Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific: Method, Practice, Theory

GENDER AND GLOBALIZATION IN ASIA AND THE PACIFIC METHOD PRACTICE THEORY

Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific

Gender and Globalization in Asia and the Pacific Method, Practice, Theory Edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco

University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu

© 2008 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 13 12 11 10 09 08

654321

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gender and globalization in Asia and the Pacific : method, practice, theory / edited by Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8248-3159-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-8248-3241-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Women in development—Asia. 2. Women in development—Islands of the Pacific. 3. Sex role—Asia. 4. Sex role—Islands of the Pacific. 5. Women—Asia—Social ­conditions. 6. Women—Islands of the Pacific—Social conditions. 7. Feminism—Asia. 8. Feminism—Islands of the Pacific. 9. Globalization. I. Ferguson, Kathy E. II. Mironesco, Monique. HQ1240.5.A78G46 2008 305.48'895—dc22 2008000382

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources.

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Contents

Foreword: Knowledge Practices and Subject-making Saskia Sassen

• ix • Acknowledgments • xi •

Chapter 1. Introduction Kathy E. Ferguson, Sally Engle Merry, and Monique Mironesco

•1•

I. Confronting Colonial Discourses Chapter 2. Telling Tales Out of School: Sia Figiel and Indigenous Knowledge in Pacific Islands Literature Judith Raiskin

• 15 •

Chapter 3. “Licentiousness has slain its hundreds of thousands”: The Missionary Discourse of Sex, Death, and Disease in Nineteenth-century Hawai‘i Virginia Metaxas

• 37 •

II. Cultural Translations Chapter 4. Gay Sexualities and Complicities: Rethinking the Global Gay Jyoti Puri

• 59 •

Chapter 5. “What about Other Translation Routes (East-West)?” The Concept of the Term “Gender” Traveling into and throughout China Min Dongchao

• 79 •

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III. Media Chapter 6. Gaze Upon Sakura: Imaging Japanese Americans on Japanese TV Christine R. Yano

• 101 •

Chapter 7. Globalizing Gender Culture: Transnational Cultural Flows and the Intensification of Male Dominance in India Steve Derné

• 121 •

Chapter 8. Performing Contradictions, Performing Bad-Girlness in Japan Yau Ching

• 138 •

IV. Labor, Migration, and Families Chapter 9. The Social Imaginary and Kin Recruitment: Mexican Women Reshaping Domestic Work Maria de la Luz Ibarra

• 161 •

Chapter 10. Breaking the Code: Women, Labor Migration, and the 1987 Family Code of the Republic of the Philippines Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

• 176 •

Chapter 11. Headloads: The Technologizing of Work and the Gendering of Labor Vivian Price

• 195 •

Chapter 12. Gender and Modernity in a Chinese Economic Zone Nancy E. Riley

• 213 •

V. Trafficking Chapter 13. Female Sex Slavery or Just Women’s Work? Prostitution and Female Subjectivity within Anti-trafficking Discourses Lucinda Joy Peach

• 233 •



Contents

Chapter 14. “Do No Harm”: The Asian Female Migrant and Feminist Debates in the Global Anti-trafficking Movement Nancie Caraway

• 253 •

VI. Militarization Chapter 15. Gender, Globalization, and Militarization: An Interview with Cynthia Enloe Kathy E. Ferguson, Gwyn Kirk, and Monique Mironesco

• 275 •

Chapter 16. Environmental Effects of U.S. Military Security: Gendered Experiences from the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan Gwyn Kirk

• 294 •

Chapter 17. Globalizing and Gendered Forces: The Contemporary Militarization of Pacific/Oceania Teresia K. Teaiwa

• 318 •

VII. Conclusion Chapter 18. Advancing Feminist Thinking on Globalization Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco

• 335 • References • 359 • List of Contributors • 399 • Index • 403 •

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Foreword Knowledge Practices and Subject-making

Saskia Sassen This is a book that unsettles existing arrangements and knowledge practices. The authors in this extraordinary collection focus on sites where we can detect the types of knowledge practices and subject-making that go into constituting the center, including the normative center, of diverse realities. They capture and describe the cultural laboring that it takes to produce that center and its stabilized meanings, no matter how precarious its beginnings may have been. They lay bare the cultural work of building agreement and shared norms, and of constituting some elements as central and others as marginal or extreme—specifically in this book, much that relates to gendering. In this process of laying bare the center and its constructed rather than “natural” origins, these authors provincialize literatures, histories, imaginaries, and understandings that present themselves as universals. Feminist scholarship in a broad range of domains has a long and powerful trajectory of doing precisely this. Yet these authors combine that trajectory with inquiries of such specificity and depth that they succeed in making significant new contributions, not just in content but also in analytics. For instance, their critique of universals includes, interestingly, what we might think of as critical universals, that is to say, universals that come out of a critical stance. In this regard some chapters in this book engage in a productive debate with some of the critical feminist scholarship. The sites for research are often unusual, a discovery in themselves, beyond the work of discovering how gendering functions in them. These sites are frontier zones of novel systems, both of the past and of the present. They range from missionary discourse on sex and disease in Hawai‘i in the 1830s, through the circulation of the concept of “gender” in China in the 1990s, to the contradictory construction of gender and the family in the modernization of the Philippines over the last several decades. As the editors put it, the chapters deal with representations and reproductions, with spaces and borders, and with voices and bodies. The objects of study are, to mention but some, colonial discourses, cultural translations, labor, migration, trafficking, and militarization. These local moments are found to be at the center of, variously, the global,

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the modern, the colonial, rather than being their opposites or apposites—the nonglobal, nonmodern, noncolonial. As a result, each of these major historical alignments is shown to vary across locations, to take on thick meanings. Each is shown to be partly constituted through the variability arising out of multiple locations. Studying the global, the modern, the colonial thus requires the study of various local moments. In turn, each of these local moments comprises specific knowledge practices and specific subjects. In this process, then, the authors relocate what might be generally seen as at the edge or the extreme condition (gendering broadly understood) in those realities, to the center of the discourse. For instance, gendering is shown to be constitutive of globalization, not marginal or confined to extreme cases. I have long found this a critical analytical move in my research. It means, in my experience at least, going digging in the penumbra of master categories. Master categories tend to have enormous explanatory power, to the point that they blind us and thereby also keep us from seeing other presences in the landscape. They produce, then, a vast penumbra around that center of light. It is in that penumbra that I think we need to go digging. In my reading, these authors do that, and they do that in the penumbra of a broad range of master categories coming from diverse canonical scholarships. The result is often a problematizing rather than a solving of questions, an engagement with the question of whose claims are legitimate in a context of supposed neutrality, whether of the actors studied or the scholars doing the studying. I do find this book opens up new research fields rather than merely providing answers. These chapters produce a range of critical discourses and theorized critiques. But they also give us analytic and historical terrains from where such discourses and critiques can get started (and, at least in some cases, can engage power). The focus on knowledge practices by various knowledge-producing actors perhaps inevitably raises the issue of the knowledge-producing practices of the authors themselves. These are made evident. Out of the variety of the critical histories and social analyses in this book emerges a conceptual zone that invites us to get engaged in a critique of current narratives about gendering rather than simply accepting what today amounts to a kind of global theoretical lingua franca, even in critical feminism. They detect the lumpiness of what is typically and easily seen as an almost (even when critical) seamless map. The analytics developed in these chapters, and their empirical or historical specifications, bring with them an elaboration of the meaning of feminist research and interpretation. This deciphering matters for a heuristic that allows us to understand something about the unsettling of powerful arrangements, and what it takes to destabilize meanings.

Acknowledgments

This book has a unique history. Its making has contributed to a vital global community of scholars and activists. The genesis of these essays lies in a grant to the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i from the Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellowships in the Humanities. From 2001 to 2005 the Women’s Studies Program selected fourteen scholars to visit the University of Hawai‘i for residential fellowships of three to six months. Each scholar pursued her/his research while getting to know the university and local communities in Hawai‘i. The Women’s Studies Program held two conferences to provide space for discussion among the Fellows, include several more scholars in the project, and share knowledge with students, faculty, and activist communities. During the conferences, time was reserved for the participants to step back from their own topics and articulate the relations emerging among the presentations. We called these interludes “weaving and framing”: framing central themes emerging from the animated discussions, and weaving them together into a coherent whole. These “weavings and framings” became the basis of our introductory chapter as well as providing rich opportunities to allow each essay to put pressure on the others. Such a collaborative project incurs many debts. Our greatest thanks go to the Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Residency Fellowship Program. Scott MacDougall, Program Associate in the Creativity and Culture Program, was unfailingly helpful. The Residency Fellowship Program provided us with a unique opportunity to nourish creative intellectual life and build a community of scholars. This project was also supported in part by generous contributions from friends and alumni of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Hawai‘i. We particularly thank Dean Richard Dubanoski, Annette Chang and the helpful staff in the College of Social Sciences for their assistance. Timely assistance from the Department of Political Science helped at a crucial moment; our thanks to Jon GoldbergHiller, chair of the department, for his support. For their tireless labor and unfailing good humor, we are much indebted to Norine Young, Kelly Ishikawa, Jeanine Hema, and Cedric Chang in the Women’s Studies office. For his crucial assistance with the byzantine complexities of the fiscal process, we thank Cal Fujioka in the

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Social Science Research Center. Our thanks to Rachel McShane and Brianne Gallagher for their labor as graduate student assistants. Our colleagues in the Women’s Studies Program have been central to the success of this project in all its stages. Teresa Arambula-Greenfield, now at California State University-Monterey Bay, provided the initial leadership to secure the grant and initiate the project. S. Charusheela, Meda Chesney-Lind, Monisha Das Gupta, Ruth Dawson, Susan Hippensteele, and Mire Koikari helped write the grant, review the essays, host the visiting scholars, participate in the colloquia and conferences, and in myriad ways bring their excellent feminist energies and insights to the project. Numerous Affiliate Faculty of the Women’s Studies Program as well as other colleagues on campus lent their scholarly expertise to the project. We heartily thank Roger Ames, Belinda Aquino, Rick Baldoz, Nancie Caraway, Vrinda Dalmiya, Colin Danby, Cynthia Franklin, Monica Ghosh, Deane Neubauer, Miriam Sharma, Jungmin Seo, Nevzat Soguk, Ty Kawika Tengan, Phyllis Turnbull, Mari Yoshihara, and Ming-bao Yue for their contributions. Our families and friends have, again, sustained us through the demands of organizing, writing, and editing. Kathy would like to thank Gilad, Oren, and Ari Ashkenazi for making a loving, somewhat chaotic, always supportive home. Cindy Carson and Peggy Cox generously entertained ideas about globalization during the Great Road Trip of ’05. The Friday night beach crowd reliably provides a laid-back milieu and excellent food. Jon Goldberg-Hiller and Markus Faigle rescued the manuscript from near-fatal computer challenges. Monique would like to thank Mike for being so encouraging as well as taking over nightly chef duties during this project. Her greatest thanks go to Megan and Wyatt McHale for playing outside and self-entertaining when she needed them to.

Chapter 1

Introduction Kathy E. Ferguson, Sally Engle Merry, and Monique Mironesco

W

hat is globalization? How is it gendered? How does it work in the complex and varied societies of Asia and the Pacific? This collection of sixteen original essays offers critical feminist analyses of dynamic global processes. We take our three anchor concepts—gender, globalization, Asia/Pacific—as points on an interactive triangle. There is no single starting point, but rather an energetic and changing set of relationships among the three areas. Each point both causes and is affected by changes in the others. Our inquiries are produced out of the vigorous intellectual energy our triad of concepts provokes. We take fresh stock of globalization’s complexities, pursue critical feminist inquiry about women, gender, and sexualities, and produce new insights into changing life patterns in Asian and Pacific Island societies. “Globalization” here refers to the increasing scope, scale, and speed of movement of “stuff” around the world.1 This disarmingly simple definition allows us to sidestep common assumptions that financial and information mobility and “free markets” are the primary signifiers of globalization, and instead to invite critical thinking about multiple, multidirectional flows. Layers of mobile chains and webs operate on two levels: material levels, where physical bodies, objects, resources and institutions do their work in concrete places; and semiotic levels, where languages, ideas, and images make it possible to represent the world in discourse. The flows of globalization connect some places and people while disconnecting others; they reinforce some power relations while interrupting or bending others. While capital, labor, and information technologies are often emphasized in studies of globalization, chains of care, violence, security, disease, pollution, media, representations, arts, intellectual resources, activist agendas, and subject positions form equally important circuits of connectivity and disruption.2 We are not just “adding women” to globalization. Instead, gender and sexuality are constitutive elements of globalization’s circuits. Rather than adding women, gender, or sexuality to an already established list of factors, these essays put the gendered dimensions of global flows into the center of analysis.3 “Gender” and “sexual-

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ity” do their work here as productive, performative, mind/body intersections, always located in bodies that are simultaneously raced, classed, and in other ways located in space and discourse. Gender is not exterior to globalization, nor is it simply one more vector or circuit: rather, the complexities of globalization are always already gendered, already doing their contradictory work on sexed, raced, and laboring bodies; gendered family relations; and masculinized and feminized institutions, ideologies, and identities. Similarly, gender and sexuality are not static precursors of globalization; rather, they are dynamic and porous practices simultaneously causing and effecting global flows. Practices of masculinity and femininity, as well as homosexuality and heterosexuality, both produce and reflect global economic, political, military, and cultural webs of relations. “Asia/Pacific” is shorthand for our geographic setting of inquiry and for the cultural imaginaries at work here. It is a physical region of the globe, primarily represented in these essays by China, India, Japan, Okinawa, the Philippines, Thailand, Oceania, Samoa, Hawai‘i, California, Mexico, and South Korea. Our essays articulate and analyze gender/sexuality and globalization within these concrete historical and geographic spaces. Broad concepts that might otherwise become abstract and disembodied are anchored in specific sites and relationships. Asia/Pacific is also an idea, a narrative anchor in accounts of, among other things, gender and globalization. In much western scholarship, this rapidly changing region of the world has been figured as a site for colonial engagements and Orientalist fantasies of danger and pleasure. In discourses generated from Asian and Pacific spaces, global and colonial accounts both contest and intersect with local voices and claims to knowledge.4

Central Themes of the Volume Representations and Reproductions Feminists and other contemporary critical thinkers argue for ways of conceptualizing complex material that do not reduce to simple dichotomies (Joan Scott 1999; K. Ferguson 1993). Yet simply urging people to avoid thinking in dualisms carries little weight; rather, one must show how, with regard to particular oppositions, “either/or” thinking can give way to more productive and multiple understandings. These essays advance feminist rethinking of recurrent dualisms, including local/global, west/rest, man/woman, progressive/oppressive, gay/ straight, agency/structure, and judgments about what is “good for women”/“bad for women.” By locating issues in particular spaces and times, one can apprehend general themes within a dense fabric of specific accounts, allowing nuanced, relational analyses to replace “either/or” thinking. These essays examine competing spatial imaginaries connecting local, re-



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gional, and global interactions; they analyze how theories and concepts travel, becoming sites of struggle while moving into fresh intellectual and political spaces; and they ask how representations are recruited into, and can be disruptive of, dynamic power relations. Some of the key binaries commonly used to understand globalization include modernity/tradition, developed/developing, change/stasis, and of course global/local. The essays in this book show that these oppositions are themselves constantly changing in relation to each other. These are not stable dyads but historically produced and shifting relationships. In other words, these pairings are themselves part of the temporality and historicity of globalization. Moreover, each pair entails some key assumptions about globalization since the first is valued more highly than the second and is associated with the new and moving rather than the old and fixed. The oppositions change over time, of course. Globalization produces new oppositions of sexuality, for example, as Jyoti Puri shows in her analysis of the historical emergence of global gay discourses and Steve Derné explains in his account of changes in Indian middle-class men’s interpretations of masculinity and femininity in films. In our interview with Cynthia Enloe, she explores how the process of militarization does its work in relation to changing understandings of masculinity and femininity. In the heated feminist debates over women’s global sexual labor, as the essays by Lucinda Peach and Nancie Caraway show, representations stressing sexual exploitation versus those stressing labor migration tap different discursive repertoires and suggest opposite political responses. In each of these essays, “either/or” thinking gives way to complex and layered understandings. “Local” turns out not to be a fixed and stable place, but a set of relationships with “global,” while “global” always makes its appearance in a particular place.5 Movement of images and representations is essential to globalization. One of the important travelers is theory itself, as models of articulation, explanation, and analysis make their moves. Min Dongchao discusses the relation of women’s studies centers and feminist theory in China to transformations in policies toward women in that country. Her analysis shows that policy changes require not only commitments by governments but also the emergence of local theoretical frameworks to persuade decision-makers of the wisdom of proposed policies. Several essays illuminate the “NGOization” of global feminism, where burgeoning numbers of nongovernmental organizations transform feminist practice.6 An adequate understanding of globalization means tracing the circulation of practices of representation, attending to points of translation and reinterpretation. A multidirectional understanding of conceptual travel is necessary for analyzing the spread of gay ideas and identities, militarized masculinities, trafficking claims, protest movements, notions of aggressive masculinity, and feminist concepts of gender. Activist agendas, as Gwyn Kirk shows in her analysis of environmentalism and militarism in Okinawa, South Korea, and the Philippines, nourish

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one another through global interconnections. Concepts travel routes shaped by power relations, of course, with some theories validated by their association with powerful countries and actors while others are denigrated by their origins in politically and economically marginalized spaces. Teresia Teaiwa looks at the simultaneous appropriation and devaluation of Pacific Islanders in both right-wing and leftwing accounts of global militarism. Judith Raiskin similarly traces the complex travels and mutations of ideas called traditional in Samoa in relation to ideas called modern in colonial education. The extent of travel, like its directions, is also governed by power, shaped by factors such as the price of books, availability of the Internet, and extent of literacy. At an equally concrete level, the capacity of activists and NGOs to promote reform or changes in consciousness is deeply shaped by donor decisions, nationalist ambitions, and imposed agendas of international financial organizations. As theories and representations travel, however, they mobilize different interpretations and sustain contradictory relations to prior arrangements. Clear-cut judgments about what is “good for women” become blurred. For example, Vivian Price argues that the prevailing western critique of women’s work in the construction trades in India, which sees it as exploitative labor, overlooks the value of this work for the women who do it. Carrying heavy loads of rocks, a traditional source of income for women construction workers, can give women the strength to continue and a sense of independence and accomplishment, even as western audiences are appalled at the sight of sari-clad women walking up rickety stairs carrying hefty cement blocks on their heads while men receive higher pay for performing the skilled construction tasks. Teresia Teaiwa insists that indigenous women and men sustain complex relations to both colonial and national militaries, complicating critiques of militarism with her appreciation of local investments by Pacific Islanders in their military memberships. Similar challenges emerge, as Caraway and Peach explain, when some feminists claim sex work is inherently exploitative while others insist that it provides a decent living, or at least a better one than the available alternatives. Some transnational flows can be recruited to interrupt local hierarchies, as Judith Raiskin suggests in her account of globalized retellings of local stories in Samoa. In other cases, global flows significantly reinforce local power relations: Christine Yano analyzes the cultural capital circulated in a popular Japanese soap opera for its reinforcement of national hegemonies, while Rhacel Parreñas tracks the persistence of patriarchal divisions of labor within Filipino families when mothers labor globally. While the pace of global conceptual travels has accelerated, such travels have long histories. As Virginia Metaxas shows in her study of nineteenth-century medical ideas in Hawai‘i, understandings of the body and healing traveled in the past as in the present. Understanding these travels involves analyzing intersections between



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sets of ideas and ways of life and attending to multiple directions of interaction and to the ways representations join or contradict one another. Metaxas shows how colonial ideas of health became predominant, while indigenous perspectives persisted in pockets of resistance. Her essay gives a robust history to global flows, emphasizing the ongoing processes and the complex contradictions of colonial representations. Spaces and Borders It has become a truism of scholarship on globalization to note that it shrinks global spaces, multiplies points of contact across nations, and renders borders porous (Appadurai 1996, 2001; Ong 1999). Yet the precise shape of this compression of space is contested, and its consequences uneven. These essays address the opportunities and anxieties attendant to global movements of bodies, ideas, and structures; they analyze enduring frictions and uneven changes in relations between public and private life; they contextualize global processes, analyze movements across borders, and analyze particular sites of struggle. One of the primary assumptions about globalization has been that as transnational circuits increase in significance, the boundaries of nation-states weaken in strength and importance. As the global expands in strength, the argument goes, sovereignty shrinks. However, many of the essays in this collection suggest the opposite, showing that the relation between global and national spaces is complex and interactive. As the flow of people increases, so does the effort to maintain and police boundaries. Some transnational flows of ideas and people, such as sex workers and reforms designed to eliminate their trafficking, have the effect of strengthening borders. Anti-trafficking movements encourage more energetic border patrols and intensify regimes of incarceration and punishment. Building on the image of the vulnerable young woman tricked into prostitution, a key trope in the discourse of trafficking, governments are reasserting border controls and deporting illegal immigrants. In other words, the deterritorialization of people and cultural images produced by globalization may sometimes have the effect of reinforcing the state. Similarly, human rights advocates appeal to the power of the international community in ways that might diminish the autonomy and sovereignty of the state, yet the central target of human rights reform is the state, the only entity that has the capacity to provide the social and economic services increasingly at the center of human rights demands. Thus, even as human rights activists seek to mobilize international pressure against states, they are forced to focus on reforming states and encouraging them to develop mechanisms for policing internal human rights violations, such as human rights commissions. Even though such commissions are usually politically autonomous, they are nevertheless supported by states. Similarly, environmental and feminist activists protesting poisoning of their homes by U.S. military bases must critique international military relations while pressuring indi-

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vidual states to clean up polluted land and water. Within the environmental devastation wrought by global militarism, Kirk demonstrates, relatively weak client states like the Philippines are less able to moderate pollution on and around bases than are stronger U.S. allies such as Germany. Another aspect of space and borders is the impact of diasporic communities on the construction of nationalism at home. Such communities are often politically important, supporting movements in the home country such as the Hindu fundamentalists in India or the IRA in Northern Ireland. Diasporic communities send substantial funds and political support to reinforce an imagined nation, even as they themselves grow more distant from that nation. Portrayals of the continuing loyalty and enthusiasm of this community for the project of cultural nationalism support nation-building at home. Yano’s analysis of Japanese nationalism in relation to the TV serial Sakura illustrates this process clearly. She argues that the figure of the young female Japanese American, with her enthusiasm for calligraphy and other symbols of national heritage and identity, is used to reinforce the value of Japaneseness, even as Japanese nationals are becoming less enthusiastic about these practices and turning to the United States for cultural models. Yano shows how the diaspora looks back and celebrates the country of origin rather than disdaining it or returning with new ideas. Here, the diaspora is reappropriated in order to strengthen the center, not to pull away from it. Similarly, the ambivalent rhetoric of the government of the Philippines towards its migrants, as Parreñas shows, reveals efforts to recuperate the nation while encouraging the transfer of workers who will send home remittances. Thus the government praises migrants for their contribution to the nation, but at the same time criticizes women for abandoning their families. The state needs both mothers and remittances, so state officials at the same time encourage and condemn women’s global labor. Many of these essays focus on the renewed significance of borders under the impact of globalization. Borders become critical sites for the maintenance of the state as well as places of vulnerability. Thus, borders are places where state governance is threatened and at the same time strengthened, as they become sites of control. Movement is both allowed and limited. For example, as Maria Ibarra’s analysis of Mexican domestic workers shows, low-wage immigrants may be permitted to enter a richer nation but they may be denied legitimate status, so that they become the ideal docile, low-cost laborers who perform useful work but cannot demand more pay. Complex hierarchies may emerge within the immigrant communities, relying on (rather than supplanting) cross-national networks of kin relations. Rural/urban boundaries take on an important role in regulating movement, a phenomenon Nancy Riley documents in China. Riley’s essay shows how women’s self-understanding as mothers in global contexts can reinforce the established power of multinational corporations, states, or men; the analyses of



