Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia.

This volume offers important new perspectives on gender. The contributors bring together field studies and textual analysis with theories of political economy, cultural and gender studies. Combined, they give the reader fresh insights on gender identities, extending and challenging the now-familiar themes of gender equality, complementarity, and female autonomy in Southeast Asia. While versions of several essays appear elsewhere, their presence provides a regional context for new research by less well known scholars.

Each of the nine chapters shows Southeast Asians caught up in particular experiences of globalization. From Minang mothers, Javanese traders, Thai farmers, Malay fathers, Singaporean politicians, Malay workers, Filipina bourgeois to Filipino migrants, all respond by weaving new identities across threads of past, present, local and global. Their reworkings of gender are situated in specific material and ideological sites within the regions rapidly modernizing economies. A superb introduction produces depth and cohesion across this diversity. The individual essays each demonstrate how particular processes of economic restructuring, experienced as differentiation at the local level, blur understandings of male and female.

Concepts of femininity and masculinity are constituted across multiple (and conflicting) discourses of masculinity, femininity, ethnicity, religion and state. Whether exploring ghost sightings in northeast Thailand or the characterization of women in Philippine feminist fiction, contributors emphasize how the fluid, contingent character of gender reflects local conditions of change and ambivalence.

Gender(ed) resistance itself can produce ambivalent results, a point made in an account of a Minang land dispute. With intensified social stratification across the region, expressions of feminine resistance based in local tradition about State-supported discourses of masculinity. Female conduct constructed as undignified and aggressive simultaneously challenges and reinscribes structures of gender and class subordinating women. Despite the egalitarian opportunity for female voices to speak, men's interests and masculine dignity prevail.

Contradictory concepts of male and female, passion and self-control structure gender relations among Javanese traders. Reports of similarly conflicting Malay masculinities highlight how fluid identities underlie local strategies of economic innovation and accommodation. Other chapters describe how such local conflicts over the definition of tradition, reinforced through state modernization policy, can be exploited for the goals of national elites. An exemplary exploration of gender and transnational flows is found in the analysis of masculinity among Filipino migrant workers returned from the Arabian Gulf. Complementing and extending earlier work on factory labor, femininity and the Malaysian State, it bridges local experience and global trends.

This volume provides a treatment of gender that is not merely about women, but makes masculinity visible in its dialectical relation to femininity. It supplants Atkinson and Errington's (eds.) Power and Difference (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) as the definitive text for gender studies in today's Southeast Asia.

DIERDE MCKAY University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada