Reading Gender Trouble in Southeast Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 927-946
Author(s):  
Tamara Loos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Thirtieth Anniversary ◽  
Gender Trouble ◽  
The Impact

Judith Butler's book Gender Trouble, published in 1990, enjoyed its thirtieth anniversary in 2020. To that end, the Association for Asian Studies, the United States’ largest association of academics working on Asia, invited scholars to consider the importance of her arguments and ideas for Asian studies and scholarship in Asia, including how scholars have diverged from and expanded their studies of gender and sexuality in ways not anticipated by Butler when she first published the book. In this essay, I examine the impact of Butler's book in Southeast Asia. Out of the abundance of scholarship stemming from and about the region's eleven diverse countries and their histories, I prioritize those works that explicitly engage the theoretical insights in Gender Trouble to elucidate the lives of gender-nonconforming communities in Southeast Asia. I include scholarship that allows me to explore the disjunction between categories of analysis that are foundational to Butler's theory and those at work in Southeast Asia. Far from rendering Butler's theory and methodological intervention inapposite, this mismatch has catalyzed productive rethinking of Gender Trouble and its implications for the region.

Gender Trouble in South Asia

2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-967
Author(s):  
Geeta Patel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Thirtieth Anniversary ◽  
Gender Trouble ◽  
Fail Safe

It is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Gender Trouble by the feminist philosopher of gender, sexuality, and governmentality, Judith Butler. When Gender Trouble came out in the United States, it hit the stands like a hit; it transformed and unraveled the modalities through which ontologies and epistemologies of gender came to be. This was especially the case with the trouble, the disturbances, the turbulence that Gender Trouble carried along with it. Gender Trouble's thematics sometimes syncopated against familiar habits of belief that were and are carefully nursed and held to one's heart, upending them in sometimes unexpected ways. The concept of “performativity,” for instance, generated a buzz, partly because it unhinged and reoriented several fail-safe, deeply felt materialized beliefs, such as the ontological immutability of gender cohering resolutely and unremittingly in and through an inveterate notion of the biological (belief certainty in the sense that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein might intend as the unnoticed grounding of one's sense of and use of language itself laid in so deeply that it disappeared from immediate purchase). Gender Trouble also asked us to address the seemingly intransigent separations between interiority and exteriority and the obdurate artifice of an “interior core” (psyche, soul, etc.), which, because it was constituted as a priori, meant that people believed it lay beyond being touched or constituted by any social, economic, or political exigencies, “regulations,” or “disciplinary practices” and thus “preclude[d] an analysis of the political constitution of the gendered subject.”

scholarly journals The Gendered and Heterosexist Evolution of the Teacher Exemplar in the United States: Equity Implications for LGBTQ and Gender Nonconforming Teachers

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele Kahn ◽  
Paul C. Gorski
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Public School Teachers ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
Gender Nonconforming ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Sexual Orientations ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender

<p>Challenges confront lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and transgender public school teachers or those who are perceived as such or who desire to be open about their sexual orientations or gender identities or expression. Teachers who do not conform to gender and sexual orientation norms currently are and historically have been the subject of persecution, urban myths, and general hysteria—part of bigger efforts to normalize heterosexuality and cisgender-ness through the development of a distinctive “exemplar” related to who teachers should be. We examine the related historical  and legal context of gender and sexuality in schools and then offer suggestions regarding how to redress the lingering impacts of gender- and heteronormativity.</p>

Clifford Geertz, Cultural Portraits, and Southeast Asia

2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 1215-1230
Author(s):  
Aram A. Yengoyan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The United States ◽  
Asian Studies ◽  
Profound Impact ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

With the death of Clifford Geertz (1926–2006), both anthropology and Asian studies lost one of their most prominent, influential, and wide-ranging figures, as many obituaries and retrospective assessments of his life and work have noted (see, e.g., the unusually thoughtful and balanced one by Sherry Ortner, 2007). For more than forty years, Geertz's books and articles had a profound impact on his own discipline and on many neighboring ones, and though he dealt at length with other parts of the world, from Morocco (the subject of some of his fieldwork) to the United States (he sometimes turned his gaze to the rituals of his own culture), he often wrote about Southeast Asia, and Indonesia in particular. In terms of topics, he made major contributions to general debates on how to study history and culture, and to more specific discussions of issues such as the path that Islam took into and through individual nation-states.

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