Shôko’s Makai tenshô yume no ato (Demon Resurrection—
the traces of dreams, 1997), Chie Shinohara’s AMAKUSA 1637 (2002), and Kugo
Naoko’s Makai tenshô beato no kôshin (Demon Resurrection—the Saint’s
Progress, 2003), in order to investigate the way in which contemporary girls’
manga use gender bending and creative misreading of Christianity to reflect
more broadly on the articulation of gender and modernity within Japan.

Wang Yiyan (Chinese Studies, University of Sydney)

“Feminism, National Identity and the Chinese Mother-in-Law”

The mother-in-law has been a powerful but also a problematic figure in Chinese
family and social life. As a conveyor of the Confucian ideology, she was the target
of China’s communist revolution. Chinese women’s liberation included taking
away the traditional right of the mother-in-law over her daughter-in-law. In
literature, she has often been an ambiguous figure – the loving mother to her son
on the one hand but the terrible torturer of her daughter-in-law on the other.
Have China’s drastic social changes transformed the mother-in-law? What does
she stand for in literary representation? What kind of gender politics is at play in
the case of the mother-in-law? This paper intends to explore possible answers to
these questions by conducting a close reading of the short story “Goddess Nüwa”
in the context of contemporary China’s feminist and state feminist discourse.

The 1980s and 1990s was a time when many writers and intellectuals in China
openly expressed a concern for a national crisis - the decline of masculinity. Many
took the task to heart and produced stories that elaborate on the connection
between China’s national potency, cultural traditions and masculinity. Most
representative texts include Liu Heng’s novella “Fuxi, Fuxi” (1988), Mo Yan’s Red
Sorghum Family Stories (1991) and Chen Zhongshi’s Bailu Yuan (1993). (The
former two have been adapted into films by Zhang Yimou and therefore earned
an international reputation.) All are by male writers about male protagonists that
foreground China’s potency, or lack of it, one way or the other. It was in this
context of national narration that “Goddess Nüwa” (1995) appeared. “Goddess
Nüwa” was written by Xu Kun with a feminist consciousness as a deliberate
counter narrative to the masculine representation of Chinese cultural traditions.
The narrative centres on two generations of extremely powerful mothers-in-law.
As loyal guardians of the patriarchy system, these two mothers-in-law manifest
an alternative femininity, the one that not only complements masculinity but is
totally in service to the patriarchy. The enormous irony in the author’s feminist
intent and a misogynist outcome urges one to doubt the compatibility between
feminism and nationalism. “Goddess Nüwa” shows the mission of a feminist
national narration may turn out to be a trap for feminist authors.