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Ibarra and Parreñas highlight women’s creativity in negotiating global parenting, as women labor within kin networks to combine work in foreign sites with mothering at home. In all these situations, the inevitable porosity of boundaries threatens to undermine control and challenge the nation itself, leading to renewed efforts to manage the borders by increasing surveillance. Although much of the discussion of border controls examines the efforts of rich nations to stem the tide of poor immigrants, most of the movement of refugees across borders occurs among poorer countries or between cities and the countryside within an industrializing country. Here again, massive movement of populations across relatively porous borders creates new problems of people out of place: poverty, violence, and enormous demands on receiving areas to accommodate the migrants. Thus, from a spatial perspective, globalization entails neither the elimination of boundaries nor their rigidification, but instead fosters a complicated porosity allowing certain kinds of movement while establishing new forms of control over those who move. Interactive global flows have clearly reshaped the labor market and the position of workers along with the place that gender, race, and class play in structuring the labor market. Price gives a dramatic account of the nature of women’s labor force participation in India, showing how they cope with the limited work and income available to them, as they struggle to maintain a toehold in physically demanding construction work in the face of increasing mechanization of the labor process. Globalization has brought not a single pattern, but a diverse array of globally interconnected labor markets that work in relationship to each other, mediated by the spatial effects of partially controlled borders. Meanwhile, media productions such as TV soap operas and films also move across boundaries, conveying ideas from elsewhere that both challenge national ideals and underscore the value of the nation and its culture. Transnational reform movements take place in increasingly globalized cultural spaces and similarly challenge national practices at the same time as they reinforce nationalism by focusing on the capacity of the state to control itself and provide benefits. Both Caraway’s and Peach’s essays critically explore the complex reform practices of global NGOs in relation to trafficking. Clearly, analyzing the movements of persons, ideas, and practices through space and across/around borders is a critical place to make inroads into understanding globalization. Borders are key ambiguous sites, areas of intensification of control and at the same time of a massive and widely recognized failure of regulation. They are central places of anxiety about control and sovereignty. Voices and Bodies These essays attend carefully to voices of women in various Asian/Pacific settings and to the practices of production, reproduction, and representation that women create and that, in turn, create women.7 They track competing articula-

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tions and negotiations of the available cultural capital in specific local/global settings; raise important methodological questions about gaining access to subaltern voices through interviewing, participant observation, and interpretation; and interrogate complex resistance strategies that use resources made available by some aspects of globalization while challenging or evading other aspects. As with space, globalization’s temporalities have been compressed. Yet the particular convergences of historical time, as in the time of colonial conquest, and individual lived time, as in the time of child-rearing or aging, are impossible to grasp outside of specific social settings. Over the course of a lifetime an individual intersects with the global in various ways. Raiskin’s study of Samoan literature illustrates this point dramatically, as the various characters pass through different phases in their own relationships to global forces, developing various identities as they do so. A focus on mutual (if politically uneven) interchanges of embodied voices challenges the myth that, before the headlong race of change we call globalization, there existed some kind of social precondition, a more stable and authentic or “traditional” way of life that has been inexorably swept away. Instead, Raiskin’s interpretations of Samoan literature and Metaxas’s analysis of changing health practices in Hawai‘i emphasize that societies have always been changing and vulnerable to external influences. Transnational change is hardly new, even though its speed is increasing and its scope is expanding. Globalization produces dramatic forms of change, often at a dizzying speed, often provoking collective anxieties, perhaps even moral panic. Such anxieties are temporally and spatially located, as are the strategies that emerge to resolve or deflect them. For example, a potent source of anxiety is fear of the dissolution of the nation, and of the proper subject positions upon which the nation depends, and its/ their reconstitution as something other. There are also older anxieties about the capacity of immigrants to assimilate properly as well as the danger that they may succeed in doing so. Yano’s study of Japan and its nationalistic soap opera, which relies heavily on a Japanese-American woman who celebrates Japan, sketches a popular public presentation of such anxieties as well as one route to overcoming them through official articulation of a properly national global subject. Citizens and elites also express anxieties about the capacity of societies in this era of rapid change and global challenges to replicate themselves through childrearing. Given conditions of family life and the pace of change, there is anxiety that young people will abandon the nation, even their families, and simply leave (at the same time that transnational movement is praised for the opportunities it offers). Anxiety can focus on whether adolescent girls can learn to discipline themselves, and how they can be disciplined when they cease following their parents’ lead. The “delinquent” girls with whom Yau Ching works make use of global flows of information, consumption, and media in ways that make authorities very nervous, while



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also giving the young women resources for their own troubled negotiations for power and respect. The new forms of discipline created by the globalizing state involve teaching habits of self-expression and self-governance, in draconian closed institutions if necessary, where young women are schooled to control their feelings and self-expression to become proper national and sexual subjects. Given the significance of sexuality in global flows—as a kind of labor, commodity, marker of subject positions, qualification for marriage and kin relations, site of pleasure, and form of danger—anxieties and negotiations about sexuality abound. For example, there is a visible global preoccupation with masculinity as defined in action movies whose main story line travels easily across cultures and countries. Derné’s examination of the film-viewing habits of nonmobile middle-class men in India finds that they often turn to foreign movies exalting aggressive masculinity. Anxieties about change and control often focus on women’s bodies, leading to more stringent restrictions on dress and comportment. In more and more places around the world, women are expected to dress modestly, and mechanisms to control their sexuality seem to be on the increase, whether in the form of greater restrictions on movement in public spaces or increasing rates of risk of sexual assault. At the same time, global conditions of labor, persistent wars, and transnational family structures require/force/allow women to move around. Anxieties about women who appear to have escaped familial surveillance often generate increased desires to control women’s sexuality. Enhanced anxiety about preserving women’s virtue and governing their sexuality amplify concerns about prostitution, sexual assault, and trafficking. As the dichotomous gender binary fades in favor of more complex categories of sexual identity, including the contested emergence of global gay identities that Puri charts, and the shifting roles of fa‘afafine that Raiskin finds in Samoan literature, shifting sexualities signify both opportunity and danger. Global anxieties impact ideas about how to maintain personal and national security. Sometimes anxieties coalesce into moral panic, when a large number of people feel similar dis-ease. There are traces of moral panic throughout these studies of globalization and gender. Sometimes it emerges as apparently contradictory mandates, such as the Philippine government urging women to go and earn money and at the same time avoid leaving their families. Similar anxiety-producing contradictions inhabit Samoan stories relating colonial education to the maintenance of cultural traditions. The widespread concern about the trafficking of sex workers suggests another sphere in which anxieties abound and global citizens seem to feel out of control. Nowhere are official expressions of anxiety about global flows stronger than in areas of military operations and “national security.” Kirk’s revealing exploration of the logic of the American military’s environmental policies for its overseas bases documents the gendered patterns of U.S. security practices. In the

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name of military readiness, oil is dumped into the ocean, toxic chemicals are flushed into fragile ecosystems, the health and well-being of local communities is endangered, and more environmentally careful practices are routinely ignored. By stressing militarization and demilitarization as ongoing global processes, requiring continuous, step-by-step maintenance, Enloe calls our attention to the enormous energy and pervasive anxiety that go into the maintenance of militarism. Teaiwa’s analysis of the militarization of Oceania shows how local practices of masculinity can intersect with national and transnational military recruitment to create highly gendered opportunities and identities. The mobilization and deflection of globalizing anxieties about masculinity and security offer a fascinating window onto the diverse trajectories of globalization. Multilayered attention to voice illuminates complex circumstances rather than flattening women’s stories into single narratives or simple judgments. It is tempting to conflate voice and agency in an uncomplicated manner, but interviews, ethnography, and other qualitative feminist research methodologies problematize the relationship. As Anne McClintock (1993) argues with regard to global sex workers, collapsing distinctions among women’s perspectives, actions, and situations leads to monolithic portrayals of their lives. Nuanced distinctions among voices, actions, and circumstances are crucial both to respecting the diverse experiences of women and to theorizing about those experiences in useful ways. Riley’s interviews with rural Chinese women working in an urban economic zone reflect the variety of experiences and agency the women express. She maintains that, while the conditions of their labor merit critique, it would be simplistic to view these women only as exploited workers. Their voices reflect considered labor choices and reveal reasons ranging from commitment to a better future for their children to longing for the latest fashionable clothing. Most importantly, Riley shows that these two desires are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and that sometimes the women she interviews are likely to express both sentiments simultaneously. Parreñas introduces a similar complexity in her investigation of the double standard for Filipina migrant workers as seen through a juxtaposition of interviews with their children and interpretation of the Family Code of 1987. Women are supposed to be both senders of remittances from abroad and stay-at-home mothers, an impossibility that ties state policy in knots while complicating women’s labor. Through Parreñas’s interviews we gain the perspective of the women’s children, who view themselves as abandoned while still valuing and praising the attention from their mothers abroad. Ibarra also discusses long-distance families, interviewing mothers who are working as domestic help in Santa Barbara, California, and O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. These women have created networks to help themselves and each other and have invented job-sharing arrangements in order to periodically “go back home” to spend time with their families, an ingenious example of using global kin



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networks to negotiate global labor markets. Yau also finds creative agency in her interviews with “troublesome” Japanese girls in a correctional institution. These girls see the authorities as troublesome and constitute themselves in more complex fashions. They resist the institution’s authoritarian regime by performing their “badgirlness” for Yau’s cameras and (re)inventing themselves in her interviews. Voices of men as well as women are critical for assessing global productions of gender consciousness. Derné’s interviews with middle-class men in India reveal how their sense of masculinity emerges from viewing foreign (western) films. The men’s voices show a strengthening of their attachment to a very conventional (and convenient) masculinity. The dyads feminists are working to problematize, including global/local, man/woman, and west/rest, are precisely those upon which the men rely. Both Parreñas and Derné reveal strategies by which men recruit global resources to maintain male privilege, even when those same resources are producing enormous changes in gender roles. Interviews with activists and intellectuals reveal similar complexities of agency and voices. Puri places herself within the discourse on the “global gay,” both as an activist and as a researcher critically aware of her role as proprietor of an uncomfortable gaze on sexual otherness. Min discusses the subtle changes of Chinese terms for gender consciousness and feminist consciousness as mediated through her interviews with Chinese feminist academics. Kirk shows Okinawan, Korean, and Filipino women’s agenc(ies) through their accounts of protests against U.S. military imperialism and environmental destruction in their respective native lands. Raiskin holds a conversation with Sia Figiel’s novel, where we once belonged, locating sites in Samoa where indigenous knowledge is both acknowledged and devalued at the same time, encouraging us to understand the complexity of that duality, and applying it to our further reading. Teaiwa attends to complex and painful reflections by Samoans on their relations to the U.S. wars they help to fight. Finally, the interview with Enloe encourages us to welcome surprise and to harness that surprise by maintaining our curiosity about the complex contradictions characterizing women’s relation to global militarism. The qualitative research contained in this volume stems from that same feminist curiosity and in turn facilitates further questions and reflections. The voices in the following essays long to be engaged, to be both understood and questioned.

Notes 1. We thank Steve Derné for offering this useful definition in his presentation in the first Women’s Studies Rockefeller colloquium at the University of Hawai‘i in April 2001. While we are informed by the critical economic analysis of Palat (2004) and others, we enlarge the common emphasis on economics and technologies to include multiple sites of

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globalization. We share this multiplication of globalizations with the “Globalization and Gender” issue of Signs (2001), but with an Asia/Pacific locus. 2. We share our focus on interdisciplinary process with Olds et al. (1999); but their essays focus primarily on economic dimensions and lack an engagement with gender. With Naples and Desai (2002), we insist on globalization as something that people do, and we attend to the daily lives and struggles of women negotiating global flows. Yet unlike Naples and Desai, we concentrate on Asia-Pacific settings and explore ways in which women’s global negotiations are sometimes complicit with, as well as resistant to, global hegemonies. We share the literary and cultural focus in Dissanayake, Yip, and Tam’s (2002) collection, while also incorporating economic and military factors. 3. We are indebted to earlier investigations of gender and globalization. Aguilar and Lacsamana (2004) combine a trenchant critique of neoliberal economic programs with attention to women’s political organizing. Yeoh, Teo, and Huang (2002) foreground feminist scholarship by geographers. Manderson and Jolly’s collection (1997) focuses primarily on sexuality. Rai (2001) looks at the gendering of development. Sarker and Niyogi De (2002) look specifically at gender in South and Southeast Asia, while Lim, Smith, and Dissanayake (1999) focus on gendering in culture and literature. 4. Strong analyses of globalization in particular geographic areas include: Merry (2000) (Hawai‘i); E. Lee (Hong Kong); Young (Mexico); Zheng (China). Analyses that examine globalization, but lack significant attention to gender and sexuality, include Davidson and Weekley (1999); Rowley and Benson (2000); and Chiang, Lidstone, and Stephenson (2004). 5. Here we are indebted to Steger’s insistence on the “uneven, contradictory, and ambiguous nature” of globalization (2004: 1) and to Sassen’s decomposition of unitary categories in favor of “contradictory spaces characterized by contestation, internal differentiation, continuous border crossings” (1998: xxxiv). 6. Merry (2006) has found comparable links between the spread of global feminism as an ideology for thinking about violence and the development of government programs. The linkage between feminist ideologies and state policies in the global spread of human rights approaches to violence against women is documented in thirty-six countries by Weldon (2002). 7. With Enloe, we embrace a feminist curiosity requiring, as she explains, “listening carefully, digging deep, developing a long attention span, being ready to be surprised” (2004: 3). The nexus of gender with globalization has been the subject of numerous books and articles informing this collection. To name a few: Wichterich (2000), Chang (2000), and Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2002) all have a primarily economic/labor focus, as do Beneria (2003) (development economics), Parreñas (2001) (labor migration), and Bahramitash (2005) (neoliberal economic reform). R. Kelly, Bayes, Hawkesworth, and Young (2001) explore relations of globalization to democracy.

Pa rt I

Confronting Colonial Discourses

Chapter 2

Telling Tales Out of School Sia Figiel and Indigenous Knowledge in Pacific Islands Literature

Judith Raiskin

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iniva, the village fool and madwoman prophet of Sia Figiel’s 1996 novel, where we once belonged, having returned to Samoa with a BA and MA in history after ten years in New Zealand, sits in the marketplace yelling at the tourists: “Go back where you came from, you fucking ghosts! Gauguin is dead! There is no paradise!” Represented as the first student to leave Samoa on a scholarship, Siniva is expected by her family and village to use her palagi (white) education to secure a job in government or business. Instead, she returns, committed to reminding her village about Samoan cosmology and the traditions of the old religion, accusing the pastors and nuns of killing the Samoan gods. She is beaten by her father and brothers, ostracized by the women, and considered to suffer from ghost sickness. Siniva voices the fury of the intellectual who, educated by the colonial machine, sees beyond the advantages offered her as an administrator of that machine (as a teacher, bureaucrat, professional) and becomes instead a critic of colonialism on behalf of her people, who reject the criticism as madness. Siniva insists that the paradise the tourists seek is a dead fantasy of the last century, that they themselves are ghostly apparitions who do not belong in the world of contemporary Samoa. Inappropriate as the tourists may be, Figiel recognizes the atavistic elements of colonial mythmaking and the intransigence of the fantasies continuing to influence both the imaginations of Americans and Europeans and the lives of Pacific Islanders. The novel focuses not on the visitors to Samoa and their difficulty of belonging, but on the social discomforts of Samoans themselves, who live between traditional and modern performances of identity and community. This is, of course, an experience not unique to Pacific Island indigenous cultures since all social relations negotiate between historical and contemporary understandings of responsibility, behavior, obligation, and so on. But the thematic core of many contemporary Pacific Island novels is the tension among a number of competing interpretations of social place. Imported education systems compete with indigenous epistemologies, Christianity vies with local cosmologies, TV sit-

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coms are as popular as traditional entertainment, and imported products of the global market replace native handicrafts and foods. As the title where we once belonged (1996b) suggests, these tensions produce a local myth entailing a lost experience of belonging that is temporal, geographical, psychological, and social. What is Figiel’s attitude to that “once” place or time, to the costs and rewards of belonging then and there, to belonging as part of a cultural “we”? Figiel’s attention to the ironies of everyday life allows for an exploration of a number of perspectives simultaneously: the past in service to the present, putative traditional values as shaped by colonial and transnational pressures, diasporic modernity interpreted by local desire. This construct permits no idealism or claim of purity: fa‘aSamoa (the Samoan way) is as much a product of the missionaries as it is of the traditional Samoan culture; migration is a potent metaphor for both precontact wisdom and postcolonial displacement; Gauguin may be dead, but there is always another sighting of Elvis, bedecked with leis, even in Samoa. One of the most powerful aspects of Figiel’s novel is its use of the tropes and symbols of traditional Samoan society to comment on the contemporary experiences of Samoans, particularly of girls, negotiating among a range of sometimes compatible and sometimes conflicting ideologies of fa‘aSamoa (as it is interpreted and enforced by contemporary village leaders and parents), individualism as taught by American Peace Corps volunteers, the promises of corporate development schemes, and the moral injunctions of both Anglo-American and Samoan Christianity. In contrast to the education she receives in the village school and at the faifeau’s (minister’s) house, Alofa, the twelve-year-old protagonist and narrator of the novel, learns important lessons outside of school from Siniva, the village madwoman, and Sugar Shirley, the village fa‘afafine (her transgender cousin), both of whom incorporate and adapt traditional Samoan epistemologies as they struggle to create a place of belonging in contemporary Samoa. Through Siniva and Sugar Shirley, Figiel challenges the colonial myths of Polynesian eroticism and horror and at the same time suggests new interpretations of the Samoan legends necessitated by her feminist sensibilities and the postcolonial realities of Samoan life. Figiel’s novel demands and provides a sharp-eyed analysis of Pacific Island life that counters the erotic/exotic romanticization of the “South Seas” so familiar to literary and anthropological traditions. Making American anthropology a main butt of her humor, Figiel reclaims the terms of definition of Samoan culture, most pointedly rejecting the banal sexualization of Polynesian, particularly Samoan, girls. She reworks other stock images of the Pacific Islands and plays with the clichéd contrasts of scarcity and tropical abundance, labor and leisure, impotence and unlimited sexual fulfillment.1 A number of critics have done excellent work unpacking English and American literary texts that have been influential in constructing and maintaining such



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objectification (R. Wilson 2000; Edmonds 1997; Jolly 1997). More specifically, recent feminist theorists have examined what Margaret Jolly describes as the “sexually saturated figure of the Polynesian woman” (1997: 99), imagined and portrayed by Europeans and Americans for two and a half centuries. Through the metaphor of the bikini bathing suit, designed and named in 1946 for the Bikini atoll on which the United States dropped over twenty-five nuclear bombs, Teresia Teaiwa (1994) explores the way the sexualization of Polynesian women both sustains and obfuscates the military use and destruction of Pacific Islands and their inhabitants. This sexualization is also analyzed as a repeating colonial trope in National Geographic Magazine by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, who describe the way the magazine reinscribes “preexisting, culturally tutored notions about the Pacific,” often leaning heavily on the images of female sensuality and availability (1993: 133, 137; Nordström 1991: 272). Perhaps the most challenging deconstruction of those images and associations is taking place in contemporary literature by Pacific Islanders. Sia Figiel’s novel deftly undermines the classic representations of Polynesia while exploring the ways they nevertheless influence the self-understandings of Samoan girls and women. where we once belonged is a novel that challenges western hegemonic representations of civilization, globalism, progress, and modernity by using traditions of orality, adapting Samoan mythology, and remembering and redefining indigenous ways of knowing the world (Subramani 2001: 157). Given her obvious delight in the raucous celebration of western popular culture in the villages of Samoa, Figiel does not idealize a notion of a static precontact Samoan way of life. She recognizes that 200 years of colonization and contemporary globalization have made impossible any return to a purely locally rooted cosmology. Not only is it impossible, but for Figiel and the children of the novel, there is a great deal of pleasure to be had in the music, fashion, food, and rerun sit-coms that are the enactment and by-products of globalization. While Figiel’s critique of colonization and globalization are expressed so clearly by Siniva, the novel does not allow the delights and desires of the children to be simply dismissed as false consciousness, as it is in a number of postcolonial novels. While we could read the children’s relentless desire to consume American goods as the destruction of valuable indigenous values and products (as Siniva does), Figiel’s description of the ubiquitous beat of rock and roll, the T-shirts and towels that express the characters’ sense of their own power, and the children’s creative reworking of TV sit-com plots all suggest a more playful and complicated understanding of how people react to and integrate the legacies of colonization and globalization. Both Siniva and Sugar Shirley attempt to offer Alofa and her friends ways of accessing powerful ideas from traditional Samoan culture and adapting them to contemporary pressures. Figiel, herself both a transnational intellectual and performer, creates these two characters, the angry university graduate and

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the clown, the mythic heroes of this novel, who, while unable to successfully dispel the violence and poverty in their communities, suggest liberatory ways of exploiting both western and Samoan ways of thinking, strategies that may be useful in this era of cultural and economic globalization and migration. Siniva’s incisive critique of colonialism in the 1970s, when she returns from New Zealand, is considered mad and, even worse, shameful by Siniva’s village and family, and she is banished from her community, deprived of any mutual communication, any human connections, until she takes her own life. Like the self-destructive Nyasha of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions who, while starving herself, tears with her teeth the pages of the colonial history texts she distrusts, Siniva wrestles with the history she and her people have been taught.2 Her studies in New Zealand, although part of the colonial education project that selects only the brightest and most promising students for university education in the “mother country,” have, ironically, revealed to her the biases and inaccuracies of the education dispensed in the villages. In vain she tries to contest the missionary-colonial tale of Europeans and Americans bringing light to the benighted savages of the Pacific, a tale that continues to hold wide currency among both visitors and islanders: “We are not living in Lightness,” she would say. “We are not. Lightness is dead. Lightness died that first day in 1830 when the breakers of the sky entered these shores, forcing us all to forget . . . to forget . . . to burn our gods . . . to kill our gods . . . to re-define everything, recording history in reverse. “Now,” says Siniva. “Is our turn to re-evaluate, re-define, re-member . . . if we dare. For this is Darkness.” (Figiel 1996b: 236–237)

While the villagers are vying for goods from their families living abroad, while the children memorize and reenact American television shows and collect American clothing, Siniva unsuccessfully challenges the paradigm that values colonial products and epistemologies over indigenous ones. But like Epeli Hau‘ofa’s antidevelopment spokesman Malu in Tales of the Tikongs, Siniva delivers a message that not only goes unheeded, but is ridiculed. Although the villagers dismiss Siniva and her message, Figiel presents her as a prophet anointed by a legendary bird, who feeds her the stories and legends of the Samoan gods and orders her to share them with her people, who are benighted, not by native cosmologies, but by Christianity and the values of modernity. Yet before Siniva is sent back to share her vision, the bird blinds her. Like seers in many cultures who are blinded before they can see and are compensated for their blindness by being given supernatural understanding, Siniva spends her life on the edge of the village, sharing wisdom that is generally ignored. Her suicide note is to her niece, Alofa:



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Suicide—it is the only way. For isn’t that what we’re all slowly doing anyway? Each time a child cries for coca-cola instead of coconut-juice the waves close into our lungs. Each time we choose one car, two cars, three cars over canoes and our own feet, the waves close in further. Further and further each time we open supa-keli [canned spaghetti] . . . pisupo [canned pea soup] . . . elegi [canned sardines] instead of fishing nets . . . raising pigs . . . growing taro . . . plantations . . . taamu [a tuber] . . . breadfruit. Each time we prefer apples to mangoes . . . pears to mangoes . . . strawberries to mangoes. Each time we prefer tin and louvres to thatched roofs. Each time we order fast-fast food we hurry the waves into our lungs. We suffocate ourselves—suffocate our babies and our reefs with each plastic diaper . . . formula milk . . . baby powder . . . bottled baby food and a nuclear bomb, too, once in a while. Drowning our children with each mushroom cloud, Love Boat. . . Fantasy Island . . . Rambo. . . video games . . . polyester shoes, socks—everything polyester. We kill ourselves slowly. Every day. Every Sunday. Each prayer to Jesus means a nail in our own coffin. Each time we switch something ON (radio, lamps, TV, ignitions . . .) means a nail in our coffin. . . . And agaga [soul] as we once knew it dies in our still biologically functionable bodies, full of junk food . . . darkness food . . . white-food . . . death food. For that is what we consume on a daily basis. We eat Death and we are eaten by Death, too. (238)

Alofa is frightened of Siniva, especially when she learns that Siniva is her aunt, her father’s sister. Although Siniva’s brother, Alofa’s father, wields power as the village disciplinarian, Siniva is the hereditary talking chief, and she offers Alofa the wisdom of genealogy and her critique of modernity. Alofa listens to Siniva’s legends carefully and as an abused girl in a village where girls are subject to harsh disciplinary and sexual violence, she finds through these Samoan tales a place in the world for a separate soul, her own agaga. She can find her place in this series of legendary tales, perhaps because Siniva has modified them, shifting the focus of central Samoan myths. In her (and Figiel’s) rendition, Pili, the trickster lizard god, tries to take advantage of Aolele, the beautiful daughter of Laueleela, the earth god, only to be overcome by Aolele’s strength and her seven brothers’ devoted defense of her safety and purity. Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, a Samoan critic well versed in the versions of Pili’s legendary cycle, finds it “problematic” that Figiel demotes Pili to a villain and “defeated” god when she seemingly values the power of mythology and Samoan tradition (1998). Indeed, Figiel describes this novel as modeled on su‘ifefiloi, the traditional Samoan form of storytelling that strings many different songs and myths together in the form of an ‘ula, or garland of flowers (Subramani 1996: 126). That Figiel changes the traditional stories to emphasize embedded female strength and authorize gender relations that value and protect girls and women need not be read as a threat to tradi-

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tion but as an adaptation that may allow for the preservation of Samoan culture and of Samoans themselves. A similar debate surrounded Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 The Woman Warrior, in which Kingston reworks the Chinese tale of Fa Mu Lan, creating a superheroic swordswoman who avenges her village against a misogynist baron and tyrannous emperor. In response to accusations by some Asian-American critics that she was misrepresenting Chinese culture and writing “fake” Chinese legends to underscore American racist stereotypes of Chinese misogyny, Kingston responded, as Figiel might, that she was writing a memoir, not sociology or history. Literary works often offer the most nuanced cultural understandings, enriching and complicating ethnographic representations and providing their own theoretical perspectives. Additionally, the formal structures of Figiel’s and Kingston’s works provide richly textured analyses of cultural fragmentation and creative responses to rapidly changing cultural environments. Kingston’s revisions of classic legends and the interweaving of their themes with the stories of the narrator’s childhood reveal how Chinese culture becomes refracted through the experience of a girl growing up in Stockton, California. The memoir is her experience of the cultural history, her need for a sustaining tradition. Kingston has responded to the charge of transcribing myths inaccurately that “myths have to change, be useful or forgotten. Like the people who carry them across the oceans, the myths become American. The myths I write are new, American” (1991: 23–25). One can anticipate similar criticisms of Figiel’s novel, which, as a written document (in English, no less), revises the traditions of orality and fidelity to traditional legends. Yet Figiel composed both where we once belonged and The Girl in the Moon Circle (written nine months later) as performance pieces and says her goal is for “the reader to be able to experience the music of oral tradition in the way I write in English” (1996a: 122). The fact that the children in both works sing both the myth cycles and TV commercials “is a sign that culture is perpetually changing and that people adjust and adapt to the changes—and continue” (128). In Figiel’s Pili story, Aolele is also a superhero, one whose strength and discernment is described in wholly Polynesian metaphors: Aolele was incarnate beauty—her eyes darker than lama juice, her lips thick like oars from a war canoe, her breasts firm like the heart of a tanoa, her teeth whiter than virgin siapo, her nose noble, experienced, pre-conditioned for greeting . . . and to take in all of a stranger’s agaga . . . and to release it only if the stranger had honourable intentions. (1996b: 145)

The story is told to Alofa by Siniva, but Alofa has also heard this tale (Figiel’s version) when she was in the womb; it is this version that motivates Alofa as a fetus to will herself, against her mother’s efforts, to become female. In expressing her love of



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Samoan culture, Figiel does not simply juxtapose the colonial stories about Samoa and the damaging lessons of colonial education with “authentic” precontact Samoan legends to prove their cultural superiority. Far more subtly, she suggests that the originary legends, as they have been preserved, contribute to the degradation and misery of Samoan women and girls today. By changing the emphasis of these tales, remembering them differently, Figiel suggests a positive strategy for valuing Samoan culture as part of a contemporary feminist critique of both western colonialism and Samoan patriarchy, a patriarchy enforced by women as well as by men. Some Samoan educators are not as concerned with Figiel’s revision of the Samoan legend cycles as they are with her colloquial use of both English and Samoan; they would prefer her to write in standard forms of English to support what they and foreign educators are teaching in the schools. Figiel’s attention to sexuality (the desire of girls and the abuse they suffer) and her use of vernacular “K” Samoan (as opposed to the formal “T” Samoan) as well as her use of swear words and candid references to genitalia and breasts repel devout Christian Samoans, and she is often asked to censor her performances and readings from her novels when she is at home (Subramani 1996: 131). This local devotion to imported curricula and educational standards, as well as rigid ideas about true fa‘aSamoa, are at the heart of Figiel’s exploration of the formal shaping of Samoan girls’ worlds and the alternative perspectives they are offered outside of school.

Colonial Education in the Pacific Siniva’s critique of western education easily finds its place with those presented for the past fifty years by postcolonial theorists and writers the world over. Writers from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Caribbean have written movingly about the psychological and intellectual costs of colonial education; they understand the “colonization of the mind” as the goal and effect of an imported education system that teaches the racial, moral, and economic superiority of the colonizing settler population. The more recent attention to the colonization and missionization of the Pacific shifts the focus from European to American colonialism, with American culture identified as the central subject of critique, ambivalence, ridicule, and desire. Even as the recent scholarship in Pacific Island Cultural Studies seeks a nonwestern paradigm for understanding the Pacific (Borofsky 2000; Diaz and Kauanui 2001), scholars of economic globalization make it increasingly clear that the suggestion that newly independent Pacific nations such as Samoa are “post” colonial is easily refuted, given their ever-increasing dependence on multinational corporations as well as on the governments of former colonial powers. This situation is particularly clear in the Pacific for those nations that have been wholly annexed by the

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colonial power (for example, Hawai‘i), for those that remain as U.S. trust territories or whose economies depend on U.S. aid and military bases (for example, Guam, the Marshall Islands, Belau), for those whose national economies depend on remittances from family members working in the United States (for example, Samoa, Tonga, the Philippines, the Cook Islands), and the rest that are deeply invested in development, tourism, or multinational corporate commerce. Sia Figiel’s examination of American cultural colonialism is as harsh as that by any cultural critic from the more recognized former colonial regions, but it is also deeply nuanced by an exploration into the shame and desire elicited by globalization. Her characters love television, revere Elvis Presley, and count their status by how many family members live in Australia, New Zealand, and America. where we once belonged, like so many postcolonial novels, is about place, about belonging, about distinguishing the center from the periphery and showing their interconnectedness. What is the center of the village, the narrator asks. Of Apia? Of Samoa? Of the World? Is Samoa the middle, the navel of the world?—or is it the exoticized paradise of the anthropologists or the eroticized horror of the missionaries? Alofa, whose refrain throughout the novel is “What’s that supposed to mean?” is trying to figure it all out—without much help from the Samoan and American teachers. Their highest hope is to prepare their students to win scholarships to New Zealand and begin the journey of migrations that Alofa compares to “someone running to and fro from a serious diarrhoea attack” (Figiel 1996b: 33). In the last several years, a number of contemporary Pacific Island writers have juxtaposed what Vilsoni Hereniko (2000) calls “indigenous knowledge” with “academic imperialism.” Given the history of western education in the Pacific—generated by colonial, missionary, and military powers—these writers see clear connections between the structure and the implementation of English, European, and American education systems and the material, spiritual, and intellectual impoverishment of Pacific Islanders. Like many other postcolonial writers who were successful students, Hereniko expresses ambivalence about his western education, while recognizing the degradation of his native Rotuman history and knowledge-base: When I reached secondary school and later went to university, I found myself having to study history, largely the history of the British Empire, and had a difficult time remembering historical information that did not seem to have any relevance to me whatsoever. . . . When I went to school and learned to read and write, I came to value English fairy tales, Greek mythology, and biblical narratives more than my father’s hanuju [Rotuman-based stories]. (2000: 78, 83)

He recognizes that much Rotuman history and knowledge is contained in the traditions of genealogy, performance, dance, and oral narratives that are



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barred from the classroom. Rich in such local expressions, Hereniko’s film The Land Has Eyes (the first indigenous film from Rotuma or Fiji) juxtaposes indigenous and colonial systems of justice and wisdom. The marginalization by school and church institutions of native ways of knowing is primary and intentional, in Hereniko’s view, to the process of colonization. As these comments make clear, the history of colonial education in the Pacific shares much with the British and French colonial education systems elsewhere, yet it also has its own peculiarities. Most Pacific education systems began when missionaries created orthographies for Pacific Island languages in order to translate and teach the Bible. Rather than banning the local language or teaching only in the language of the colonizing country, the missionaries set up a system of biblical education taught in the local languages. In the nineteenth century the Christian day-schools were often conducted either in the church or the pastor’s home, often by a native village pastor trained by missionaries. Colonial administrators who followed the missionaries often kept the religious schools in place, since they tended to support the colonial regimes; chiefs and high-status leaders were often rewarded for their support of the missionary schools with elite educational opportunities for their children both at home and abroad. In Western Samoa the only educational change the Germans made to the missionary schools under their administration from 1900 to 1914 was to add German language to the religious curriculum (Thomas 1984: 220). After World War I, when New Zealand was awarded a trusteeship over Western Samoa, colonial authorities assumed the obligation of establishing a publicly supported, secular education system. This new curriculum was patterned closely after the syllabi from New Zealand (which were, in turn, patterned after the English curriculum), and after World War II the New Zealand scholarship scheme sent Samoan students to New Zealand for advanced education. Even after Samoan independence in 1962, education continued in the same vein, and by the end of the 1960s only 1 percent of the entire school-age population entered higher education. Figiel’s character Siniva (and Figiel herself) is one of the few “lucky” students to be sent to New Zealand for high school or college. New Zealand examinations continued to be used as criteria for determining the success of students through the 1980s (ibid.: 221). Mark Bray describes the way this colonial education system parallels that across the Pacific. While curriculum development units “may devise new textbooks, prepare teaching guides and distribute visual aids . . . the overall structure and orientation of schools remains strongly Western” (1993: 338). All of the curricula of these countries are dominated by examinations designed for international recognition. In addition, all nonsovereign territories continue to use examinations from the “mother countries”:

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Students in New Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis & Futuna sit the Baccalaureat and other examinations set in France and their counterparts on American Samoa sit standardised achievement tests from the USA. Secondary school students in Niue and Cook Islands sit New Zealand examinations, though Tokelau now operates its own form 5 examinations. (339)

Over the past twenty years, independent nations have moved to create their own regional exams, yet none were created until 1988. Bray argues that while there is little left of Japanese and German influence in Pacific Island education, “the impact of American, Australian, British, French and New Zealand colonialism is very clear” (344). Unlike Britain and New Zealand, the United States did not take its role as colonial administrator seriously. Given America’s economic and military use of the islands since World War II, the lack of financial and material investment in its trust territories is striking. Murray Thomas describes the shortcomings of leaving educational policy in American Samoa to the U.S. Naval Administration. The stated goals of the administration were identical to those of the missionaries: to Americanize the islanders and to teach them “a few simple truths” and English as a “world language” (Thomas 1984: 214, quoting Gray 1960). Thomas contends that until 1932, the curriculum was American “with only a slight island flavor in the form of plantation work in the upper grades” (1984: 215). By 1962, when Western Samoa won independence, the United States had done very little to further develop educational systems in American Samoa. Most of the curriculum there in the 1960s was delivered by educational television shows produced in the United States; by the end of the 1960s there were 180 hours of lessons telecast each week, with virtually no mention of Samoan culture or values. Konai Helu Thaman, a Tongan education specialist and poet, argues that there is very little qualitative difference between the education offered by Christian missionaries, colonial administrators, or contemporary overseas-trained indigenous educators and foreign consultants. In her poetry, Thaman expresses the deep ambivalence among Pacific Island leaders regarding the value of indigenous knowledge in educational programs: our director of education supports vernacular studies for other peoples’ children. (1993b: 55)

Funding and leadership from dominant countries, Thaman argues, continues to keep dominant ideologies and philosophies in the curriculum that displace and demean local values.



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Thaman seeks an indigenous vocabulary for her students and for her own poetry. As a teacher, she is pressed between English standards, as expressed in the curriculum unit on William Wordsworth, and her own recognition of their irrelevance for her students: looking at boredom i wandered lonely as a cloud memorize this verse! (1993b: 48)

Thaman and Figiel join Caribbean writers such as Jean Rhys, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid, who have similarly used Wordsworth’s poem to express their scorn for the English fetishization of its own culture throughout its imperial classroom. Alofa learns “The Daffodils” poem but doesn’t understand a word of it and surmises that a daffodil is “a dancer that lives in the sky” (Figiel 1996b: 173). In Figiel’s performance poem “The Daffodils, The Other Version,” she reads the poem with pious inflection but ends with mischievous irreverence: “I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills / When all at once I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils./ I wondered and I wondered, wondered and wondered /  What the fuck is a daffodil?” (Teaiwa and Figiel 2000). Thaman offers a countermetaphor in her essay “Of Daffodils and Heilala,” where she proposes the Tongan sacred flower and the garland as appropriate sources and forms for Polynesian literature.3

Indigenous Epistemologies In his caustic appraisal of colonial dependency in Tales of the Tikongs, Epeli Hau‘ofa ridicules Pacific Island “diploma dependency” and dresses his character Manu in a T-shirt that reads “Religion and Education Destroy Original Wisdom.” A recent movement of Pacific Island educators and cultural leaders is attempting to determine what indigenous cultural values or “original knowledge” can be taught in school to counter the western values of individualism and capitalism.4 There is a growing literature defining indigenous epistemologies, comparing these “ways of knowing” across Pacific Island cultures, and countering inaccurate western anthropological descriptions of local knowledge and cultural meanings.5 This desire of Pacific Island scholars, educators, and community-builders “to create an indigenous account of indigenous culture” (Gegeo and WatsonGegeo 2001: 67) is a central theme in contemporary Pacific Island fiction and poetry as well. Patricia Grace is a contemporary Maori writer whose novels focus on the struggle to keep indigenous cultures alive under colonialism. For Grace, school is a damaging environment where Maori children are taught to “rubbish” their traditions and their ancestors. In her novels, hope is provided by characters

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of a new generation who refuse to attend school, who refuse to send their children to school, or who use western education to fight back against the encroachment of westerners on their land or their rights as indigenous people. For those children not strong enough to withstand the violence of an imposed epistemology, for those who “fall through the cracks of the school room floor,” the adults in Grace’s 1986 novel Potiki find alternatives and look back at traditional ways of educating children in their cultural values and skills. Roimata, a mother of five, keeps two of the children home and contemplates what they need to grow and thrive. Roimata begins to tell her children “own-centered” stories of her childhood, those of her parents, and then older stories of her people. This process leads them all to relearn a Maori way of knowing, a knowledge set in a concept of cyclical time radically different from the western idea of linear time. Educated in their own traditions, the children become able to evaluate the western view that sees them as marginal, on the periphery. Like Figiel, Grace takes on the western developers and educators to reclaim the definition of what is the center, what is the periphery, what is sacred, what is debased. In Potiki, Grace introduces the white character Mr. Dolman (renamed “Dollarman” by the Maori characters), who has come to negotiate the use of their land for the development of a tourist leisure area and a sea park. He has come to pressure them to allow developers access to the sea and to encourage them to participate in the project for their own economic development: the plans “were to do with excursions and water sports, the underwater zoo and the animal circus, the clapping seals, the man putting his head in the mouth of a whale . . . a letter came telling us how we could be involved, and how we could dress up and dance and sing twice a day and cook food in the ground” (Grace 1986: 97). When Dollarman suggests their house be shifted to a more central location nearer to town, “Everybody had laughed then, because the man had not understood that the house was central already and could not be more central. . . . [Dollarman] had a surprised look when the people laughed and looked down at his clothing as though he could suddenly be dressed strangely” (100). Toko, the narrator of this scene, who is the boy-ancestor, the son-father whose body is not long for this world, suddenly understands how the white man sees his beloved family: I pulled myself up on my sticks. . . . Right then I saw what the man saw as he turned and looked at the three of us and as my eyes met his eyes. I saw what he saw. What he saw was brokenness, a broken race. He saw in my Granny, my Mary and me, a whole people, decrepit, deranged, deformed. (102)

The novel turns away from such debasing western values to explore a model of teaching the children the sacredness of their environment, apprenticing them to carving, fishing, performing traditional funeral rights, and growing crops.



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Rather than school, the true learning in the novel takes place “at the elbow” of an elder who passes down indigenous skills and values. Similarly, in Alan Duff’s 1990 Once Were Warriors, the salvation for the neglected and abused children is found in learning traditional rituals, haka, chants, and learning about the history of the Maori people from the perspective of Maori elders. Thaman’s concerns about the effect of inculcating western ideas of individuality, learning to see oneself as a “free market agent,” and learning to desire all things western, mostly American, are expressed with great poignancy in Sia Figiel’s novel. Alofa’s repeated question, “What is that supposed to mean?” is a basic question of epistemology as Solomon Islanders David Welchman Gegeo and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo define it: “who can be a knower, what can be known, what constitutes knowledge, sources of evidence for constructing knowledge, what constitutes truth, how truth is to be verified, how evidence becomes truth, how valid inferences are to be drawn, [and] the role of belief in evidence” (2001: 57). Alofa lives in a community where a multitude of beliefs and practices from both indigenous and colonial worldviews are intertwined; because they are called simply fa‘aSamoa and are given the status of cultural imperative, Alofa finds it difficult to interpret, appraise, or reconcile them. Alofa suspects that the simultaneous referral to supposedly indigenous and Christian social structures in the schools and church meetings—values that support the violently enforced and violated sexual purity of the girls—is an overdetermined defense of patriarchal authority, power, and freedom. Her ability to survive (when many of her friends do not) comes from the lessons she learns outside of school and church from Siniva and Sugar Shirley, both surprising traditionalists in their own ways who, pointedly, do not themselves survive. Alofa struggles throughout the novel between two competing but intertwined epistemologies regarding her understanding of herself as an individual. The western-style education that is imported from New Zealand and is taught by Peace Corps volunteers from the United States demands an individualized identity, separate from that of the village or family. This is an identity that is mystifying, potentially nullifying for a girl who has been raised to measure her wealth, prestige, and place in the world through the recitation of her genealogy and current family relations. The Peace Corps volunteers who teach in the schools consider it one of their primary educational responsibilities to develop in their students a sense of individual identity, a self separate from that of their families and village, a private “soul” that is simultaneously deplorable and enticing to the children. Miss Cunningham, a teacher from Oregon who is as perplexed by her students as they are by her, gives them essay assignments to encourage their sense of personal ownership and perceptions. She has them choose among the topics “My Village,” “My Pet,” and “On my way to school today I saw a . . .” The essays she receives from the students continually disappoint her by their generalizations and

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lack of a strong personal voice. Finally, forced to write on the third topic, Alofa explains her confusion: I knew only that it was hard to witness something—anything—alone. You were always with someone. . . . Nothing was witnessed alone. Nothing was witnessed in the “I” form—nothing but penises and ghosts. “I” does not exist, Miss Cunningham. “I” is “we” . . . always. (Figiel 1996b: 136–137)

Although her Samoan upbringing insists that she is always part of a group, that she know herself and understand her experiences only through that group, the sexual pressure exerted on the girls by the boys and the sexual abuse they receive from men are always experienced alone. Alofa senses an incongruity between what girls are taught in their families (“I” is “we”) and what each girl experiences on her own. Alone Alofa touches the pastor’s son’s penis, alone Alofa sees her father’s penis as he makes love with her teacher, and alone Lili is raped and then beaten by her father. Although any public recognition of these events (Alofa and Lealofi are caught and exposed, Lili becomes pregnant) leads to brutal beatings of the girls, they nevertheless bring these stories back to each other, “confessing” what has happened to them alone. Whereas Miss Cunningham, ignorant of the danger associated with that position, encourages them to value who they each are “alone,” the Samoan-Christian set of strictures that Alofa calls “girl lessons” depend on the first principle that each girl is “through” her family, her village, her church, Samoa (138). Everything each girl does is an expression of her role, her place in her community. But the world that Sia Figiel describes is one where it is not clear to the girls, despite the constant prayer meetings and classes, just how one successfully becomes a woman. The “girl lessons,” taught with slaps and the pulling of hair, give the girls some guidelines: We were not allowed to laugh too much or too loudly. We were taught to be meek. We were taught to be humble (again). . . . Always take a shower twice a day, once when you wake up and once in the ­evening—and three times when you are sick from the moon. Never wear the same panty twice when you have the moon sickness. Never laugh at blind people or deaf people . . . or palagis. Never walk alone at night—only bad girls and teine o le po [prostitutes] walk around that late. Never wear anything exposing your knees. . . .  Never go bra-less to church. Never speak with the “k” in your mouth.



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Never pray for yourself—you should pray for the whole village and for the whole of Samoa. “We” were taught to mimic Jesus Christ in all that he was, so that “we” too could be good examples of his life. “We” were young ladies, and “we” should handle ourselves as such. Therefore: “I” am “we.” “I” does not exist. (140–141)

While the girls are taught that this negation of individual selfhood is “the Samoan Way,” there is, Siniva teaches her, access to a powerful sense of self that is rooted in Samoan culture. At the conclusion of a series of Samoan legends told by Siniva and the narrator, Alofa identifies herself and her Samoan “soul” as central to that tradition. While she finds a place of identification in pre-Christian Samoan cosmology, it remains a tenuous and somewhat threatening place where she is vulnerable to spirit sickness. Alofa’s willingness to listen to Siniva exposes her to the danger of losing herself completely, but it also gives her freedom from the constrictions of modern Samoan-Christian beliefs that insist on her debasement. Alofa’s soul separates from the trappings of global commerce and enters a world that is distinctly Samoan: Agaga is the soul that each man and woman has. Agaga lives in peoples’ bodies. And leaves the body only when one faints, loses consciousness or dies. . . .  When my body dies [at night], agaga leaves the “Made in Taiwan” cotton sheets (all floral and colourful), the “Made in China” blue or green or red panties, the white polyester brassiere, and the watch also. . . .  This is when ghosts are born again and again. They roam the village looking for a waking baby, looking for a waking cat. Ghosts eat baby eyes and cat eyes . . . and dreams, too. Ghosts do. And “I”? “I” become a god . . . “I” am . . . “I” exist. (194)

Although she is terrified of Siniva, Alofa can find a recognizable sense of self only through the Samoan myths imparted to her by her aunt. Alofa recognizes that Siniva is not just a village fool but a warrior of great strength and power (192). Alofa interprets Siniva’s battle against colonialism in traditional Samoan epic terms and, through her aunt’s struggles, she celebrates herself: Nafanua gathers the invisible people of Samoa and leads them to war, covering her breasts with coconut leaves to disguise the fact that she is a woman warrior. She

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leads Samoa into war and overthrows the oppressive power . . . cutting their heads off one by one . . . cooling the hot earth with blood. “I am a warrior,” sings Nafanua. “I am a warrior.” “I am,” sings Alofa. (193–194, 197)

Like Maxine Hong Kingston’s adolescent girl in The Woman Warrior, Alofa finds a model of independent selfhood and womanhood in modified versions of her community’s legends. These new heroines allow the girls to claim individual identities without having to deny their communities or be cut off, as are their suicidal aunts.

“Girl” Lessons Alofa’s other mentor and protector is her cousin Fa‘afetai (Sugar Shirley), who is the village fa‘afafine, a man who lives “in the way of a woman.” In village lore, Shirley is born at the time that Alofa’s aunt commits suicide. Alofa, named after her beautiful and tragic aunt, struggles to find a way to become a woman who lives and continues to be respected and embraced by her family. Shirley helps the teenage girls of the village negotiate the rules that govern their domestic duties, their grooming, their speech, and their relationships—each of which is seen to reflect their sexual status, particularly as they enter adolescence. Shirley teaches them “girl lessons” that, while they do not overtly contradict the expectations of fa‘aSamoa, expose those expectations as cultural choices that have changed over time—and therefore can and will change again. If the dictates of fa‘aSamoa derive from traditional cultural practices of communal selfhood as shaped by Christian restrictions of female sexuality, Shirley challenges that particular conflation by performing a traditional role that elicits expressions of value for “femaleness,” both female labor and female sexual autonomy. When she can, Shirley protects the girls from adult brutality and maintains for the community a performance of female sexual levity, which was traditionally the role of unmarried girls but was prohibited after the arrival of Christianity.6 Alofa’s skepticism about the education she receives in church and in school is due in part to her lack of understanding and in part to her sensitivity to the hypocrisy of her elders. While she is taught with violence to suppress her sexual curiosity, the girls are regularly peeped at by neighbors, impregnated by teachers, courted and sometimes raped by male family members. Girls who become pregnant are badly beaten and are held solely responsible for the sexual transgression, whether they wished it or not. Alofa is searching for a way to interpret her experiences and her encounters with friends, family members, and teachers. Whom can she believe and what perspective is dictating the conflicting expectations? The chapter called “The Centre” explicitly raises this epistemological problem: “There is no consensus



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as to what the centre of Apia is. Everyone has their own version, their own definition, which varies in degree from one person to another” (Figiel 1996b: 65). The chapter describes a series of different centers for a range of characters. It is clear that while all characters have their own perspectives and obsessions that run their lives, the foreigners, who come bringing one form of “truth” or another, are always ignorant, understanding little of what they see or hear. The presence of various fa‘afafine in the novel highlights, often with humor, alternative perspectives on western ways of knowing. For instance, Soia, the devout widow and mother of fifteen, names her only sons after the American anthropologist Derek Freeman (who claims not to have met any fa‘afafine during his research in Samoa). These twins, Freeman (Pagoka-ua-faasaolokoiga) and Derek (Keleki), “both turned out to be fa‘fafige. Keleki returned from Hawai‘i with breast implants, and Pagoka-ua-faasaolokoiga leads a life of sin in Apia with sailors and unhappily or happily married men” (68). While this is a wry undercutting of the pomposity of the foreigner’s interpretation of Samoan culture, it is also a way for Figiel to express the complexities of “coming of age in Samoa” from the point of view of Samoan teenage girls. Far from being merely a joke, the fa‘afafine in the novel offer the girls a traditional education in a way the schools cannot—an education even their mothers and disciplinarians of the village cannot—for in many ways the adults have idealized the school system, even as they remember their own misery there. Sugar Shirley is an excellent vehicle for portraying the effect of the conflicting “knowledges” in the village and the changing sexual politics, where traditional sexual and gender codes are influenced by Christianity, migration, and media. In this novel, as with many other contemporary Pacific novels, the children are presented with alternative sources of knowledge to the missionary, colonial, or foreign-influenced educational systems. Both Sugar Shirley and Siniva complicate family sexual politics and challenge village and foreign representations of contemporary life in Samoa. Sugar Shirley is fully integrated into village life and is well loved for her intermediate state by both men and women, boys and girls. Sugar Shirley is called a girl and treads the line between girl-sister (teine) and woman-wife (fafine) and between boys and girls who are separated as functional brothers and sisters. She speaks the respectful formal language more associated with girls than with women, boys, or men (Mageo 1992: 453), but her jokes are usually sexually irreverent.7 In her liminal role between genders, Shirley is permitted more freedom than others, male or female, to comment on village sexual politics. Her clowning (accusing the boys of the Christian youth group of impregnating her, complaining to the old women about her period) maintains a grace for the kind of impropriety that often brings terrible violence upon the girls in the village. In her study of Samoan gender and sexuality, Mageo describes the way fa‘afafine express the contradictions inherent in the contemporary constraints on female sexuality, contradic-

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tions that the girls experience as hypocrisy: “In the transvestite body . . . one finds an intercalation of opposites that places the figure of the virginal girl in ironic quotation…. [T]ransvestites make a mockery of virginity itself and the Samoan-Christian ideal for which it stands” (Mageo 1998: 211). Mageo suggests that the fa‘afafine, not mentioned in nineteenth-century reports or missionary journals,8 is a role of increasing importance, given the decline of traditional ways of performing gender roles of being a girl and being a woman. For the girls of this story, the transition from teine to fafine is fraught not only with sexual violence, but with generational changes concerning permissible behavior. According to Mageo, the fa‘afafine “represents a novel cultural stratagem for assisting real girls to play idealized roles and for defusing an increased pressure toward violence in public gatherings,” where boys and men must challenge any defamation of categorical sisters (Mageo 1992: 444). Because Shirley is performing girlhood, her behavior underscores the expectations of girls while exposing, to the girls as well as to their elders, girlhood as a performance. It may be argued that when only designated members of communities are allowed to cross boundaries, their transgressions are at the cost of more widespread freedoms. Hereniko suggests that the performances of fa‘afafine, like other licensed clowning performances, serve a conservative role in maintaining gender roles and sexual norms that are under great pressure in contemporary Samoa (1999: 24). Sugar Shirley’s performance, however, operates on two levels that might appeal to the imaginations of some members of her community, like Alofa, who is actively searching for ways to express her own agaga and not lose her social place. Even though she acts in ways that real girls must not, Shirley opens a gap between gender expectations and behavior that may allow for broader understandings of what is appropriate masculine and feminine expression. Her behavior also calls attention to what is considered appropriate “Samoan” behavior. Because she is not a real girl, Sugar Shirley is permitted to perform the sexual expressiveness of girls and women that were part of traditional Samoan culture before the missionaries’ arrival. Because she is not a boy, she is not held accountable for her sexual clowning in front of girls. The village agreement not to prosecute Shirley for her behavior is a powerful undercutting of the Christian strictures of the past century and a tacit acknowledgment of a Samoan way that could allow girls more freedom. Niko Besnier explores the ways transgender performances in Tonga rest upon tensions between local and “translocal” identities central to a society where so many Tongans and their children live in metropolitan cities in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. Like the fakaleiti Besnier describes, Sugar Shirley has taken an English name that signals the existence of and connection with alternative social constructs while she simultaneously performs local Samoanness as a fa‘afafine (Besnier 2002). Unlike western drag, which can easily be read as a negative model to shore up male heterosexuality, Samoan fa‘afafine can be read additionally as a warning for



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virginal young women not to flaunt their sexuality: “The inversion serves to remind sisters of how they are not supposed to behave” (Mageo 1993: 454). Traditional fa‘afafine occupy a liminal position diffusing the tensions of gender performance and protocol in a community where gender relations have changed rather rapidly. Figiel provides a sympathetic portrayal of such a fa‘afafine from the point of view of the entire village, particularly of the girls who benefit from Shirley’s enactment of ideal girlhood and its limitations. When she is taunted at a cricket match by a wife new to the village, Shirley knocks her down and is defended by all the men of the village, including the husband of the newcomer. Figiel delivers Shirley from ridicule and makes her a hero, in fact much like the mythical girls of the Samoan stories who die by the will of the gods. When she dies by drowning, she is mourned by the whole village for weeks. It is Shirley, not the schools or the prayer meetings, who helps the girls negotiate the conflicting expectations of tradition and modernity. She is well loved because she affirms traditional cultural practices and protects the girls by delineating, through her transgression, the boundaries they must respect: “‘Don’t do what I would,’ she would say to us girls whenever we left the house for the aufaipese [choir] at nights” (Figiel 1996b: 52–53). Her exaggeration of both the sister-role and the woman-role help idealize and stabilize the girls’ gender roles while opening up the possibility, for those who see it, of imagining other ways of being (Mageo 1992: 454). While the fa‘afafine is a traditional role in Samoan society, Shirley’s concern for the girls that she expresses through her own set of “girl lessons” exhibits the recent pressure on girls in modern Samoan society. Although Siniva and Shirley both perish, Alofa, representing a younger generation of the Pacific Islands, learns from each of them ways that indigenous cultural practices as forms of knowledge can be life-saving. Standing at Siniva’s grave, Alofa can now also hear the cry of the legendary Tuli bird and decides that she, unlike her aunt, will not die; she will not despair, but will return to a “new gathering place where ‘we’ once belonged” (Figiel 1996b: 239). Who will gather here and who will feel they belong are questions Figiel’s novel provocatively leaves open.

Notes I am grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation and the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. I appreciate the careful readings of this analysis by other Fellows, Women’s Studies faculty, and anonymous readers, as well as the helpful comments on earlier versions by participants of the International Cultural Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i and the faculty of Hawai‘i Pacific University. I am also grateful for support from the University of Oregon Humanities Center and the Center for the Study of Women and Society. 1. Tiffany (2001) argues that the “sexual life of savages” has been the ruling discourse

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about Samoa in anthropology, which has posited the Pacific Islands as civilizations offering us a mirror image of western culture’s understanding of itself: where westerners are repressed, the Pacific Island societies are expressive; where the west is civilized, the Pacific Islands represent precivilization. As Tiffany puts it, “In short, the bodies and behavior of Samoan girls are of interest in helping us understand ourselves [i.e. Americans]” (23). Tiffany’s examination of the changing representation of Samoan women in particular, through the marketing of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa and Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa, raises important questions about the effect of politics on anthropological ethnography as well. 2. Tsitsi Dangarembga, from Zimbabwe, is, like Sia Figiel, the first woman from her country to write a novel in English; for each of them, their choice of English highlights the structures of power they explore in their novels. 3. In the past twenty-five years a number of indigenous Pacific writers have captivated the attention of readers and literary scholars. Some of the better known are New Zealand Maori writers Patricia Grace, Witi Ihimaera, Alan Duff, and Keri Hulme; Samoan writers Albert Wendt and Sia Figiel; Fijian writer and critic Subramani; Tongan satirist and essayist Epeli Hau‘ofa; Niuean novelist John Pule; and Rotuman writer and filmmaker Vilsoni Hereniko. In Hawai‘i, “local” literature produced by descendents of the plantation workers have challenged “standard English” and U.S. “mainland education” with stories and novels that employ Pidgin (among these writers are Milton Murayama, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Lee Tonouchi, and writers from the Bamboo Ridge journal and press headed by Darrell Lum and Eric Chock). While this literature offers a significant critique of the human costs of globalized labor forces (from the indentured servitude in the cane fields to contemporary hotel workers) and explores the rich cultural possibilities of ethnically diverse communities, native Hawaiians and their concerns are often absent from these works. Writers of Hawaiian descent, such as John Dominis Holt, Haunani-Kay Trask, Joe Balaz, and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl have influenced native Hawaiian writing. Recently, with the revival of Hawaiian in language-immersion schools and the growth of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i, native writers are creating new spaces for performance and publication. The native Hawaiian cultural renaissance of the past thirty years has produced a rich body of music, chants, and poetry, and the native Hawaiian journal ‘oiwi has published poetry, art, short stories, and essays in English and Hawaiian by native writers. Perhaps one of the most interesting projects of this journal is Noenoe Silva’s reproduction and translation of newspapers and other texts written in Hawaiian at the time of the overthrow of the Hawaiian government and the U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i. Unlike many other Pacific Island countries, where the majority population is indigenous and their languages remain the national languages, New Zealand Maoris and native Hawaiians have had to work to resurrect their native languages in order to challenge colonial history and produce a literature reflecting native concerns and perspectives. 4. “[T]he dominant ideology promotes somewhat anti-collectivist sentiments with



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increasing focus upon the advancement of the individual, based upon the capacity to pay within a free market context. Such an orientation, driven not by the democratic impulse, but by economic considerations, is alien to the orientation of Pacific societies and is potentially dangerous to their future as distinct cultural groups. . . . Many foreign consultants lack an understanding of the cultural contexts in which curriculum development and implementation is undertaken” (Thaman 1993a: 253). 5. Manulani Meyer interviewed twenty native Hawaiian educators working to inscribe native ways of creating and evaluating knowledge into the new curricula of the Hawaiian charter school movement, which began in 1999 with the goal of having native Hawaiian educators provide a successful school system for (primarily) native Hawaiian children. Among those indigenous educators are teachers of hula, chanting, lei-making, navigation, and care of the land. Meyer argues that an articulated Hawaiian epistemology will “highlight the hidden curriculum of assimilation and the acultural assumptions in pedagogy that exist in Hawai‘i’s colonial schools” (2001: 148). Ah Nee-Benham and Heck (1998) concur with this view and contend that between annexation and statehood in Hawai‘i, the political goal of Americanization “was translated into educational policies that had as their goal the acculturation of Native Hawaiians and other ethnic children into a social order demanding English speech, adherence to U.S. social and political ideals, and industrious labor in their assigned jobs” (1998: 172). Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo argue that the way to knowledge in West Kwara‘ae, Malaita, Solomon Islands, is based in the interpretations of sensory information paralleling what Meyer finds in Hawai‘i and what other indigenous scholars find elsewhere in the Pacific. The Kwara‘ae Genealogy Project seeks to define indigenous knowledge and therefore is run not by scholars trained abroad but by a group of rural villagers who want to clearly delineate indigenous from introduced epistemic frameworks. Part of the motivation of such native projects stems from years of feeling exploited and misunderstood by outsiders who study local culture and by the “massive failure of Anglo-European-designed development in West Kwara‘ae since the 1960s” (Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 2001: 65). 6. Mageo sees this cultural change as central to a crisis in contemporary gender relations and girls’ sexuality. With the Christian disapproval of informal marriages and of culturally governed areas for sexual expression, female sexual flaunting (fa‘alialia) became a forbidden and violently punished act. When the missionaries made sharp distinctions between formal marriage and elopement and between legitimate and illegitimate children, it became disadvantageous for even low-status families to have their daughters elope, and the policing of daughters’ sexuality was extended from designated high-status girls to all the girls of the village (1998: 55). 7. As Mageo describes the social role of the fa‘afafine: “If boys’ ula [teasing] is likely to turn upon the fact that they are not women in the biological sense, women’s ula is likely to turn upon the fact that they are not girls in the anatomical sense. Fa‘afafine’s ula turns upon the fact that they are neither women nor girls, by ironically signaling that they are

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both. If the fa‘afafine’s humor has a contrapuntal character, so does her role: it is sisterly in form, but its content is all woman” (1992: 452). 8. Besnier (2002) points out that gender liminality was well documented in Tahiti and Hawai‘i in part, he suggests, because the British Royal Navy that landed in Tahiti in the late 1700s was preoccupied with repressing and punishing sodomy; he also asserts that “the absence of historical documentation on gender liminality in Western Polynesia does not necessarily mean that it is a postcontact phenomenon” (1994: 294).

Chapter 3

“Licentiousness has slain its hundreds of thousands” The Missionary Discourse of Sex, Death, and Disease in Nineteenth-century Hawai‘i

Virginia Metaxas Ke Akua Bless this land And the people who love this land Aloha ‘āina

I

n 1838 American missionary physician Gerrit Parmele Judd published the medical textbook Anatomia, 1838 at the Lahainaluna Missionary Seminary, with the purpose of using the book to train native healers in western medicine.1 Nearly twenty years since the abolition of the kapu system and the establishment of Christianity by New England missionaries, and reeling from the deaths caused by newly introduced infectious diseases, Hawaiians perceived that their world was about to collapse. The very appearance of Anatomia, 1838 marked a major challenge to centuries of Hawaiian cultural and religious beliefs and practices about health, disease, and healing. As Figure 3.1 vividly demonstrates, to use this medical textbook meant internalizing western and Christian views of the body, medicine, and healing, but this was nevertheless an option that many Hawaiian students and would-be healers took. The position of the human skeleton depicted there was fitting: imperialism, in all its cultural, political, and economic manifestations, killed and otherwise severely diminished the lives of Hawaiians, bringing many to their knees in prayer.2 Desperate times called for desperate measures. In the sixty years following the first contact with westerners in 1778, traditional healers (kahuna) had failed to cope with the newly introduced diseases continuously plaguing Native Hawaiians. By the late 1830s, the devastating effects of epidemic after epidemic pushed Native Hawaiians into uneasy yet significant relationships with western physi-

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Figure 3.1. Genuflecting skeleton from Anatomia, 1838.

cians in which both sides tried to find effective ways to care for the physical and spiritual well-being of the sick and dying. Judd, a physician and also a Protestant minister who lived on the islands since 1828, served as a messenger from the west and a significant instrument of change in this difficult and mournful time in Hawaiian history. The publication of Dr. Judd’s book is just one piece of evidence showing tran-



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sition in a period of contested authority in the matter of Hawaiian health and disease. Other English-language texts reveal explanations of the tragic population losses in Hawai‘i. In 1838–1839, for example, a series of articles appeared in the missionary-sponsored English-language newspaper The Hawaiian Spectator in which authors noted and emphasized the “uncivilized” and “depraved” habits of the “native heathen” as primary causes of death.3 A vigorous discourse on “civilization,” pointing in particular to gender and race, argued that Native Hawaiians died by the thousands because of their refusal to commit to Christian moral behavior and western medicine. Kauka (western physicians) and kahuna struggled between western and native medical ideas and practices in the context of growing political, economic, and cultural American hegemonic power in nineteenthcentury Hawai‘i. This analysis fits into the stream of historical interpretation asserting that nineteenth-century America fully engaged in imperialist ventures against native peoples. While American expansion, or what is sometimes called Manifest Destiny, spread across native lands in the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and the Spanish Southwest, it also included taking over lands and cultures beyond the continental borders.4 In many of these evolving nineteenth-century imperialist projects, Protestant and Catholic missionaries set out to “civilize” the “primitive” peoples. In Hawai‘i, missionaries served as the ideological vanguards of imperialism, influencing shifting world views on issues such as land ownership, the legal system, and governance.5 Working with western physicians, missionaries influenced change in precontact ideas and practices surrounding health, illness, and healing in Hawai‘i, beginning with attempts to manage the body and sexuality, both considered vital elements to the civilizing process (Merry 2000: 228–230). As in colonial ventures in other parts of the world, that meant the existence of an ongoing conflict between western medicine and science and “Orientalist” representations of Hawaiian climate, peoples, and cultures.6 Using a variety of English-language sources, this chapter focuses on the 1830s as a moment in which a troubled and overtaxed traditional Hawaiian medical system began to consider and incorporate western medicine. I approach this study of nineteenth-century epidemics and the shifting paradigms of medical ideas and practice as a social historian, interested in the ways people experienced, interpreted, and acted against the seemingly inevitable power of disease and death. My examination reveals the ways that missionary or western-influenced English writers framed explanations of this population disaster in terms of gender and race, and how ideas about disease and healing were transformed under nineteenth-century American imperialist influence. In part, a flurry of attention about the problem of the native population decline occurred in the late 1830s because of alarming results found in census studies con-

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ducted by missionaries.7 One taken in 1838 showed that the native population had declined dramatically from the estimated original 400,000 people living in Hawai‘i at the time of first contact (Bishop 1838: 53).8 Another report showed a sharp and rapid population drop between the years 1832 and 1836, which cited a loss of nearly 20,000 people that left roughly a total of 110,000 living Native Hawaiians (Chapin 1838: 262). Nineteenth-century missionaries argued that the Hawaiians had to be “civilized” in order to stem the tide of death, yet they seemed to minimize the fact that the introduction of new diseases from the so-called civilized world had caused the deaths in the first place. Recent scholarship, on the other hand, emphasizes the fact that it was the very “gifts of civilization,” which included syphilis, smallpox, measles, mumps, influenza, tuberculosis, cholera, leprosy, and numerous other infectious diseases, as well as the introduction of alcohol, which caused the genocide of Native Hawaiians (Bushnell 1993).

Ka Moolelo Hawaii Most nineteenth-century sources placed little if any blame on foreigners for the introduction of diseases and the subsequent population decline. One early source that discussed the population decline and adduced reasons for it is an 1838 Lahainaluna Missionary Seminary textbook entitled Ka Moolelo Hawaii (Hawaiian History).9 The book, a collection of essays written by Lahainaluna students and edited by the school’s principal, Rev. Sheldon Dibble, presented important events in Hawaiian history. Some of the essays promoted what we now understand as a distorted set of myths, such as the story that Capt. James Cook was mistakenly identified by the natives as the Hawaiian god Lono.10 Ten of the school’s best students gathered material for the book by interviewing knowledgeable elders (kupuna), using questions structured by Dibble (Arista 1998: 97–98). Two students, David Malo and Samuel M. Kamakau, later became important writers of Hawaiian history. Their works were translated, edited, and published in such classics as Hawaiian Antiquities, Ka Poe Kahiko: The People of Old, and Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii (1991b), although recent scholarship has pointed out the serious limitations of relying totally on these texts rather than the original Hawaiian sources (Nogelmeier 2003; Silva 2004). The Lahainaluna School book was at best an early attempt to create a written history of Hawai‘i, a way of preserving in writing the oral traditions of Hawaiian culture. It is also important to understand that since the student writers were converted Christians, the essays often took a decidedly moralistic missionary perspective on many of the issues addressed. In a chapter on the population decline and low birth rate, four major causes were discussed, and these put most of the responsibility on Hawaiians and their behavior (Dibble 1984: 232–233). The first cause was the indiscriminate killing of Hawaiians by other Hawaiians in warfare. Here the text refers to the internecine



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conflicts between various chiefs in the years prior to the unification of the Hawaiian kingdom under King Kamehameha. The second cause was said to be the early nineteenth-century “pestilence” (typhoid fever) known as the “squatting disease,” which attacked and killed vast numbers of Hawaiians, making it impossible for the community to adequately care for itself during the 1804 epidemic and for years to come (Stannard 1997: 302). The third cause accused women of intentionally killing their children because they felt children were “a burden” and interfered “with [Hawaiian women’s] life of fun.” According to the reasoning here, the women did not like the effects of “frequent pregnancy on their physical appearance,” they “feared” pregnancy, and perhaps performed infanticide to avoid the wrath of husbands angry at the alleged “promiscuous living on the part of their wives.” These passages cruelly trivialize the situation of Hawaiian women, who may or may not have considered abortion or infanticide in such desperate times. Such assessments were also representative of a widespread nineteenth-century racially specific discourse about “savagery” that also accused Hawaiians of cannibalism. The final cause given for the population decline was the spread of syphilis, “the greatest problem of all.” It was “the terrible disease which affected the women [of Hawai‘i] as a result of their promiscuous visits to the vessels [of foreign sailors],” causing thousands of Hawaiians to suffer painful disease, infertility, and death (Dibble 1984: 233). If, in fact, venereal disease was as widespread as early nineteenth-century observers claim, then intentionally ending the life of a child born to an infected mother may have been a humane act, but it is more likely that the natural effects of the disease on a pregnant woman resulted in miscarriage or stillborn death without human intervention. Indeed, there is no proof of any intentional killing of children. One leading scholar interprets the nineteenth-century charge of infanticide as historical misrepresentation in the form of “fables of savagery.” In the words of David Stannard: If ever there was a time in Hawai‘i’s history when large-scale infanticide was likely to have occurred—or when a generally low birth rate and high infant mortality rate was likely to be mistaken by foreign visitors for widespread infanticide—it was during those four or five decades immediately following the arrival of Europeans when Hawaiian women were giving birth to thousands of terribly deformed, diseased and dying infants. Still, despite these ideal conditions for even the appearance of an outbreak of infanticide, there is not a single first-hand historical account suggesting widespread infanticide during this time—and there is first-hand and other evidence that infanticide as a common practice did not exist either in 1803 [that is, in the middle of the post-1778/pre-missionary period], at the time of Western contact in 1778–79, or earlier. (1991: 397–398)

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Outlining the rejection of motherhood and the alleged promiscuous sexual behavior of native women in the way that Ka Moolelo Hawaii did reveals more about promotion of the missionary agenda than about causes of the low birth rate and population decline in the Hawaiian community. But these explanations may have appealed to many Hawaiians who may not have fully followed the missionary belief system, yet wanted to do whatever was needed to stop the deaths. Given the fact that anyone living in Hawai‘i in the nineteenth century could not help but notice the decline of large families and the small numbers of Hawaiian children to survive past the age of two (Bishop 1838: 54), many may have begun to absorb and internalize this judgmental Christian view of the sexual history of Hawaiians, eventually deciding to reject the more open, traditional Hawaiian attitudes towards sex (Merry 2000: 221–258). In the minds of many, if having sex meant contracting venereal disease, and if sex equaled disease and death, then curbing sexual behavior made sense.

Missionary Wives’ Accounts Even missionary wives chimed into the conversation in the late 1830s, in their Maternal Association meetings, where they discussed ways to keep their children safe from influence by their “heathen” Hawaiian charges (Grimshaw 1989a, 1989b). Fearful for the souls and bodies of their own young children, they forbade any verbal and social interaction with the “natives,” implementing and enforcing what they called a “non-intercourse principle.” Separating their children from playing with, speaking to, or communicating in any way with Native Hawaiians severely limited and complicated relationships between the missionaries and the natives, who lived and worked side by side on a daily basis.11 Realizing that missionary wives often taught their native charges, in and outside of school classrooms, and provided “good Christian family” models, it was problematic to keep the doors of their family compounds closed, as one missionary wife did when she built walls around the yard so that her children were kept in and natives out (Zweip 1991: 235–268; Merry 2000: 240). In May 1840, one missionary expressed difficulty in enforcing the rule, since “there was so much danger of creating the feeling in the minds of the natives that they were unwelcome guests.” She feared having the natives possibly “becoming prejudiced against their teachers.”12 One woman said it was nearly impossible to separate her household from the natives since they “must come for medicine and if they could not find [the doctor] elsewhere would proceed to the bedroom and nursery in search of him.”13 Another missionary wife described a native Hawaiian’s emotional reaction to the severity of the non-intercourse principle when she said:



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when she first made known to the natives that she prohibited intercourse between her children and themselves and that she expected obedience on the part of her children they laughed and said that filial obedience was never heard of in their land. But afterwards when they saw the plan . . . progressing, they shed tears at the contrast between the missionary children and their own.14

All these sources betray the missionaries’ profound sense of ambivalence about the Native Hawaiians. On the one hand, missionaries seemed truly sorrowful for the deaths of Native Hawaiians, particularly those with whom they had established relationships. They were especially concerned when unconverted native friends and acquaintances died, for they believed their unrepentant souls as well as their bodies lost forever. On the other hand, fear about disease and contempt for the “moral inferiority” of their native charges dominated their minds, stymied their ambition to “bring light to the heathen,” and filled life in Hawai‘i with unknown dangers to their own bodies and souls. Certainly the possibility of sexual contact between Native Hawaiians and the next generation of missionary children, raised to adulthood in Hawai‘i, had to be avoided at all costs—which social segregation helped ensure.

Mo‘olelo Kahuna La‘au Lapa‘au (The History of Native Hawaiian Healers) Long before contact with westerners, Hawaiians had a well-established system in which health and healing were based upon what Nanette L. Kapulani Mossman Judd called “a holistic view of the universe that shaped concepts of wellness and illness, and of life and death” (1997: 37). Traditional Hawaiian mo‘olelo (histories) are filled with stories and metaphors that speak of the relationship of humans to natural forces, and of the delicate physical and spiritual balance known as pono, which defines health.15 Archeological and anthropological evidence points to the fact that this holistic philosophy of health and healing can be traced back to ancient Hawaiian times, as well as to a long history of good health and athleticism.16 For centuries, several kinds of medical kahuna practiced healing in Hawai‘i; they specialized in areas such as delivering and caring for babies, diagnosing by touch or vision, setting bones, or making and administering plant medicines. Prayer was central to their practice, which points to a recognition of the need for spiritual and corporal balance in order to achieve good health (D. Bray 1959). Kupuna (elders) whom Nanette Judd interviewed explained contemporary kanaka (Native Hawaiian) attitudes towards health, saying, “[W]ellness is the result of a

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balanced relationship between oneself, the spiritual world, the environment, and other human beings” (Judd 1997: 66).

The Hawaiian Spectator American missionaries and physicians living in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i never understood the Hawaiian medical system as rational or worthy; they thought it as primitive as were the Hawaiians who practiced it. Several articles published during the years 1838–1839 in the short-lived missionary-dominated newspaper The Hawaiian Spectator articulated such attitudes. Rev. Artemas Bishop, for example, remarked how sad it was to see the “barbarous or semi-barbarous” people of Hawai‘i, “an ignorant and debased people destitute of the means of subsistence and the arts of civilized life . . . rapidly verging to annihilation.” These observations awakened in him “feelings of unmingled pity and regret.” Noticing that there were a large number of childless families in the Hawaiian community, he found biblical reasons to explain the problem, saying: “the blessing pronounced upon our first parents, ‘be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth,’” was not possible among the Hawaiians, who had “degenerated into universal depravity and irreligion” (1838: 52). He continued: Licentiousness has slain its hundreds of thousands. These islands, like [others] in the Pacific, were inhabited, at the time of their discovery, by a people of loose and licentious manners, but free from disease. This trait in their character formed the magazine of combustibles, to which the match only needed to be applied, and the conflagration followed.

By the time Bishop made these remarks, he realized that the spread of venereal disease had “cut down in early life” thousands of young children, destroyed the procreative powers of Hawaiian women, and swept away at least half of the population. “One only need look with an observant eye,” he said, “and be in the habit of administering medicine for a few years to the pitiable objects about him, to become fully advertised of the fact here stated” (61). Bishop made interesting and nuanced arguments about the question, “why barbarous nations, when coming into contact with civilization, have uniformly melted away before its withering influence, so that, after a few generations, it is said of them, ‘They were, but are not.’” Was it “the fault of barbarism that it could not endure the blaze of civilization?” No, he reasoned: “It is not civilization, but civilized vices that wither the savage. He drinks into them like water, without knowing that their attendant diseases are cutting the tendrils of his heart and drawing away his life’s blood.” In the case of the Hawaiians, and their



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contact with the “vices of civilization,” sex and alcohol were the primary problems (58–59). Bishop’s colleague, Alonzo Chapin, M.D. and resident missionary, similarly emphasized sexual behavior as a primary cause of death. But in contrast to some of his contemporaries, he placed blame equally on the civilizers and the uncivilized. Chapin described detailed observations on venereal disease in the islands, agreeing with Bishop that precontact Hawaiians “ever had lived in the practice of promiscuous and almost unrestrained sexual intercourse.” But unlike people in “all civilized countries,” where venereal diseases had been present for centuries, precontact Hawaiians had been spared the “consequences which follow the licentiousness in all civilized countries.” He had to admit that those who “discovered” the islands must also receive “the credit of having introduced among these islanders two of the vilest and most loathsome diseases ever sent as a punishment for transgression”—syphilis and gonorrhea (1838: 257). He complained bitterly that most of the natives refused to receive treatment for venereal disease by foreign physicians, even though “the natives possess, among themselves, no curative means which will control it” (258). In general, Chapin characterized the “medical views and practices” of Native Hawaiians as “absurdities of the most ridiculous, and often dangerous” kind. Even though he judged at least some of the native medicines to have some “value,” if skillfully employed, he concluded that such drugs were used without “principle or judgment” and were “often the means of irremediable injury” (262). In his view, four products of civilization caused the population decline: venereal disease; the introduction of alcoholic liquors; the use of tobacco; and a large quantity of foreign commodities, all of which contributed to “new and superfluous wants” that “destroyed the native character,” making them an “artificial and degenerate race” (263–264). Infantilizing Native Hawaiians, Chapin believed that his charges did not have the maturity, personal integrity, or discipline to resist any excesses. Even though he thought “the introduction of Christianity” would “exert its usual benign influence,” he predicted the complete disappearance of “the native inhabitants” in a few more years (262). David Malo, the well-known Native Hawaiian writer and chronicler of Hawaiian history, wrote about the problem of the population decline in this series of newspaper articles as well as in the Lahainaluna history textbook (1839: 121–130). His article must be read as a missionary tract as well because of his close involvement with the school and because the article was “translated” by the Protestant missionary Lorrin Andrews, even though Malo spoke and wrote in English perfectly well by this time. Malo was born in 1795, raised in Hawaiian religious and cultural traditions, and became, as one recent scholar put it, “a counselor of chiefs [serving them]

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through the coming of Christianity and the transformation of the kingdom to a constitutional monarchy” (Arista 1998: vi). Malo converted to Christianity and attended Lahainaluna School between 1831 and 1835. He was sent there by the Hawaiian chiefess Ka‘ahumanu, who believed that a Christian education would better prepare him for his role as counselor to the ali‘i (chiefs). Because Malo was in his thirties when he attended the school, he was much respected by his fellow students—and his instructors realized his potential as an important messenger to the Hawaiian people and ali‘i. Malo’s skills at preserving traditional Hawaiian society while at the same time embracing Christianity and reconciling both traditions to changing times proved invaluable on several occasions from the 1820s to the 1840s (Arista 1998: viii–ix). Malo’s particular interest in the role of Hawaiian women in the population decline may have been piqued by his involvement in the so-called Buckle Incident, which was related to missionary attempts to end prostitution in Lahaina, the largest nineteenth-century whaling port in the Pacific. In 1825, Malo’s friend Rev. William Richards convinced the acting governor of Maui, Hoapili, to prohibit prostitution. British whaling captain William Buckle refused to follow what he considered to be “missionary law,” and let his men go ashore to search for prostitutes. Upon failure to procure what they sought, the frustrated and angry sailors found, surrounded, and attacked the missionary Richards. Lucky for him, Richards was saved by some Hawaiians who held the sailors back. Later Richards was sued for libel after a letter describing the situation and criticizing Buckle found its way into publication in a London newspaper. Malo got involved with the incident when he provided counsel to the ali‘i making a legal decision on the case. The experience also convinced Malo of the serious danger prostitution and its accompanying evil venereal disease posed to his people (Arista 1998: 70–77; Merry 2000: 242–244). The article Malo published in The Hawaiian Spectator about the population decline reads more like a dialogue than one author’s analysis of the situation. Lorrin Andrews, Malo’s former teacher and the “translator” of the article, made footnote comments about Malo’s interpretation of events throughout the article. Compared with Bishop’s or Chapin’s articles in the same series, Malo’s voice differed in the sense that he was reaching out to his fellow Native Hawaiians. He spoke as someone who was attempting to bridge from old Hawaiian ways to new circumstances; specifically, he tried to reconcile Christianity with traditional Hawaiian beliefs. Andrews, however, wanted to educate a worldwide audience about conditions in Hawai‘i. Andrews set the tone in the very first footnote when he introduced Malo to the reading audience as a “native of these islands” who was well connected to the chiefs and knowledgeable about Hawai‘i’s government (1839: 121). Andrews obviously felt an obligation to justify Malo’s credentials to the reading public, and he even went on to say that “it is to be hoped that the time will soon come when Hawai-



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ians shall be permitted to speak of themselves in their own way.” Yet throughout the article, he could not stop himself from contradicting, supporting, or explicating Malo’s writing in his running commentary (Arista 1998: 101–110). Malo devoted much of his discussion to historical reasons for population loss before the appearance of outsiders, which in some ways supported the contemporary discourse of “civilization.” Malo referred to ancient times when the “ignorance of the people and the barbarity of the times” dictated a lack of ability to “manage the affairs of the kingdom, the cultivation of land, and the comforts of life.” He criticized the old ways, in which the people “yielded . . . to the implicit authority of their chiefs,” who sometimes led the people the wrong way. He clearly sought to modify relationships between ordinary Hawaiian commoners (maka‘ainana) and their ali‘i. Andrews attempted to enlarge the context by commenting: “The above is a graphic description of the situation of rulers of nations; for it is not peculiar to the Hawaiian government. History informs us . . . of a similar state of things in most governments, from the time of Solomon to the present period” (1839: 122). Drawing on his missionary education, and in concert with his colleagues, Malo listed several “barbaric” causes for the diminution of the people in ancient times, including war, murder for personal gain, theft, human sacrifice to false gods, and indolence. He also perpetuated the myth of native women performing infanticide, saying that they “pierced their unborn children, and thus many a child was destroyed before it was born” (1839: 123). Like the other Hawaiian Spectator writers, however, he also held foreigners accountable for bringing venereal disease to Hawai‘i: “Because of the licentious habits of such foreigners, contracted perhaps in other countries, they came here polluted with a filthy disease, and they have thus polluted with a filthy disease the females of Hawaii” (1839: 128). Unlike any other English-speaking writers, Malo raised the issue of the role of Hawaiian men’s sexual behavior and its relationship to the problem of the population decline. Malo criticized Hawaiian men who, due to economic hardship, left the islands for other places instead of staying home to marry and procreate. He spoke of Hawaiian men who returned from foreign places, married young women, and “spen[t] without economy,” which forced them to leave again, sometimes abandoning their wives for years. Some wandering husbands returned infected with venereal disease, passed it to their unsuspecting wives, and eventually abandoned them to “become confirmed in licentiousness” (1839: 127–128). Echoing Bishop’s religiosity, and drawing on his own experience with the Buckle Incident, Malo said: “Foreigners have lent their whole influence (hooikaika loa) to make the Hawaiian islands one great brothel. For this cause, God is angry, and he is diminishing the people, and they are nigh unto desolation” (1839: 128). Malo wrapped up with a general criticism of the Hawaiian ali‘i, whom he held responsible for much of the difficulty in which the people found themselves.

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In his self-defined role as a Christian kahuna pule (minister), he determined to educate the people and his ali‘i, urging them to obey God’s commandments (Arista 1998: 90). He wrote: From the steadfast adherence of the chiefs to the things they desire, many evils have sprung up with the present generation, the people and chiefs are fully bent (lilo loa) on following their own inclinations, and do not heartily assent to obey the will of God. They do not heartily consent to follow the laws of God, nor do they wish to obey his commandments, nor yield to his prohibitions, but they are in a great measure given to the pleasures of sense. . . . On account of the magnitude of these evils which have come upon the kingdom, the kingdom is sick, it is reduced to a skeleton, and is near to death; yea, the whole Hawaiian nation is near to a close. (1839: 130)

Expressing desperation, Malo tried to understand the overwhelming incidence of death around him and sought ways to prevent its continuation. He reiterated his internalized missionary sentiment and ideology in his final conclusions: In recapitulation, let the principal of [the causes] stand thus: 1. The illicit intercourse of Hawaiian females with foreigners. 2. The sloth and indolence of the people at the present time. 3. The disobedience of the chiefs and people to the revealed will of God. Therefore this diminishing of the people will not cease; but if the nation should be regenerated, and these evils should cease; then would the nation escape if a reformation of morals should take place, and the kingdom should be renewed, then would it escape destruction. (1839: 130)

Anatomia, 1838 The blending of Christian language and thought with the discourse of “civilization” appears in Dr. Judd’s book Anatomia, 1838 as well. It was originally published by the mission press of the Lahainaluna Seminary to “explain the nature of the human body” to students. The book begins with a rationale of western medicine that was explicitly tied to Christian faith and critical of traditional Hawaiian medicine: From ancient times in enlightened countries, many people pursued the study of anatomy. They looked carefully at the bones. They cut open a large number of corpses, carefully examined the intestines so as to know the nature of everything that the eyes saw. Much of it is understood at the present time. And so, enlightened people practiced the wisdom of God, the one who made and indeed put and kept in order the extraordinary things in their bodies. The ungodly cannot say, “there is no



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God” because they witnessed him through his great work. Here is another excellent thing that came from their research: they discovered the nature of diseases and pain. They knew medicines. The experts of medicines today are very skillful, not like those of the past. Jesus and the miracle workers, helped by God, were the only ones most skilled in administering medicine. (2003: 9)

The book’s author, Gerrit P. Judd, came to Hawai‘i in 1828 with the Third Company of American Protestant missionaries, along with Lorrin Andrews. He was the only missionary physician in the islands at that time. He and his wife, Laura Fish Judd, learned the Hawaiian language quickly, and Dr. Judd filled three roles—teaching, preaching, and practicing medicine among the missionaries and in the Native Hawaiian community. By the time he had spent ten years in the islands, his medical work had become so overwhelming that he wrote to the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM) in Boston for help. He also commissioned Native Hawaiians to assist him in his work. Judd wanted to teach as many willing students as possible. He even taught his fellow missionaries, stationed all over the islands, the basics of medical treatment to be applied to their own families as well as to Native Hawaiians. Judd wrote to the ABCFM to ask for medical supplies and books, so that every mission station would have the necessary materials to practice medicine. By 1835 Boston had ordered Judd to prepare an anatomy book for the Lahainaluna students. By 1837, the school had sent a request for a teacher of sciences, including medicine, to educate native students at the school. The missionaries hoped native graduates would help to displace the authority of native healers, considered superstitious quacks by the missionaries. Their request for a teacher was denied approval until further notice, but a book, Anatomia, 1838, did appear (Mookini, in Judd 2003: 2–4). Judd based his book on an English medical textbook written by Jerome Smith, M.D., originally published in Boston in 1834.17 Until recently, most scholars assumed that Judd copied sections verbatim. In fact, he tailored Anatomia, 1838 to his Hawaiian audience. In Smith’s introduction, for example, the body was described as a machine, reflecting notions of western Enlightenment philosophy and industrialization—something with which Judd’s audience could not relate. Smith also spoke of the triumph of science and its progress in lengthening the human life span. This, too, contradicted Hawaiian recent experience dramatically and could not possibly have been included in Judd’s version. We can compare Smith’s introduction, below, with Judd’s above: From remote antiquity, men of learning and persevering industry have labored to comprehend and explain the complicated machinery of man, but at no period has the subject been better understood than at the present. By the study of this science,

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the condition of the species has been ameliorated; extreme sufferings have been avoided; and in the aggregate, human life has been prolonged. (Trapp 2002a: 125)

Judd chose to challenge certain Hawaiian cultural practices in the book, such as the shaping of infants’ heads. In Smith’s book, the section on the head is brief and to the point: “There are fifty-five bones entering into the composition of the head, by including thirty-two teeth” (Trapp 2002a: 133). Judd’s version is more descriptive, including a discussion of the ways that God made all heads slightly different from one another, and how although “it is an important thing in unenlightened nations to change the natural form of the heads of their children and reshape them,” he suggested that Hawaiians follow the practice of parents in “enlightened lands, [where] people leave the heads of their children alone, because it was by the grace of God that made them” (2003: 12). Judd also tried to challenge a Hawaiian social practice related to dental health. Hawaiians often knocked out their teeth as an expression of deep grief (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee 1972, vol. 1: 133). Judd tried to stop this practice, gently pleading with his readers to “leave [the teeth] alone quietly just where they were planted by God.” But if there was “pain and perhaps the tooth is shaking,” then he approved of extraction (2003: 22). Judd’s book contained twenty-six pages of explanation on bones—their names, function, and development—and seven copper engravings of the skeletal system. Receiving this scientific and reductionist information must have challenged his Hawaiian students’ beliefs regarding bones (iwi), which were seen as the repository of one’s spirit and the link to one’s past and future. Many Hawaiian words contain the word iwi, such as the word ‘ōiwi, meaning native son or daughter, or kula iwi (literally “land of bones”) meaning birthplace, or iwi kua mo‘o, meaning backbone or close relative (Pukui, Haertig, and Lee 1972, vol. 1: 112). Early twentieth-century interpreter and translator of Hawaiian culture Mary Kawena Pukui explains, “[T]he bones of the dead were guarded, respected, treasured, venerated, loved or even deified by relatives; coveted and despoiled by enemies” (vol. 1: 107). The misuse of the skull, the home of the spirit, or any other desecration of human bones prevented the spirit from joining its aumakua (god) (vol. 1: 108–109). Continued research into Hawaiian-language sources can shed light on what Native Hawaiians may have thought of the western medical ideas embedded in Judd’s book. The late 1830s marks the beginning of an exchange of ideas among missionaries or missionary-influenced English speakers who were attempting to confront the terrible history of loss among the Hawaiian people. While there is evidence of cooperation between American physicians and a small percentage of native healers who wished to learn western medicine, most care remained in the hands of Hawaiian medical kahuna. And the people kept dying, no matter what kind of medicine was used.



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Missionary Reports Missionary disdain for a sustained native resistance against western medicine can be found in missionary station records. Several references to western medicine appear ten years after the publication of Judd’s book in 1838, when missionaries witnessed the deaths of at least 10,000 Hawaiians in a series of epidemics of diarrhea, influenza, measles, and whooping cough. Writing an annual report to his missionary colleagues in April 1849, Reverend Bishop of Ewa expressed frustration at his many failures. He could not stop the deaths of the Native Hawaiians. He could not convince them to turn to western medicine, even though he had at least one native practitioner administering it. He had failed to convince Native Hawaiians to convert to Christian religion and ways of life, and he had failed to “civilize” the Native Hawaiians, who were rapidly disappearing before his very eyes.18 In view of all this, Bishop’s next comment spoke of his overriding concern about his diminishing flock. He complained that at least one-quarter of his congregation was “missing” due to death, lingering illness, and religious apathy. Saying he had not lost all hope, he declared there was still much work to do and many souls to save “through [our] instrumentality,” but that the work had to be done “quickly.”19 The missionaries were convinced that the way to health was through Christian conversion and that to reject conversion meant certain death. Indeed, one might argue that the missionaries’ spiritual or religious epidemiology of disease and death was perhaps not so distant from traditional Hawaiian beliefs that physical health is directly tied to relationships with gods and spirits. Bishop’s missionary colleague Pastor Titus Coan in Hilo, for example, explained the widespread death scenes he witnessed in the 1840s as punishment for the failure of the Hawaiian people to surrender to the power of his Christian God. The angel of the Lord has passed through the land with his drawn sword and the nation has been decimated. We have seen the affecting spectacle of a whole people prostrated at once by pestilence, like a forest before a mighty tempest, and our ears have heard the startling death-wail coming up from every hamlet of the land, while the angel of vengeance was destroying all our coasts. . . . [W]e seem to read the design of God to remove and blot out this people from the earth and from under these heavens; a truth [by] . . . which the nations and the tribes that violate these laws shall gradually perish till they are utterly wasted.20

Similarly, missionary J. S. Emerson explained the deaths by citing the failure of the Hawaiians to adopt the Christian religion and civilized ways. From his Waialua Station he reported that the deaths of baptized children were fewer than those of

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unbaptized children. “This fact,” he said, “speaks loudly as to the reason for the great mortality among native children.”21

Conclusions These English-language texts illustrate the perspective of Christian missionaries, western physicians, and a converted Hawaiian at a time in Hawaiian history when many people tried to understand the overwhelming number of deaths among the native people of the islands. Relying on these sources does not tell us, however, what unconverted Native Hawaiians were saying and doing, except in indirect ways. We can conclude that a small percentage of Hawaiians agreed to consider western and Christian ways of fighting against disease. We can also see that the missionaries began to make inroads into changing traditional Hawaiian attitudes towards the body and medicine. But overall, although Dr. Judd trained a small number of Native Hawaiians to western medicine, traditional healers held ground for decades, even while some of the trappings of western medicine took hold. By 1850 the Hawaiian government had established a Board of Health, which helped to gain control, at least to some degree, over the entry of infectious diseases by ship. The Board of Health also managed to institute some measures of prevention and sanitation in the port cities. By the late 1860s the Board of Health began to license medical practitioners, both kauka and kahuna, who continued their uneasy and conflicted dispute for authority in Hawaiian medicine. By the end of the nineteenth century, the status and authority of healing kahuna slowly but surely declined. Western medical practitioners, both haole (Caucasian) and kanaka (Native Hawaiian), gained more credence in their insistence that western scientific medicine was superior to traditional healing methods. As the socalled “civilizing” project ripped its way through nineteenth century Hawai‘i, and as more and more Hawaiians converted to Christianity and adopted western medicine, traditional medical practices were largely rejected and abandoned. Indeed, by 1900 most practicing kahuna were forced to go underground—but fortunately for future generations much of their knowledge was not lost. Today there is a new respect for the holistic practices of these traditional healers. And it is in their honor that I dedicate this chapter.

Notes Many thanks to librarians, archivists, friends, and colleagues who provided support and advice during the spring of 2003 when I participated in the Rockefeller Fellowship Program at the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Special thanks



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to Kekuni Blaisdell, Lynette Cruz, Laurel (Seeti) Douglass, Barbara Dunn, Kathy Ferguson, Tuti Kanahele, Kehaulani Kauanui, Sally Merry, Monique Mironesco, James Nakapaahu, Marilyn L. Reppun, Mari Yoshihara, and the students in the American Studies Graduate Seminar on Race and Class in America. I also wish to thank unknown peer reviewers and members of the Southern Connecticut State University History Department reading group, Polly Beals, David Bello, Nikos Chrissidis, Bruce Kalk, Troy Paddock, and Michelle Thompson, for their challenging comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. This book was reprinted with the Hawaiian text translated into English by Esther T. Mookini; see Judd, Anatomia, 1838 (2003). Hawaiian-language scholars are currently working on the original text; see Trapp (2002a and b). The Lahainaluna Seminary was originally founded in 1831 as the first high school in the islands to train native schoolteachers. Its name was changed to Lahainaluna Seminary from Lahainaluna High School in 1837. See the Introduction to Anatomia, 1838 by Mookini (1–6) for more background on the school. 2. Dr. Judd’s Anatomia, 1838 is an abbreviated and edited version of a medical textbook written by Boston physician Dr. Jerome V. C. Smith, originally published in 1834. The illustration of the skeleton in the prayer position (Plate VII) appears in Smith’s textbook as Figure 30, and the pose of the skeleton is explained as follows: “Having completed a general description of all the individual bones and exhibited some of the principal ligaments of the limbs, the object of this third drawing of an entire skeleton is, first, to give a side view of the parts adverted to in the foregoing pages, without letters or references to deface the engraving, or to perplex the mind. The peculiar attitude of the figure was given it by the artist, merely because a larger sized drawing could thus be given in a little space.” I have not been able to locate an extant copy of Dr. Smith’s original 1834 edition. This explanation of the skeletal image is taken from Smith (1848: 48). 3. See Bishop (1838); Chapin (1838); and Malo (1839); all are available in microfilm, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. 4. For a sample of scholarship on American imperialism, see Jacobson (2000); Hobsbawn (1987); Drinnon (1980). 5. See these works for the ways that missionaries influenced the colonizing process: Merry (2000); Kame‘eleihiwa (1992); and Osorio (2002). 6. See Said (1979). An excellent discussion of Britain’s colonization of medicine in India can be found in Arnold (1993). 7. Mission stations on all the major inhabited islands had been established by the 1830s, and every year each station sent reports to Honolulu that included birth and death statistics. Stannard (1997) makes the point that such close enumeration of population did not exist in North America until centuries after western contact, thus limiting our knowledge of native population decline on the continent in the early years of settlement. 8. The exact number of Native Hawaiians existing on the islands at the time of first contact, the arrival of Capt. James Cook in 1778, has been debated by many historians. For an overview of this debate, see Stannard (1989).

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9. Sections of this book also appeared in the English-language newspaper The Hawaiian Spectator in 1838 and 1839, including a piece titled: “Decrease of the population of Hawaii” (Oct. 1839: 446–447). 10. The myth of Cook as Lono has been vigorously debated by Obeyesekere (1992) and Sahlins (1995). 11. Maternal Association. Records of the Maternal Association of the Sandwich Islands Mission, 1834–1852. Hawaiian Children’s Mission Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Volume I, 1834–1841. See the Wednesday June 3, 1840, meeting at which the question was posed: how much intercourse is proper for our children to hold with the natives? The members of the Maternal Association were asked if they thought it proper for their children to speak “in the Hawaiian dialect,” and there was a “unanimous reply in the negative.” Some mothers forbade their children to speak to the natives in English as well. Fears about “heathen” contamination had vexed missionary mothers since the first American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions’ families arrived in Hawai‘i in the 1820s. 12. Mss. Maternal Association. Records of the Maternal Association of the Sandwich Islands Mission, 1834–1852. Friday May 29, 1840, p. 42. Located at the Hawaiian Children’s Mission Library, Honolulu, Hawai‘i. 13. Records of the Maternal Association, May 20, 1839, p. 43. 14. Records of the Maternal Association, June 30, 1840, p. 45. 15. See Handy (1927); Pukui, Haertig, and Lee (1972); Chun (1986, 1998); Emerson (1951); Fornander (1996); Kamakau (1991, 1991b, 1961). 16. Bushnell 1969; Gutmanis 2002; Handy, Pukui, and Livermore 1934. 17. Analysis of Dr. Smith’s book for this essay is taken from the 3rd edition (1837). 18. Mss. Missionary Station Reports. Ewa, Bishop, April 1849. In his own words, Bishop speaks of the plight of the people he considered his own: “The past has been a year of trials and sorrows among my people in passing through scenes of sickness and death, beyond what I had ever witnessed. It was not merely that the Angel of Death has been among us, for to his stroke all mortals are subject, but it was the affecting fact that the Hawaiian was singled out for slaughter in the presence of an alien population, who dwelt among them in fearless security, intact by the plague that was decimating the aborigines. It was the fact that no means could be efficatious [sic] to save their lives, which proved effectual upon foreigners, solely because of their unwillingness to submit to the regimen prescribed. They preferred their native quacks and impostors, to the drugs of their foreign teachers, and died in the deception. Many honorable exceptions are however to be noted, enough indeed to give one full and daily employment for many months in prescribing and administering medicines. Still they died around on every side, and the toll of the funeral bell was heard every day. Until that time I had clung with tenacity to the hope, that this people would eventually be preserved in their distinct nationality to future generations. I had believed that the power of Christianity was sufficient to deliver them not only from the thralldom of sin, but to rescue them from extinction. . . . Their present danger is, they



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may not survive the transition process, and like the tribes of North America, melt away before the vices of civilization and before they shall have obtained the means and skill to arrest the progress of disease and death.” 19. Mss. Station Reports. Ewa, Bishop, April 1, 1849. 20. Mss. Station Reports. Hilo, T. Coan, Pastor, 1849. 21. Mss. Station Reports. Waialua, J. S. Emerson, May 1837.

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Gay Sexualities and Complicities Rethinking the Global Gay

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laims about global, even “planetary” gay sexualities are difficult to sidestep for a project interested in lesbian, gay, and bisexual sexualities in contemporary India. The notion of the “global gay” (Dennis Altman’s term, 1997) crystallizes the position that alongside economic and other cultural aspects, sexualities are also becoming globalized; due to the conjoined effects of global capital and sexual politics since the Stonewall era, Euro-American-style sexual identities have been exported to the non-west. The globalization of sexuality is seen as shaped, but not determined, by U.S. hegemony and global capital, and the effects of local culture are emphasized. Cautioning against the equation of globalization with homogenization, the project is to show how non-western gay identities are the variegated products of globalization and local culture. Reframing this position as the “global gay paradigm,” I take issue with it in this chapter. Especially from the vantage point of sexual minorities in contemporary India, this paradigm does not withstand scrutiny. Despite its criticisms of U.S. hegemony in sexual politics, the global gay paradigm unwittingly gives that hegemony greater strength. Notwithstanding the emphasis on cultural differences, the approach is haunted by falsely universalized, Euro-American understandings of what it means to be gay. The troubling outcome is collusion with what is ostensibly being questioned and the visibility of sexual subjects selectively recognizable from a Euro-American standpoint. Issues of complicity and the intellectual sleight that renders some into sexual subjects and not others are of central concern here. Hardly limited to the global gay paradigm, academic complicities highlight the process through which we as scholars and activists actively but unreflexively produce sexual subjects. Complicity has specific connotations: being involved or in partnership with egregious or evil acts. Yet it also has a less loaded but not less significant meaning: state of being complex or involved. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) reads complicity not as simply participation in a wrongful act, but as being folded together; her idea is to undo the negative valence of complicity and see it as an inextricable doubling or joining.

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Drawing on her understanding, my discussion shows how the global gay paradigm paradoxically exports the hegemonic Euro-American gay subject well beyond his cultural and historical origins, while obscuring the politics of these circulations. Such exports are facilitated by networks of global capital that shape travel, mobility, and the institutional production of knowledge. My purpose is to call attention to the pitfalls and possibilities of being “folded together” with institutional sites of knowledge and power. The main task of this chapter is to consider the circulation of the paradigm within lesbian, gay, and bisexual academic and activist discourses in India. Despite scholarly criticisms of the global gay paradigm, upon which I draw below, it shapes popular and activist accounts within the urban Indian context. In contrast, the globalization approach is absent from some of the useful scholarly work on same-sex sexualities in the Indian context. Contrasting the activist and scholarly discourses within the Indian context, I highlight the politically fraught implications of this paradigm. To this purpose I draw upon relevant scholarship, especially related to the Indian context, as well as upon fieldwork conducted in Mumbai and New Delhi. Put succinctly, this analysis identifies what is at stake in the globalization of sexualities paradigm from the specific and “local” context of urban India, particularly Mumbai and New Delhi. I bring together existing scholarly critiques of what I call the global gay paradigm with useful challenges to the globalization approach. It is one thing to map and analyze the global, unequal flows of capital, people, ideas, and information, but it is quite another to reify globalization as an academic and popular discourse. My purpose is to point toward alternate lines of inquiry. The analysis is implicitly guided by queer theory’s critiques, after Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick (1990) and Judith Butler (1990, 1993), of the limits of sexual categories—homosexuality and heterosexuality.1 Transnational feminist scholarship and its cautions against remaking identities elsewhere in the image of hegemonic subjects in the “west” are equally influential here.2

Against the Global Gay Paradigm Attention to the conjunctions of globalization and sexualities is hardly new, and the focus on gay sexualities sits alongside ongoing considerations of sex trafficking and HIV/AIDS among others. Three aspects of scholarly attention to globalization and gay sexualities are important to note. One, this literature is preoccupied with male-based gay homosexualities and attention to heterosexually oriented sexualities is lacking.3 Two, the emphasis is on how male homosexualities are comparable but not identical across a variety of cultural and national settings. By this, I refer to the insistence on a dynamic interface of the global and the local. Three, the scholars interested in “internationalizing” gay and lesbian or queer studies are those who appear most attentive to the issue of globalization



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and its implications. Despite the limitations of the global gay paradigm, the narrow domestic scope of lesbian and gay studies in North America or Europe is partly offset through this international focus. A foremost proponent of this paradigm, Dennis Altman, in a 1996 article, “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” explores the emergence of a universal gay identity linked to modernity and, more specifically, to globalization. Calling it the “global gay,” Altman notes that this term is inflected by American consumerism and intellectualism and refers to men—young, upwardly mobile, sexually adventurous—with in-your-face attitudes toward restrictions and an interest in activism and fashion (1996: 77). Young, politically conscious men in baseball caps, wearing Reebok or Nike, with mobile phones, and attending gay parties are a recognizable caricature, and Altman’s purpose is to map the conditions under which this sexual identity emerges. In Southeast Asia, South and Central America, and Eastern Europe, Altman notes the development of commercial space—of entertainment, shops, and restaurants—catering to a homosexual clientele as the most obvious indicator of the proliferation of modern/western gay identity. He sees a burgeoning gay/lesbian press, gay organizations, and conferences as other important indicators signaling this shift. In their book Global Emergence of Gay and Lesbian Politics: National Imprints of a Worldwide Movement (1999), Barry Adam, Jan Willem Duyvendak, and André Krouwel shift emphasis to what they see as the emergence of a worldwide gay and lesbian movement. Like Altman, they address what kinds of sexual politics are possible due to the emergence of new sexual subjectivities and explore similarities existing across gay and lesbian movements. They note similarities in issue emphasis, by which they mean the struggle against legal and social discrimination and the establishing of public social spaces given to gays and lesbians; patterns of action and events organized by movements across countries, such as consciousness-raising and mass demonstrations; stages of development of lesbian and gay movements; and the presence of gender conflict between gays and lesbians. These approaches explicitly reject a transhistoric or essentialist understanding of sexual identities. Instead, they underscore how forces of globalization produce common consciousness and identity based on homosexuality (Altman 1996: 79). Similarly, in his article on the emergence of a transnational queer subjectivity, John Champagne (1999) challenges what he calls naïve, idealist notions of an ahistorical, transnational “gay sensibility,” as well as cross-cultural anthropological comparisons. In their turn, Adam, Duyvendak, and Krouwel are careful to note that there is no one lesbian and gay movement worldwide. At work here is a cultural constructionist approach arguing that homosexuality is being dynamically shaped and reshaped in non-western settings under conditions of globalization. Each of these studies seeks to come to grips with and be critical of the proliferation of a U.S.-

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based sexual-identity model and style of politics. They note the importance of cultural differences and the varied histories of homosexuality. Each study negotiates the tension between similarity and difference, what is global and what is local. For Altman, two trends need to be noted: some form of gay and lesbian identity that is more common across the world; and the continued local but dynamic presence of older, culturally specific forms of homosexuality in places such as Indonesia and India (1996: 85). Elaborating on what is distinctive about this modern gay identity, he suggests that it is based in sexual orientation and not conventional gender identities; it is about emotional as well as sexual relationships; and it is about the development of public homosexual worlds. Altman (2001, 1997) also underscores the dissonance between what he sees as the old and new forms of homosexuality. Although modern gay identity often asserts new identities while rejecting older forms of homosexuality, according to him the rupture can be both difficult and not complete. For Adam, Duyvendak, and Krouwel also, the challenge is to analyze the commonality and the uniqueness across the various movements; to this purpose, they underscore the role and context of national culture and politics. These studies specify the interface between the global and the local, the common and the particular, to note the new arrangements of gay sexuality, marked by dissonances and possibilities. The ascendancy of western sexual politics and the continued significance of local cultures are not easy to negotiate alongside nonessentializing approaches to sexuality. Writers tread carefully. How is it possible to explain the apparent proliferation of a modern gay identity without seeing it as inevitable? Globalization is the answer, for it accommodates the social constructionist approach to sexuality. By framing the global gay in a variety of settings as a factor of global capital, the globalization discourse shows how this proliferation was by no means inevitable; rather, the social and economic conditions of globalization help explain the widespread emergence of the global gay model. The globalization discourse explains how this model flows out of the west, also the implicit source of global capital. It also accounts for the similarities in the global gay, whether he is in Manila or in Manhattan. Typically, the underlying strategy used in the global gay paradigm is twofold. Globalization is used to complicate the cultural divide between the west and nonwest and their overlapping distinctions of first and third worlds, of modernity and tradition. It is suggested that globalizing social, economic, and political processes complicate these geopolitical divides, that it is crucial not to reproduce them by insisting on essential cultural and sexual differences between the west and non-west, and that it is important to note what is common across these contexts. For example, Altman (1997; 1996) argues against romanticizing or primitivizing homoeroticism in non-western cultures. Indeed, he echoes the well-established point that tradition and modernity are vague, politically contested terms and that these references en-



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code oppositions of west and non-west and sexual versus gender-based manifestations of homosexuality, which he appropriately challenges. The global gay paradigm seeks to preserve the realm of cultural and sexual difference by rightly arguing that sexuality is not only complex but also contextual; therefore, writers underscore the other well-established point that globalization does not homogenize, and local context differentiates the global gay. Another strategy is to ground the universalizing modern/western gay and gay politics in capitalism, which is used interchangeably with globalization. These scholars emphasize capitalist proliferation to explain how globalization leads to the emergence of common but not identical forms of gay identity. For Altman, globalization is capitalism writ large, which perpetuates the erosion of custom, of existing forms of kinship and communities, deprivatizes space in the interests of markets, and enables greater freedom for individual choice, at the same time there is more education and greater awareness of other possibilities (1996: 87). In order to account for the emergence of a worldwide but not homogenous lesbian and gay movement, Adam, Duyvendak, and Krouwel propose a parallel process: the modern capitalist world system undoes traditional kinship systems; enables wage/labor systems; permits greater personal autonomy, at first for men but then also women; fosters the ascendancy of romantic love and bonding; mobilizes vast numbers of people from rural to urban centers; and provides social and public spaces in which men and to a lesser extent women can encounter each other outside of the confines of kin-based ties (1999: 5). Despite, or rather because of, such perceptions, these scholars cannot avoid universalizing a Euro-American gay subject. As crystallized in the words of Altman: There is great temptation to “explain” differences in homosexuality in different countries with reference to cultural tradition. What strikes me is that within a given country, whether Indonesia or the United States, Thailand or Italy, the range of constructions of homosexuality is growing, and that in the past two decades there has emerged a definable group of self-identified homosexuals—to date many more men than women—who see themselves as part of a global community, whose commonalities override but do not deny those of race and nationality. This is not to present a new version of an inexorable march towards “development,” with the end point defined in terms of building American-style gay ghettoes across the world. . . . But globalization, in both its cultural and economic manifestations, impinges on the very creation and experience of sexual behavior and entities. (1997: 424, emphasis in original)

Unable to avoid versions of the “development” narrative, Altman recuperates an overarching community of self-selected, “American-style” homosexuals as an effect of globalization. Notwithstanding those who do not so identify, race and na-

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tionality may separate homosexuals, but supranational alliances of homosexuality help forge belonging to a specific kind of global community, according to Altman. It is curious that the numerous critiques of nationalism and its flawed promises of an egalitarian community seem to have no parallels here. Noting the importance of national context, Adam, Duyvendak, and Krouwel nonetheless make a similar troubling claim about the global collective identity of lesbians and gays: “In an era when queer theory seeks to throw gay and lesbian identity into question, it is interesting to see that gays and lesbians very often feel themselves to be ‘a people,’ considering an attack on their brothers and sisters in another country as an assault on themselves . . .” (1999: 370). In his call for scholarship beyond the United States toward materialist critiques of capital, Champagne problematically recreates the difference between so-called first and third world economies in order to account for the global gay. Despite the commitment to nuanced understandings of gay identities across cultural contexts, despite the emphasis on contextual meanings, despite the need not to privilege the model of the global gay, these studies end up accommodating and co-opting differences. Then again, these accommodations are implicit in the framing of the global/local.

Field-based Narratives and Disjunctures of Globalization and Sexuality Fieldwork presents a useful, if complicated, lens through which to examine the global gay paradigm. Field-based observations can be interpreted to lend support to this paradigm, but they can also help to unravel its tautological core and produce an effective means to rethink the imbrications of globalizations and sexualities. Consider the following two quotations; the first from Altman’s article, and the second from my fieldwork. Cinecafé, Manila, date unknown, Altman: Cinecafé combines the elements of a café, a bar, a porn video showroom and a backroom for sex. All this is contained in a small three-story building on a back street removed from the tourist hotels of Makati and Ermita, with a clientele that is almost entirely Filipino. At the same time there are certain aspects of Cinecafé that very clearly link it to a larger global gay world: the posters, the magazines, the films themselves (exclusively French and American) are the same that one might find in similar establishments in Zurich, Montreal, or Sydney. In many ways Cinecafé is a third-world version of the male sex-on-premises venues found in Los Angeles, Melbourne, or elsewhere, though it is much smaller and less well appointed. (1997: 420)

Friday Evening at Humsafar Trust, Kalina, Mumbai, June 2001:



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The modest room in the Bombay Municipal Corporation building is prepared for a Friday evening fashion show and competition. The room is darkened, softening its grittiness, and a string of small colored bulbs and a spot shed light on the contestants. We, four judges, one self-identified gay man and three women, are seated along one wall, facing the catwalk, with a grid to award points on appearance, carriage, etc. The show starts. Kothi contestants confidently strut down the aisle, one by one, sometimes escorted by a conventionally but formally dressed male, to the cheers of an enthusiastic audience of ordinarily attired men.4 The first half, devoted to “traditional” women’s clothes—nauari saris, chaniya cholis, etc.—is followed by “Western” outfits—including long evening dresses, fitted pants and strappy blouses, etc. Intermission: The catwalk and center of the room is taken over by young men from the audience voguing to Western, not-easily-identifiable dance music in the intermission. These young men in pants, T-shirts, and shirts dance, strut to the even more enthusiastic cheers from others, even as the lines between audience and performers blur. At one moment, a young, perhaps eighteen- or nineteen-year-old, slender, about five feet five inches tall, dark-haired, presumably Kothi or gay man has the floor to himself. He is graceful and our attention is drawn to him. We make eye contact and he holds my gaze as he vogues. I don’t look away, not wanting to be rude, but then I am unable to. A sense of discomfort and then blankness settle upon me. The smile on my face locks in. It seems as if he is dancing to me; I am discomfited by his attention and, yet, feel strangely empty. As my facial muscles hurt, I will him to shift attention, to stop, to bring this strange moment to an end. What lasted no more than a few minutes was interminable.

I cite at length to juxtapose two accounts that appear to be about the globalization of gay identities. Altman describes Cinecafé to demonstrate how it calls for a balance between the universalizing and the particular. If Cinecafé emerges as a dilapidated version of establishments in Los Angeles and Melbourne, then the fact that the clientele is almost entirely Filipino is what connotes the local and the particular in this account. The same could be said about the fashion contest in Mumbai: the impact of globalization (specifically through fashion shows on cable television that many of the contestants reportedly watch at Humsafar Trust) as well as the local context are quickly identifiable, not just through the fact that all the people in the room appeared to be local/Indian, but also through the accommodation of saris and the like into the competition. Yet the interim, the intermission, disrupts any facile characterizations of the global and the local. It is not just a matter of balancing between the global and the local, between juxtaposing one and the other, or seeing how they interact in Cinecafé. These typologies limit our understanding and obscure where our gaze is lo-

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cated. The moment when we start to see the global or the local as “real,” rather than as interpretive frames (Gibson-Graham 2002), we lose sight of the tautologies in the analysis. Cinecafé appears a lesser version of venues in Los Angeles and so forth; its localness is evident in that most of the people there are Filipino and its globalness in the French and American posters and magazines. In contrast, the intermission at Humsafar Trust reminds one how inadequate the discourse of globalization can be. As a reluctant judge, with no prior experience in this regard, I am unsettled by my uneasiness but even more so by the feeling of emptiness, the inability to feel, which further exacerbates the initial discomfort. Desire, pleasure, or the discomfort of unwanted attention is easier to identify, easier to categorize. But the response of no response is harder to explain. One reaction is a kind of emptiness born out of not knowing how to react. The discomfort is the effect of the unfamiliar, of not knowing how to make meaning through established codes. What confounds meaning, makes it hard to react, are the hierarchies of class, gender, sexuality, and mobility that crisscrossed unevenly between this young man and me; their interaction made it difficult to fix meaning. In that moment, dualistic codes of meaning, such as woman/man, feminine/masculine, heterosexuality/homosexuality, and global/local, prove to be inadequate. And they will prove to be so insofar as we preassign dominance to one term in each of the binaries and fail to consider the always contextual unfolding nature of meaning in situations dynamically charged with social class, sexuality, gender, place, mobility, gazing, social research, and more. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of scholars treat sexuality and gender as historical and cultural concepts, not as essences, but as conceptual terms that are realized in their enactment. Then, why reify global and local, why treat them as if they actually exist? Parallel to the long-standing critiques of sexuality and gender as transhistoric essences, global and local are ways of making and analyzing meaning. This research-based encounter points to what happens as dominant ways of reading and analyzing fail, as they inevitably will, when they are most needed. Who is emplaced and who is mobile? Who represents the global and who represents the local? Who is gazing and who is being gazed at? If the gazing is mutual, is it the same? What is implicated in the interim? The globalizing influences on “gay” identity? Or the conditions that make transnational research possible?

Limitations of the Global Gay Paradigm A number of critical scholars have pointed out the limitations of rendering globalization into a discourse. Fewer have noted the limitations of explaining gay sexualities through the lens of globalization. My purpose is to synthesize the criticisms of the global gay paradigm and to call attention to what has not been suffi-



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ciently spelled out in these criticisms: an epistemological vantage point centered in dominant Euro-American notions of a gay subject.5 A consistent point of criticism to be summed up here is how the terms global and local are defined and their fraught implications for theories of the emergence of a global but nonhomogenous gay identity. Globalization is typically but imprecisely associated with the proliferation of capital, transnational flows of finance and investment, the predominance of multinationals, the emergence of global forms of governance, the spread of cultural homogeneity, and a rapid shrinking of time and space. In specific studies, especially in relation to sexuality, little effort is made to offer a more precise understanding of the meaning and maps of global flows (Bergeron 2001). According to Randy Martin (1999), instead of a complex set of effects or a condition of limitation, globalization is essentially seen as something that has happened to us and as unified. Also challenging the discursive politics of globalization, Michael Shapiro rightly asks how globalization emerges as a phenomenon in “productive understandings.” He asks, what kind of phenomenon is globalization (1999: 2)? His well-taken point is that current spatiotemporal disruptions associated with globalization trigger discursive attempts to provide some unity of individual and collective identity. Echoing these concerns, Suzanne Bergeron (2001) cogently argues that feminists reproduce mainstream discourses of the political economy of globalization despite attempts to reconfigure them. Drawing on Spivak’s work on capitalocentric approaches as alibis for exploitation, Bergeron notes that globalocentric feminist approaches present globalization as a unified, intentional, noncontradictory economic logic that is inevitable and determined solely by international institutions. Representations of globalization implicit in the global gay paradigm are vague and imprecise while also unified and coherent in order to produce accounts thereof. The question is the nature of the representations thus produced. Notwithstanding globalization as already almost everywhere, these representations are unwittingly located in modernist premises of place and geopolitical divisions. Martin rightly observes that globalization is seen as “a consolidated phenomenon that radiates outward from a lofty world platform” (1999: 1). And the world platform is implicitly and explicitly located in the so-called west. Rather than a complex, multiscalar, multicentered, multiform, and multitemporal process, globalization is reduced to the hegemony of the west, this time understood as a geopolitical concept (compare Boellstorf and Leap 2004). The result, according to J. K. Gibson-Graham (2002), is a continually produced script of capitalist globalization as indomitable, impenetrable, and naturally stronger than noncapitalist economic forms. Insofar as globalization derives its meaning from what it is not, the local, according to these analysts, becomes constituted within this power differential. If capitalist globalization is es-

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sentially emanating from the west, and the west and global are implicitly synonyms, then the local also stands in for that which is outside the west, namely the so-called third world or places that are influenced by but not quite the west or the third world—Japan, Singapore, the Eastern European nations, among others. It is especially striking how the local is conflated with the national (for example, see Adam, Duyvendak, and Krouwel 1999). Despite the emphasis on the interaction between the global and the local, global dominance is seen as untransformed, and the local is seen as inevitably contained and dominated by capitalist globalization, as Gibson-Graham argues (2002). At a seminar in New Delhi in 2002, I was reminded by a participant that the complexity of globalization is that it stretches across colonial boundaries of metropolis and colony, of west and east.6 Not in discourses of globalization is my response; the so-called west is still seen as the geopolitical origin and center of the flows of capital, finance and investment, multinationals, forms of governance, tourism, and other factors broadly connected to globalization, with the exception of the flows of people as labor—which is emphasized in the reverse direction. Is it any wonder, then, that the effects of globalization on local settings are typically placed in the non-west and attention to globalization’s effects on the west is relegated to the study of immigrant populations? Entire fields of study and analysis are omitted through this implicitly binary understanding of globalization. Regardless of the attempt to avoid binaries of west and non-west, the conjunction of globalization and sexuality recreates them in new and not-so-new ways. Similarities and differences, the west and non-west, global and local coincide in neat and questionable ways in the global gay paradigm. Despite attempts to problematize terms such as cultural tradition and modernity, the former consistently gets equated with the non-west, while modernity and westernization are used interchangeably. Speaking to the issue of gay sexualities in Indonesia, Tom Boellstorf takes on Altman to suggest that underlying these vexed binaries, the issue is not whether the world is becoming more similar or more different under globalization. Instead, it is the yardstick by which one assesses similarities and differences (1999: 480). Needless to say, the discourse of globalization encodes not merely binary reductionism but also profound inequalities. The outcome, according to Martin Manalansan (1995, 1996), is a developmental teleology of sexuality spanning the west and non-west. Shaped in the aftermath of the post-Stonewall era in the United States, gay takes meaning within this developmental frame that originates with an unliberated, prepolitical homosexual practice and culminates in the liberated, politicized, out, modern gay subject. Insofar as gay is singularly understood within the framework of bourgeois civil society and individual subjectivity, homosexuality and gayness in non-western contexts are found wanting. For Manalansan, Eurocentric bourgeois notions of gayness duplicate an imperial gaze at the non-western world.



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Nothing less is at stake in the global gay paradigm—an epistemological gaze that encodes a universalized Euro-American subject in transcultural differences and similarities. If Boellstorf is right about the measures used to assess questions of similarity and difference, then the problem may be less the impact of globalization on homosexualities worldwide than the epistemological grounds from which that question is asked. Speaking to Altman’s strategy to assert and respect cultural diversity while reconciling it with the idea of globalization and the universal politics of gay rights, Lisa Rofel (1999b) argues that the problem is not one of mere contradiction. Instead, it is the search for a monumentalist history of gay identity, one that is unable to contend with diversity and the fault lines of power in global gay discourses and practices. Addressing the issues of a search for what he calls the “Gay International,” this time in the so-called Arab and non-Arab Muslim world, and the fault lines of academic and popular discourse, Joseph Massad (2002) indicts its driving Orientalist perspective. In an essay that generated some controversy,7 Massad argues that universalization of “gay rights” and academic and popular literature written mostly by white male westerners has produced an “incitement to discourse” (Foucault’s expression): this produces homosexuals, gays, lesbians where they do not exist, polarizes into supporters and detractors of gay rights, triggers state repressions of those suspected of identifying as gay in places such as Cairo, and, ironically, heightens heteronormativity as more men are likely to turn to compulsory heterosexuality for fear of standing outside the societal norm as a publicly identified gay. Massad targets the epistemological gaze that seeks to undo difference by reproducing it in its own image, incorporating the unfamiliar into the familiar. Massad makes a compelling argument, but I also want to flag two points of concern before proceeding.8 The question of incitement to discourse in non-western contexts leads to at least two readings of complicity, neither of them particularly useful. The first is that only western and west-oriented researchers are complicit in producing sexual subjects. Here, complicity has an overwhelmingly negative valence and the binaries of west and non-west, which are at the heart of Orientalist narratives that Massad questions, remain intact. A second reading of incitement to discourse in non-western contexts makes it possible to claim that there are no indigenous expressions of same-sex desire, a position expressed by the Hindu right wing, a point to which I return below. Clearly, this reading cannot be supported. For now, I extrapolate from Massad’s argument that the issue is not about similarities and differences in same-sex sexualities across cultural contexts. Rather, the problem is the epistemological gaze that recognizes and assesses what counts as similarity and what bespeaks difference. The binaries of global and local that traverse the global gay paradigm ob-

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scure rather than clarify the epistemological gaze. Not only does this approach reify the global and local as locales, but the local is understood from the perspective of the western, global gay. When local variations and complexities are implicitly understood in terms of the normative global, local identity is only the flip side of the idea of the universal, Euro-American gay subject. The shift from the singular subject to the presence of at least two possibilities—the globalizing gay and the culturally different complex one—is still about the global gay.

Globalization and Lesbian and Gay Sexualities in the Indian Context I would like to grapple with the discourse of globalization from the vantage point of scholarship and activism related to same-sex sexualities in India.9 Although this scholarship is not institutionally located within lesbian and gay studies, it represents a growing and influential area of research and study. I draw upon fieldwork and selective interviews conducted with three respected gay-identified activists in Bangalore, Mumbai, and New Delhi. These exploratory interviews delved into the seeming visibility of lesbian and gay sexualities and how to account for them. That sexual identities are visible as a result of globalization has gained much currency in the past ten years. Among its well-touted indications are lesbian and gay organizations in urban centers, routine discussions on same-sex sexualities in the media, and a more open presence of lesbian and gay women and men in public spaces, such as bars, clubs, conferences, and rallies, as well as a critical mass of scholarly and fictional writings.10 In scholarly texts, however, the discourse of globalization remains comparatively attenuated. Contrasting with the impulse to map a global gay identity or to map a worldwide lesbian and gay movement, the implicit question raised through lesbian and gay scholarship is about the increasing public presence of these sexualities within the Indian context. The question of how to account for such visibility is typically not asked. One site, though, where questions of globalization/westernization and indigenous sexualities play out is in discussions about appropriate terminology. A wide range of terms, with varied, distinct, and sometimes overlapping meaning circulate currently—gay, Hijra, Kothi, lesbian, men who have sex with men, as well as what are considered regional language terms equivalent to lesbian and gay. These discussions are driven by concerns about the effects of the west prior to and since globalization, what is indigenous and culturally relevant, what is meaningful to extant practices and subjectivities and what is imposed, and which categories are inclusive and open-ended and which suppress expressions of same-sex desire.



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While a thorough review of the discussions on terminology is outside the scope of this discussion, I do want to note one helpful response, which implicitly challenges the globalization thesis. Ruth Vanita (2002) notes the prevalence of terms to describe same-sex eroticism in languages such as Urdu and Hindi. At the same time, she challenges the reliance on “indigenous” categories over the terms “lesbian” and “gay” for two reasons: the terms have enabled political demands for civil rights, the repeal of antisodomy laws, among others; objections to these terms comes from those who have already gained their basic civil rights in the first world. What supports her argument is that after a 200-year history English cannot be disavowed as an Indian language and that similar objections are not raised when terms such as “family” are widely used. It is a persuasive position that, unlike Massad, complicates geopolitical binaries of west and non-west, interrupts notions of oneway flows out of the west, and refuses ideas of pure, culturally insular sexual subjectivities or Euro-American-centric meanings of terms. In contrast, popular and activist accounts are replete with references to globalization. Explaining the visibility of lesbian and gay sexualities, a leading gay activist and scholar in New Delhi said succinctly in his interview: “Globalization.” For him, the influence of the U.S. model of sexual politics since Stonewall, the increased travel to and from the west, the internet, and the liberalization of the Indian economy are some of the markers of globalization that help explain the idiom of sexual identities. Another well-known gay activist and scholar in Mumbai not only claimed a global but, indeed, a “planetary” gay identity. Describing it as a “westernized gay subculture,” in the context of India, he distinguished, in his words, this planetary gay identity from the traditional presence of Hijras and working-class, “vernacular gay” subcultures. Urbanization, industrialization, the breakup of the large family, the rise of the nuclear family, and the empowerment of women within the preceding ten years under the aegis of globalization was how he explained the emergence of this “westernized gay”; this language is not dissimilar to the discourse of globalization and even though the terms globalization and westernization have distinctly different trajectories in the Indian context, they begin to coincide. Globalization is widely seen as the most recent socioeconomic phase of westernization, which was first set into motion through colonial conquest. But the problems with accounting for lesbian and gay visibility in India through the framework of globalization/westernization are multiple. The previous section argued that the problem with the conjoined discourses of globalization and gay lies in the inherent privileging of a Euro-American standpoint of gay identity and politics. Seen from the vantage point of contemporary urban India, especially if we eschew Orientalist binaries of west and non-west or discount the argument that homosexuality is not indigenous to the non-west, the limitations of this framework are further compounded.

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Limitations of Globalization/Sexualities Discourses If globalization is to account for the visibility of lesbian and gay sexualities in contemporary India, then framing these sexualities along axes of visibility needs to be problematized first. At the ends of the spectrum, the concept of visibility suggests two antithetical but related possibilities—of invisibility and full visibility. If invisibility connotes that which cannot be seen or even that which by its nature is not an object of sight, then full visibility suggests that which is clearly, readily apparent or manifest. Historical evidence, to which I refer below, amply counters complete invisibility or full visibility of same-sex sexualities in the Indian subcontinent. More often than not, visibility is partial and contingent on sociocultural context and circumstances. Visibility is further mediated by perceptibility. Although visibility and perceptibility are often used interchangeably, what is visible is not always perceptible. A middle-class English- or Kannadaspeaking lesbian may seek to be visible but is not always perceptible as such. While the cross-dressed Kothi may be conspicuous, the conventionally dressed Kothi is not always widely perceptible or may be only selectively perceptible. Furthermore, not all forms of visibility are desirable. The apprehension of men from less privileged socioeconomic classes as homosexual also makes them vulnerable to the police and thugs; blackmail, extortion, coerced sex, sexual assaults, and physical beatings are related to this kind of visibility. The visibility of lesbian and gay sexualities in contemporary India is fraught by the politics of class, heteronormativity, gender norms, individual choice, social and cultural institutions, and the epistemological vantage point. In terms of homosexual visibility in Indian cultural settings, the more pertinent questions are how do some subjects become visible and under what circumstances are they perceptible? There is little that is innocuous about linking the visibility of gay sexualities to globalization: which same-sex sexualities, who counts as gay, who does not, what it means to be visible, and who remains imperceptible are the key questions embedded in this approach. This is where the discursive power of the paradigm, the politics of the epistemological gaze, matters for at best it sidelines and at worst erases parallel expressions of same-sex sexualities. Among the most egregious consequences of the globalization discourse is the denial of same-sex sexualities from the cultural past and, in effect, in the cultural present. Here, I refer to the Hindu right-wing denial of homosexuality or homoeroticism in the histories of the subcontinent. According to this position, homosexuality is the result of external corruption first through Islamic invasions, then through British colonization, and more recently through westernization/globalization (see Puri 1999; Vanita 2002). Indeed, Paola Bacchetta (1999) notes how Hindu nationalism assigns queerness to the non-Hindu other, especially Indian Muslims.



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To account for extant gay sexualities through globalization, with its persistent westernized connotations, ironically reinforces and bolsters the conservative, homophobic argument that homosexuality is foreign to Indian—used to mean Hindu— traditions. Gay rights’ activists and others who support the globalization framework are paradoxically both at odds and in consonance with the Hindu right wing. Another consequence of the discourses of globalization and same-sex sexualities is the privileging of some subjectivities over others. In an interview with another self-identified sexual minority rights’ activist in Bangalore, the ramifications of these conjoined discourses in contemporary India became further evident. Citing the gay pride parade in Kolkata (Calcutta) in June 2003, he noted how widely the event was covered by the local and national media. According to him, the event was hailed as a crucial marker of a burgeoning gay (and lesbian) movement in India. That approximately a hundred gay-identified marchers braved the gaze of hostile and curious onlookers on the streets of Kolkata was widely publicized transnationally, especially through e-mails and listservs, as the first gay pride parade in India. In contrast, according to the activist, what did not get parallel coverage, nor was it described in parallel language, was when 250 Hijras took to the streets of Bangalore in the previous year, 2002. They were protesting the murder of another Hijra, Chandi, by her husband, and the subsequent police neglect of the crime; they demanded the right to earn a living and to protection from police brutality, among other demands. This event is not described as the first large-scale demonstration of sexual rights’ activism in India. Frameworks such as the global gay paradigm and “westernized” notions of gay subjectivity produce such biases. A third limitation highlights how the globalization/same-sex sexualities discourse ironically preserves the hegemony of the west and obfuscates other lines of inquiry in explaining the gathering social and political momentum around sexual identities. Critical scholarship on same-sex sexualities and homoeroticism related to the Indian subcontinent has explicitly indicted the histories and legacies of the colonial state, anticolonial nationalisms, and postcolonial nationalism for attempting to erase and repress homoeroticism and homosexualities. Books such as Vanita’s Queering India (2002), Vanita and Kidwai’s Same-Sex Love in India (2000), and Giti Thadani’s Sakhiyani (1996) have sought to make visible same-sex erotic practices in precolonial and colonial pasts, challenge dominant discourses, and recover forgotten traditions to help confront homophobia.11 What is noteworthy, especially about the first two contributions, is their implicit and explicit avoidance of the discourses of westernization and globalization to question the role of the colonial state. Through the introduction to Queering India and the collection Same-Sex Love, in particular, Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai demonstrate that same-sex sexualities have long existed in the subcontinent. Granted these sexualities may

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not have existed in the same way or with the same social meanings, this scholarship nonetheless calls into question that what was once invisible is now coming into visibility. To this purpose, they note the inherently contradictory efforts of the colonial state to discourage particular sexual practices. By the mid-1850s the state took over and regulated the unofficial brothels for British soldiers to discourage homosexuality (Bhaskaran 2001) even as Section 377, or the code that criminalized “unnatural sex,” was introduced in order to suppress same-sex sexual practices. These books along with another, Less Than Gay (1991), not only dispute the myths that homosexuality is foreign to India but also indict the role of social institutions first through the colonial and then through the independent national state in exacerbating and formalizing homophobia. The global gay paradigm resonates within the Indian context, but unevenly. Other scholarship and activist positions are at odds with this approach. We ought to take seriously the troubling implications of how same-sex sexualities are unequally treated, not least because other lines of inquiry are obfuscated. The examples of critical scholarship cited above are useful in part due to their implicit and explicit attention to the impact of social structures that do not easily line up with what is western or national. I would like to especially underscore the role of the state structures and institutions, historically as well as presently, in shaping same-sex sexualities. One area of inquiry that is singularly understudied is the interaction between state and sexuality in order to reflect on the overt political mobilization (that is, visibility) of sexual minorities in India. The production of sexual subjectivities at the juncture of postcolonial state structures and institutions, through strategies of surveillance and expressions of homoerotic desire, is a promising alternate line of inquiry to self-identified lesbians and gays and also to Hijras and Kothis.

Reconsidering Complexity/Complicity I end this examination with another example drawn from fieldwork to return to the question of complicities in shaping knowledges about lesbian and gay sexualities as well as to complicate and rethink them. Late afternoon, suburb of Mumbai, June 2001: I get in touch with an activist who runs a helpline for lesbian and bisexual women several days a week, and she invited me to see her the same afternoon. When I arrive, she is on the phone trying to get in touch with two women in a small town in central India who were married on the day before. She is concerned that they might need her help for they may have been thrown out of their jobs or been harassed in some way. But she is unable to find a phone number to reach the journalist who reported the



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story. Instead, through sheer persistence, she makes phone contact with a person who knows the journalist. The plan is that she will give a message to this intermediary, who will then pass it on to the journalist, who will, in turn, relay it to the women. The message will be in the form of a letter to be faxed to this intermediary. It seems easy enough and the best option under the circumstances. It turns out that the women are Hindi-speaking. Suddenly that poses a problem. Of the three of us—the activist, a human rights lawyer who does pro bono work, and myself—I seem to be the only suitable person to write this letter. We discuss the content of the message in English and the lawyer and I draft a letter in idiomatic Hindi. The stumbling block is how to describe the helpline and its support for lesbian and bisexual women, how to address their identities—in short, how to refer to lesbian. Lesbian, written in Hindi, would not make sense; perhaps they have not heard of the word or wouldn’t so identify. Bisexual? That is not even on the table. We don’t know the Hindi terms for lesbian or homoerotic desire between women and don’t want to impose something else. We are stumped. With gaining confidence in my written skills, I finally suggest the following, woh auraten jo sirf auraton se pyar kartee hain (those women who only love other women). The other two endorse the suggestion, and we finish the rest of the letter. I copy it in my best writing and the letter is faxed.

This example illustrates our complicity—the activist, the lawyer, and the researcher—in the production of codes of desire through attempts to offer assistance to two married women. What meaning did we produce? I am not sure. I wonder what we said with the phrase “women who only love other women”; does this refer to a small minority of women who have no caring relationships with men, sexual or otherwise? Or, is this expansive enough to include a vast majority of women, who have loving sexual and nonsexual relationships with other women? At a critical moment when we clearly want to avoid imposing sexual identities or class-based terminology, and allow for regional variation and individual choice, we nonetheless fill the linguistic gap. Massad’s caution that western and western-oriented researchers are inciting discourses of homosexuality and gay identity in Arab and non-Arab Muslim cultural settings is uncomfortably relevant. But this complicity, seen as folded togetherness instead of simply an egregious act, extends well beyond a west-based incitement to discourse. Surely, any of the possible terms—lesbian, “women who only love other women,” or a term in Hindi—would actively produce sexual subjects, who may or may not concur. We are “folded together” into the conditions under which the expression “women who only love other women” was produced; the crucible of same-sex sexualities, class differences, feminist models of activism, the rights discourse, and strategic if impure moves to enable some as sexual subjects. Complicity/complex involvement would have been present regardless of the term

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used. The test, really, is which kinds of sexual subjectivities are highlighted through our involvement, and, surely, what is thereby excluded. The extent to which this complicity enables “subjugated knowledges” (after Foucault) and the extent to which these discourses suppress these knowledges, customs, and subjectivities is the litmus test of academic and activist involvement. The challenge is to remain self-reflexive about the nature and outcome of these complex involvements. At the very least, we can be critical of the global gay paradigm, as well as alert to how as scholars and activists we shape the very subjectivities and practices that are of interest to us. We can play a role in mediating “subjugated knowledges” and, more importantly, unraveling and indicting the social structures that subjugate.

Conclusion This essay has engaged with the global gay paradigm from the vantage point of same-sex sexualities within the Indian context. What are the strategies and fault lines? The global gay paradigm, I argue, is underpinned by a universal but EuroAmerican-centered model of sexual subjectivity and an epistemological gaze rooted in western lesbian and gay politics. Ironically, the move to problematize this universalizing subject, by endorsing the presence of the local, only gives it greater force. A revised meaning of complicity, drawing from Spivak, is especially useful to considering the “folded togetherness” between scholars/activists and the objects of our interest; the essay has presented numerous examples of how such complicity yields particular understandings and knowledges. Engaging this paradigm from the vantage point of the Indian context shows its politically fraught implications. If, on the one hand, conservative Hindu denial of the multiple histories of homoeroticism and same-sex sexualities in the subcontinent is strengthened through the lens of globalization, it also helps privilege middle- and upper-class gay subjects over a wide range of gendered and sexual subjects in the Indian context. A second purpose of this essay was to highlight alternate lines of inquiry. In place of the globalization approach to the seeming proliferation of sexualities, I argue for an analysis of the state’s contradictory and inconsistent role in enabling sexual subjects, institutionalizing homophobia, and promoting heteronormativity. Rather than taking the twin approaches of globalization and westernization, Vanita and Kidwai, for example, charge the role of the colonial state. Similarly, I think we would be better served to attend to the contemporary state, understood as a disaggregated set of structures, institutions, and discourses that deeply regulates sexuality, sexual subjects, and sexual politics within a transnational context. In other words, Altman’s descriptions, Champagne’s concerns, or the claims of a worldwide gay and lesbian movement are better understood at the intersections



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of the state, notions of citizenship, and transnational flows of funding and rights discourses. Lastly, this essay is also a commentary on the role of field research in exploring same-sex sexualities. Inasmuch as the purpose of this discussion was to unravel the discourse of the global gay, it is also a plea for the importance of fieldwork in such analyses. All too often, discursive critiques remain limited to texts in their conventional forms. Even though field-based observations cannot assure sound readings, they can alert us to our analytic inconsistencies and disjunctures. The need for fieldwork, to sharpen our understanding of the globalization/sexuality discourse and to develop alternate lines of inquiry, cannot be overemphasized.

Notes My acknowledgment to the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Kathy Ferguson, Monique Mironesco, and others, in supporting this work. My particular gratitude to those who provided feedback on presentations and versions of this chapter, especially to Kazi Ashraf, Esther Figuero, S. Charusheela, and the anonymous reviewer of the earlier version. 1. Given the emphasis on the proliferation of gay sexualities in the globalization discourse, questions of queerness are outside the scope of this discussion. Insofar as queer and gay are used interchangeably, a parallel argument could be made against claims about the proliferation of queer sexualities. Indeed, discussions on queerness do not always avoid the assumptions of a normative sexual subject. For example, see Gopinath’s (1996) response to Berlant and Freeman’s (1993) article on Queer Nation. 2. I refer to the now-substantial literature spearheaded by essays by Mohanty (1991), Ong (1988), and Spivak (1988). 3. For an exception to this, see Kantsa’s (2002) discussion in which the author focuses on lesbian rather than gay tourists in Greece. However, there is little in this literature in general that seeks to analyze how heterosexuality may be becoming globalized. 4. In the globalization framework and notions of older and newer forms of homosexuality, Kothis would be seen as “indigenous” homosexual men who seek sexual intimacy with normatively gendered or hypermasculine men. A form of self-identity, Kothis may be married to women, and some may cross-dress, while others do not. 5. Morton (2001) notes that Altman’s work has received much attention and criticism in Australia. Notwithstanding these concerns, I seek to highlight a foundational limitation in Altman’s arguments. 6. Postcoloniality, Law, and Sexuality Seminar, Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi (7/18–19/2003). 7. See A. Schmitt’s response (2003) to Massad (2002), and Massad’s (2003) reply.

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8. Also see Hasso’s critique (2005) of Massad (2002). 9. This discussion does not include the significant literature on Hijras and Kothis partly because I will not be able to do justice to the complex issues raised through these identities. 10. In addition to the scholarly writings mentioned below, also see Seabrook (1999). Among the fictional writings, see Merchant (1999) and Sukhthankar (1999). 11. My gratitude to Ruth Vanita for clarifying, via e-mail, her critique of the globalization discourse in accounting for same-sex sexualities in India.

