Rethinking Representations Of Asian Women

Based on historic and ethnographic approaches, this volume examines how the ideological images of Asian women are produced, circulated, appropriated, and pluralized. Contributors analyze the interactions between the politicized formation of ideological representations and the everyday practices of women who resist and re-contextualize these images.

Based on historic and ethnographic approaches, this volume examines how the ideological images of Asian women are produced, circulated, appropriated, and pluralized. Contributors analyze the interactions between the politicized formation of ideological representations and the everyday practices of women who resist and re-contextualize these images.

A collection that places Asian woman centre stage and challenges a dichotomised view of Asia and the 'west' or 'north'. It offers an understanding of Asian women in their networks of connections through the work of feminist scholars discussing Asian women in North America, Asia, Europe and Australia.

Based on historic and ethnographic approaches, this volume examines how the ideological images of Asian women are produced, circulated, appropriated, and pluralized. Contributors analyze the interactions between the politicized formation of ideological representations and the everyday practices of women who resist and re-contextualize these images.

This book is an upper-level student source book for contemporary approaches to media studies in Asia, which will appeal across a wide range of social sciences and humanities subjects including media and communication studies, Asian studies, cultural studies, sociology and anthropology. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies, anthropology and Asian studies, it provides an empirically rich and stimulating tour of key areas of study. The book combines theoretical perspectives with grounded case studies in one up-to-date and accessible volume, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today.

This book, based on extensive original research, examines the practice by women in a university sport setting of kendo, the Japanese martial art which, using bamboo swords as well as protective armour, and descended from traditional swordsmanship, instils in its practitioners, besides physical skills, societal values of etiquette and resilience as well connecting them to a “traditional” outlook, which includes a gendered cultural identity. The book therefore illustrates an unexplored example of identity construction in Japan, one which legitimises women’s sport experiences within a male-centric physical culture, unpacks the notion of “tradition” in kendo and unravels its stultifying control over women’s kendo participation, and discusses the androgenicity of women’s participation to highlight its subversive potential to develop women as leaders in sport, politics, and other fields which continue to be very male dominated in Japan.

Amidst the increasing global trend of cross-border marriage migration, this book offers timely theoretical and empirical insights into contemporary debates about migration and citizenship. Extant scholarship on marriage migration and citizenship have concentrated on East-West inter-cultural marriages and tended to approach citizenship as an individual-centred concept linked to the nation-state, thus fading the family into the background. Focusing on cross-border marriages within Asia, a region where collectivist and familistic values are still prevalent, this book points to the importance of going beyond the state-individual nexus to conceptualise and foreground the family as a strategic site where citizenship is mediated, negotiated and experienced. Through six critical and in-depth case studies on cross-border marriages between East, Southeast, and South Asia, this book reveals how nation-states mobilize patriarchal notions of the family for its citizenship project; how formal frameworks of citizenship structure the trajectory and circumstances of cross-border families; how the repercussions of marriage migrants' citizenship are experienced and negotiated across generations; and how the tensions between the individual, the family and the state are produced along gender, class, race/ethnic, religious, cultural, geographical and generational boundaries. Collectively, this book calls for a rethinking of citizenship from an individual-centred proposition to a family-level concept. Its wealth of case studies and examples make it an essential resource for students, academics and researchers of Sociology, Geography, Anthropology, Politics, International Development Studies and Asian Studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Citizenship Studies.

This book seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining changing understandings of the physical human body from a variety of anthropological perspectives. In doing so, it interrogates how the body has been and continues to be conceptualised, experienced and interacted with. After an introductory appraisal of recent approaches to understanding the body, the book provides empirically rich accounts from East and Southeast Asia of how cultural, environmental and social norms shape human physicality. The contributions are organised in four broad themes. Part I, ‘Body and Space’, offers two contrasting case studies from Malaysia, both of which examine gender norms associated with marriage and pregnancy, including the taboos associated with these rites of passage. Part II, ‘Imperfect Bodies: Communication and the Body as Media’, analyses two case studies—Deaf people in Japan and masked theatre performance in Bali, Indonesia, to reflect on changing attitudes towards disability, which reflect broader social norms and cultural beliefs about the nature of disability and its place in society. Part III, ‘The Body and Image’, provides a pair of case studies from Singapore, on male fans of the popular manga boys’ love genre and on ways that the Chinese zodiac system is determined from birth and continues to be spiritually embedded in the body of a Chinese individual through ritual practices. Part IV, ‘The Body as Container: Taming the Bodies?’, presents a single case study from Thailand of spirit possession among schoolchildren. Though wide-ranging, all the case studies posit that the body is a site of constant negotiation. The way the body is presented and the way it is seen are shaped by a complex array of social, cultural, political and ideational factors. Anthropology through the Experience of the Physical Body is a valuable interdisciplinary work for advanced students and researchers interested in representations of the body in East and Southeast Asia and for those with wider interests in the field of critical anthropology.