Chapter 5

“What about Other Translation Routes (East–West)?” The Concept of the Term “Gender” Traveling into and throughout China

Min Dongchao Traveling is a concept that depends upon the notion of stasis to be comprehensible. Routes are pathways between here and there, two points of rootedness.    —Susan Friedman, Mapping

C

ommenting in her 2001 article on traveling theory and translation relating to feminism, Claudia de Lima Costa poses an intriguing question: “. . . there’s a tendency to see the south translating the north. . . . What about other translation routes (east-west)?” I am interested in issues pertaining to why and how the ideas and knowledges of feminism and Women’s Studies travel from “here” (the west) to “there” (China). From whom and to whom do they flow; how and for what reasons? In what form are they received, understood, and localized? Like de Lima Costa, I recognize an ongoing tendency to see translation routes for the terms of “feminisms” as traveling in a one-way direction, from west to east. Yet a closer look at specific Chinese examples of conceptual travel and global translations suggests a more complex story. This chapter looks, in particular, at how the concept of gender, one of the most popular feminist terms in Women’s Studies circles in China during the 1990s, traveled into and then throughout China. Drawing on my doctoral research (Min 2002), I start my journey from North America in the 1960s. Using a Chinese-language expression, jie gui (to connect with the international track), as a metaphor, I examine why and how the concept of gender traveled outwards from the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) in Beijing by means of the expansion of funded projects into Women’s Studies in China. I hope to convey some of the concerns of this exciting time in the Chinese women’s movement. My discus-

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sion is linked in a critical way to debates about globalization and translation. My theoretical approach makes use of postmodern and feminist ideas about cultural translation and knowing (Clifford 1989; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mignolo 2000). Methodologically, I am concerned with the material practices of translation, including debates that have taken place since the 1990s between Chinese women from different organizations and circles who are concerned with how to translate the past into the present as well as how to translate between different cultures and languages. In order to explore these issues, I focus on the details of everyday events and exchanges by which feminist theory travels. To capture something of this in China, I have systematically examined pertinent Chinese and English material including Chinese Women’s Studies journals, books, and relevant conference papers. During fieldwork in China in 1999, I also conducted interviews with various Chinese Women’s Studies scholars and with cadres from the Women’s Federation. My involvement since 2002 with the place-based collaborative project “Women and Development: Project Design, Analysis, and Implementation” in Xian and Kunming has given me valuable hands-on experience in observing one route by which the term “gender” travels.

Departure In the west, especially in North America, the term “gender” has played a key role in feminist theory and politics since the late 1960s. Debates over the meaning of “gender” and its distinction from “sex” reflect major turning points in feminist thinking of the past thirty years (see Nicholson 1998; Oakley 1997). The term “gender” is usually taken to have an Anglo-American origin, and it has been reviled as one of these things “made in the U.S.A.” (Scott 2003). However, as Joan Scott observes: Even here, though, [for many] there was no fixed meaning beyond the idea of “social sex.” There were feminists who took sexual difference as a given, the ground on which gender systems were then built; there were others who took sexual difference to be the effect of historically variable discursive practices of “gender.” (2003: 13)

Like the term “feminism,” the term “gender” has a number of linguistic troubles attached to it. In defining gender as a keyword in a German Marxist dictionary, Donna Haraway started her entry as follows: The root of the English, French, and Spanish words is the Latin verb, generare, to beget, and the Latin stem gener-, race or kind. An obsolete English meaning of “to gender” is “to copulate” (Oxford English Dictionary). The substantives “Geschlecht,” “gender,” “genre,” and “genero” refer to the notion of sort, kind and class. . . . The mod-



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ern English and German words, “gender” and “Geschlecht,” adhere closely to concepts of sex, sexuality, sexual difference, generation, engendering, and so on, while the French and Spanish seem not to carry those meanings as readily. Words close to “gender” are implicated in concepts of kinship, race, biological taxonomy, language, and nationality. (1991: 130)

This complex linguistic history of gender in European languages indicates that translating this term from English into other languages will always be difficult. The debate over gender that preceded the 1995 FWCW revealed some of the issues concerning power that can impact translation matters. During the preparations for the Beijing conference, the Vatican and other conservative forces made a serious attempt to undermine feminism by staging an apparently trivial attack on the use of the word “gender.” The Vatican attacked what it believed to be the very foundation of feminist theory—gender interpreted as a socially constructed difference between feminine and masculine. The preparatory document for the Beijing conference used the term “gender” to refer to the difference between masculine and feminine as distinct from anatomical sex, but not as a euphemism for sexual orientation, as the critics suggested. Jean Franco (1998) has argued that the Vatican’s attack was not only “against” feminism, but also “for” presenting the Church as a bulwark against a “savage capitalism.” This was aided by the fact that the Spanish and Portuguese word for gender, genero, did not have the same range of meanings as gender has in English. However, the story of the term “gender” traveling to China is quite different, and in a political sense it has had a much easier journey than the term “feminism.” Although the word “gender” had been translated into Chinese, and a gender perspective had been mentioned in some articles in China during the 1980s, not many people had noticed that a new concept had evolved until the 1993 workshop on Chinese Women and Development at Tianjin Normal University in China. At this workshop, the idea of a gender perspective was introduced by a group of Chinese scholars from the Chinese Society of Women’s Studies (CSWS),1 and it became the focus of discussion. Since then gender as a social category and a concept has been central to Women’s Studies in China (Zhang with Xu 1995). Since the FWCW in 1995, gender theory has been widely adopted by the AllChina Women’s Federation (ACWF), Chinese Women’s Studies scholars, and activists. The result has been the emergence of a transnational feminist movement that is now influencing Chinese Women’s Studies. The concept of gender has been at the top of the list of most traveling feminist theories and concepts. However, in order to explore the complicated routes of traveling feminist theories, we need to reconsider the issue of globalization and localization. One of the important reasons for this in my own case is that thinking about gender, feminism,

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women, and development cannot be confined to the context of China when China is already deeply involved in the processes of globalization. The predominant understanding of globalization is still limited by assumptions about the dichotomies of global/local and center/periphery relations. Although the issue of globalization had been discussed in the mainstream of western scholarship for a long time, relatively little attention has been given to localization. Perhaps, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos has commented, “More often than not, the discourse on globalization is the story of the winners as told by the winners” (1999: 216). But who are the losers, the locals? Wanting to escape the binary thinking of a rigidly distinct global and local, west and east, and to avoid seeing women as either victims or heroes, I have challenged the view of the local as contained within, and thus defined fundamentally by, the global. In place of this, I have conceptualized the changes occurring within Chinese Women’s Studies as a constituent part of the processes of globalization, and not as a result of events happening elsewhere. This permits more flexible thinking about the relationship between global and local. I want to “reveal a local that is constitutively global” (Katz 2001: 1214). The production and reception of feminist ideas in transnational exchanges illustrate some power relationships in “traveling theory” (Said 1984) and “cultural translation” (Clifford 1989; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Mignolo 2000). There is a hidden set of power relationships involved in the processes of traveling theory: [N]ot only does the concept of traveling theory tend to affirm the primacy of theory (or Western theory in the context of Said’s book) by endowing the latter with fullfledged, mobile subjectivity, but it fails to account for the vehicle of translation. With the suppression of that vehicle, travel becomes such an abstract idea that it makes no difference in which direction theory travels (from East to West or vice versa) and for what purpose (cultural exchange, imperialism, or colonization), or in which language and for what audience. (L. Liu 1995: 21)

Concrete attention to the material and discursive vehicles for translating gender can help us to locate and analyze these obscured power relations.  With transnational feminisms traveling to China, translation issues started emerging in Chinese Women’s Studies circles from the mid-1990s. Perhaps because they dealt with such issues every day and participated in translation projects, most of the concern came from overseas Chinese Women’s Studies scholars (Hom 1997; Lin 1997; Wang 1997a; Hsiung and Wong 1998; Min 1999). Initially, there was silence from their home counterparts, except for a few articles addressing some problems of translation after the FWCW in 1995 (Feng 1996; Qi 1997; X. Li 1999, 2002). Anxiety about translation issues began with looking for the right words, no-



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ticing language barriers in current international feminist dialogue, and asking how to negotiate the shaping of meaning by political and cultural forces. What is it that we should be anxious or concerned about when doing translation? Is translation just a matter of looking for the right words, or is there something going on beyond the words themselves? And if so, what precisely is it? What else do we know or can we say about translation and its implications for cross-cultural understanding? And indeed, what does it mean for a feminist scholar to cross the language barrier between two or more cultures and linguistic communities? The complex power relations inherent in traveling theory require a more nuanced view of translation; it is not a static matching of terms but rather an interaction that requires interpretation. Translation in the broad sense is a process of negotiating meaning. As Simon states: [M]eaning is not located within the culture itself but in the process of negotiation which is part of its continual reactivation. The solutions to many of the translator’s dilemmas are not to be found in dictionaries, but rather in an understanding of the way language is tied to local realities, to literary forms and to changing identities. . . . In fact the process of meaning transfer often has less to do with finding the culture inscription of a term than in reconstructing its value. (1996: 138, emphasis in original)

One problem we face in writing the history of these particular translations is the common misreading of feminism as unitary and intrinsically western. The story is always that feminism developed specifically out of western thought, and now it is spreading to other countries and cultures. This dominant story tells of a power flow of ideas in a one-way direction. The complex relationships of power in this traveling are missing. However, the running debate among anthropologists concerning cultural translation has shown us these power relations. Talal Asad, for example, cites cultural translation as crucial in power relations around cross-cultural interpretation and suggests that closer atten­tion should be paid to the social and political context. In effect, the ethnographer and the native informant speak different languages: To put it crudely: because the languages of the Third World societies—in­cluding, of course, the societies that social anthropologists have traditionally studied—are “weaker” in relation to Western languages (and today, espe­cially to English), they are more likely to submit to forcible transformation in the translation process than the other way around. (Asad 1986: 157–158)

In cross-cultural encounters, the more powerful societies generally have the privileged languages.

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These ideas about cultural translation have some major implica­tions for comparative scholarship and for cross-cultural studies. As Asad points out, translating into another language has less to do with lin­guistic competence and much more to do with institutional practices and the knowledge/power relationships that authorize certain ways of knowing about other’s cultures. Further, within cultures, different groups of translators may embrace competing agendas or negotiate from clashing organizational or structural positions. Much work needs to be done towards a concrete analysis of the dynamic involved in the relationship of unequal conceptual exchange. From this point of departure, I now want to reconsider these issues in the light of further research into the process of how “gender” traveled to and throughout China, asking where the term departed, how it traveled, how it was received and by whom, which translations of it were produced, and how these are received in different cultural and political contexts in China.

Jie Gui: Connecting with the International Track “The railway tracks in Russia and Inner Mongolia are a different gauge from each other; consequently, at the border there has to be a change of train. What is meant by jie gui? The train needs the same gauge tracks. If the ‘tracks’ in the East and the West are different, they cannot connect” (Gao Xiaoxian, interview, July 14, 1999). The concept of jie gui (connecting with the international track) is based on the view that China had been outside the international community for a long time, and when it returned to the international community, it had to change its gauge to fit the “international track.” One of the major events in this process of “jie gui” was China’s hosting of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW). It was in 1991 that the Chinese government made the decision to host the FWCW. Perhaps the decision was taken mainly out of political expediency after Tiananmen Square in 1989; the decision nevertheless had some immediate positive effects on women and also some unexpected results. For most of the Chinese Women’s Studies scholars and activists interviewed in my research, the idea of jie gui is very welcome. Hu Haili says, “Jie gui is a kind of escape from the narrow to the broad” (Hu, letter to author, July 24, 1998, my translation). Li Huiying says, “For China, the most important thing is to ‘open the door’ and continue the communication with the world. It doesn’t matter even if we are not similar at all” (interview, March 3, 1999). Dai Jinhua, one of the leading Chinese feminist scholars, writes: “As a turning point, suddenly the FWCW opened a window for us, we saw a new world. In fact, the process of preparation for the FWCW was a process of dissemination of feminism in China” (Dai 1999: 153, my translation). It is noticeable that these scholars use “door” and “window” as metaphors to



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Figure 5.1. Jie Gui: Connecting with the international track. Source: Ding Cong, pen name XiaoDing, artist. BTV Youth website. http://www.bjyouth.gov.cn/special/youxiu/ btv/page7.htm

emphasize that they wanted to get away from the confinement of political control and officialdom after the events of Tiananmen Square and to get fresh air from the outside world. These positive attitudes towards jie gui represented an important political trend in China in the 1990s. At the official level, there were many other changes also. After government officials from all over the world signed the Platform for Action at the FWCW, the All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) was quick to use the pledge made by the Chinese government. It launched a nationwide campaign to implement the Platform for Action and the Beijing Declaration, the two documents that “voice the aspiration of women all over the world,” as the Chinese media proclaimed. Even though this campaign was helping create legitimacy for the Chinese women’s movement in terms of “connecting with the international track,” the ACWF had to work out how to combine the term “gender” with traditional Marxist women’s theory and how to adapt to the concept of NGO (nongovernmental organization) in place of their old organizational structure. In November 1996, the president of the ACWF, Chen Muhua, produced a new exposition of Marxist women’s theory. She emphasized that “Marxist wom-

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en’s theory is concerned to analyze women’s issues from a gender (xingbie) perspective, and its core is the equality of women and men” (see Yiying and Yihong 1998: 1, my translation). The intent on the part of the ACWF was to incorporate these new ideas into the old theories so as to keep abreast of political and economic changes and to connect with the international community. This statement was an official encouragement as well as an indication that gender (xingbie) was becoming a popular concept in official discourse. But if there was no difference between a gender (xingbie) perspective and Marxist women’s theory, then why should the ACWF need the term xingbie within their discourse? Was it really useful, or was it included just for propaganda purposes? With these questions in mind, I reread the report of the special symposium to discuss the issue of gender (xingbie) consciousness held by the Women’s Studies Centre of the Central Party’s Cadres School in 1996. Women’s Studies scholars, activists, and women officers from the ACWF and from central government all participated at this symposium. During this meeting the first question asked was why xingbie consciousness was needed in China. Two reasons were emphasized. One was that there was a lack of xingbie consciousness in China; the other was the reality of inequality between women and men in China, and therefore xingbie consciousness was necessary (H. Li 1996). But how did the participants account for this, given that the official discourse held that women and men were equal? Kang Ling, the secretary of the ACWF secretariat, put forward the analysis that even though the laws and policies in China reflected equality between the two sexes generally, this was no guarantee that discrimination against women did not occur in practice. For instance, the ACWF raised the issue of women’s education with the Department of Education in the central government, but the department asserted that it was not necessary to address this issue because women and men have equal rights of education. Kang Ling argued that, although there was no discriminative clause in the law, there was no guarantee that women and men were treated equally in practice. Therefore, the idea of xingbie consciousness could help to eliminate this discrimination against women in practice (H. Li 1996). Reading this statement, which is partly an explanation of xingbie and partly a response to the complaints concerning problems faced by the ACWF, I gradually came to understand why the word xingbie was useful to the ACWF. The context was rapid socioeconomic transformation, and the ACWF had to deal with conflict between traditional Marxist women’s theory and the widespread recognition of discrimination in practice. The ACWF leadership consequently needed a new language with which to address gender issues within the framework of Marxist women’s theory. It seemed that the concept of gender (xingbie) provided a new term that helped the ACWF to solve its problem. Although the official ACWF emphasized



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that xingbie consciousness and equality between two sexes were precisely the same, the difference is that xingbie consciousness involves an a priori recognition of the existence of inequality between women and men as a starting point, while traditional Marxist women’s theory has a blind spot regarding xingbie. When I asked why the ACWF had changed its attitude so much, one of the leading Women’s Studies scholars in the ACWF explained: The ACWF always follows the government. If the Chinese government has an agreement about the Platform for Action, that means they should also recognize the gender perspective. Therefore the ACWF grasped the opportunity to introduce the gender perspective. In the meantime, the ACWF wants to raise the status of the organization. If gender consciousness is being channeled into mainstream policymaking, then as an organization the ACWF will be joining the political mainstream. (Liu Bohong, interview, March 3, 1999)

If the ACWF continues to find that gender is a useful term, then they can use it to “translate” Marxist women’s theory into a new approach. However, the incorporation of feminist claims at the level of official U.N. and government policy does not necessarily translate into effective implementation. As neoliberalist policies lead to the state having a less central role, and the market a much more important one, it is unlikely that the necessary resources will be allocated to promote gender equality. For instance, the head of the ACWF did not agree to write the term “gender” into the Eighth National Congress in 1998 (Liu Bohong, interview, March 5, 1999). Thus the chasm between gender consciousness, domestic politics, and actual practice in China remains. However, in a specifically political sense xingbie consciousness is still widely used at other levels of official ACWF discourse and by many Women’s Studies scholars and activists (B. Liu 1999; Gao, Jiang, and Wang 2002). Gender-oriented projects are carried on by the ACWF and the local Women’s Federations. For example, the Women’s Federation of Yunnan province conducted three large gender-training workshops for their cadres from 2000 to 2002. Afterwards, “gender mainstream” became a common discourse among the cadres of the Women’s Federation of Yunnan whom I interviewed in Kunming (interviews February 2003). Different attitudes towards the concept “gender” between the official ACWF and the local Women’s Federations reflect a reformation and reshaping of the Chinese Women’s Movement as it participates in the processes of globalization. During this process, the meaning and view of “local,” as Doreen Massey asserts, has changed. When the local is viewed from the perspective of the global, or when each thoroughly infiltrates the other, the local as understood in a “traditional” sense may not be very relevant and a more inclusive concept of local should be developed

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(Massey 1994). A global sense of the local is a site of both promise and predicament. Thus, we should move beyond the point of view that the local is a unique, self-contained place to a view that “situates places in their broader context and in relation to other geographic scales, offering a means of understanding structure and process” (Katz 2001: 1228). It is no surprise that transnational links around “development” funding played a fundamental role in pushing Chinese Women’s Studies into particular ways of connecting with the international track in the 1990s (Du 1996, 2001; Z. Wang 1997b; Hsiung and Wong 1998; X. Li 2000; Spakowski 2001; Milwertz 2002). An important part has been played by international organizations and western foundations such as the Ford Foundation, UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund for Women), UNDP (United Nations Development Programs), and the British Council. The Ford Foundation played the most prominent role in the 1990s by funding major Women’s Studies conferences and seminars. In addition to major Women’s Studies projects on reproductive health in China, the Ford Foundation also funded projects on rural women’s development, women’s education, the mobility of the female population, women’s legislation, and the Women and Gender Studies curriculum in higher education. Chinese Women’s Studies lacks funding resources within China, so a dependence on western and international foundations has been seen as the only possibility. Besides funding, these foundations have also offered ideas. As a Chinese sociologist in the Yunnan Reproductive Health Research Association (YRHRA) said to me: I can confirm that without the support of the Ford Foundation, the YRHRA would have found it difficult to survive. It is not just the money. The Ford Foundation has supported programs of reproductive health all over the world and has published guidelines for the programmers. Their support was ideological as well as financial, which is the absolutely important factor for the YRHRA since it was set up. (Zheng Fan, interview, October 1, 1999)

A second important factor in this transnational linking concerns the relationship between western feminist scholars and Chinese women scholars in the diaspora. Since the beginning of the 1990s, overseas Chinese Women’s Studies scholars have conducted many projects involving women scholars in China. Many have brought with them intellectual resources garnered from their own experiences with feminism while abroad as well as contacts with sources of funding (Z. Wang 1997b). The Chinese Society of Women’s Studies (CSWS) in the United States has been the key organization for the introduction of gender theory into China. It has been involved in many cooperative projects with Women’s Studies groups and individuals in China on the subject of gender through conferences, workshops, translations,



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publications, and training programs since the beginning of the 1990s (Z. Wang 1997b; Bao with Xu 2001; Spakowski 2001). Certainly, new ideas traveled to China from the “top” (World Health Organization, United Nations) and “bottom” (NGOs), from the west (United States, United Kingdom) and the east (Korea, Thailand, India). So much has happened, and so quickly, in the name of jie gui. The ideas of “gender” and “gender and development” have been given priority in Chinese Women’s Studies circles, not only because the 1995 FWCW put these issues on the agenda of the United Nations via recurrent conferences and NGO forums, but also because of financial support from international and in particular western foundations. The organization of Chinese women scholars in diaspora—CSWS—was a key player in these transnational links.

Xingbie or Shehui Xingbie Cutting across the general welcome given to the introduction of the word “gender,” a divergence of views on the translation and thus the meaning of gender has also emerged. Having no equivalent in the Chinese vocabulary, the term “gender” has been translated as xingbie (sexual difference) since the 1980s. Xingbie is already a part of Chinese vocabulary and using it to translate the term “gender” is an easy way to help people understand this imported word. However, a new translation, shehui xingbie (social + sexual difference) then came into existence and has been widely adopted since the mid-1990s. Shehui xingbie is a created term to which translators have tried to add new meaning. Nevertheless, compared with the debates about translation of the term “feminism,” discussion about translating the term “gender” into Chinese has been much less evident (Z. Wang 1997a; X. Li 1999, 2002). Translating Gender as Xingbie Women’s Studies scholar Li Xiaojiang (2002) insists on using the translation xingbie. She asserts that it is not difficult to define the notions of sex and gender in the Chinese language because the term “sex” (xing) refers to the natural, while the term “gender” (xingbie) refers to a social identity. In other words, xingbie comes from xing. Until now, whether or not we like to face up to it, Li states, the natural and social dimensions of gender have been coexistent (2002). With the term “gender” becoming a trendy word in Chinese Women/Gender Studies, Li tries to make the point that there are strong links between sex and gender. In order to prove her point, she draws on other features of the Chinese language: The terms woman (nuren) and man (nanren) already reveal their social character, since they refer to “human beings who have a socialized sexual character.” At the same time, both the terms nu (female) and nan (male) are attached to the term

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“human being” (ren), whereas the English word “woman” is attached to the word “man.” Therefore, in China, no matter how far women’s liberation is carried out, there is no need to launch another revolution in our conceptual scheme, because in our language the term “woman” (nuren) is not predicated on man. Furthermore, if it were not for the sake of facilitating communication between China and the West, it would be redundant to introduce the notion of gender (shehui xingbie) to the Chinese language, since nu and nan are already understood as social, and not natural beings. (X. Li 1999: 262)

As a pioneer of Women’s Studies in China, Li has always been concerned to maintain the difference between Chinese women and women in the west and anxious that Chinese Women’s Studies does not lose itself in the “lure” of “connecting with the international track.” But in trying to stick to an already existing Chinese term to translate gender, Li has, in effect, given up the chance to reinterpret the old word xingbie. Perhaps Li’s attitude towards western feminism can be defined as a defensive position in which a language practice acknowledges Otherness and opposes the Other. This defensive posture “enhances its specificity by heavily emphasizing the otherness of the ‘alien’ discourse,” and as a consequence “translation is generally viewed in a negative light” (Robyns 1994: 67–68). In terms of language, Li also overlooks the fact that, since the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese language has changed a great deal through the translation and adoption of western vocabulary and language practices, including gendering in written Chinese. For instance, as Lydia H. Liu’s research has revealed, one of the most fascinating neologisms invented since 1900 is the gendering of the thirdperson pronoun in written Chinese. The original form of the Chinese character for the pronoun ta contains an ungendered ren (denoting the human species), and the gendering of this pronoun arose out of translating English, French, and other European languages. Such a split at the symbolic level of the pronoun allows gender to shape social relations of power in a new language (L. Liu 1995). Moreover, Liu’s research enables a methodological rethinking of translingual representation of gender in modern China. Rather than refusing to adopt the new concepts, Liu links them to broader ideas about change: In a broader sense, deictic constructions of gender reflect and participate in a larger gendering process under way since the turn of the twentieth century, as Chinese men, women, and the state discover separately for themselves and in terms of one another that they all have a stake in deciding how gender difference should be constructed and what kind of political investment that difference should or could represent in China’s pursuit of modernity. (L. Liu 1995: 38–39)



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The important point here is that the notion of gender enables seeing differences between women and men, which link with class, race, and nationality as crucial in the processes of reconstructing society. Translating Gender as Shehui Xingbie Another important argument concerning the translation of the term “gender” comes from the overseas Chinese scholar Wang Zheng. As a key figure promoting gender theory in China, Wang strongly recommends that the translation should be shehui xingbie (social + sexual difference). In her article “An Analysis of ‘Female Consciousness’ and ‘Gender Consciousness,’” Wang (1997a) briefly introduced a history of gender theory in the west, mainly in America. Her view is that, compared with the theory of gender, and in particular Gayle Rubin (1975) and Joan Scott (1988), the translation xingbie does not satisfactorily render the meaning that gender has in western feminism. Xingbie derives from and “fits” Chinese culture, and confining gender to xingbie not only limits our understanding but also makes the concept confusing. For Wang, translation should avoid using terms that are full of existing ideas, so that they must be packed with the new concepts as well, and therefore she maintains that gender should be translated into shehui xingbie. The translating strategy here is that because the new term is made up of two words (social and sexual difference), it will make people ask: what is shehui xingbie? This question is a good precursor for understanding this new term (Z. Wang 1997a). Perhaps Wang Zheng is right, and xingbie is a good example of “unfaithful translation.” Indeed, it is hard to read it as incorporating the meanings commented on by Gayle Rubin or Joan Scott. As a major translator of gender theories in China, Wang Zheng had been following with interest the process of transferring the meanings of western feminist thoughts and concepts to Chinese readers. She wished to use gender theory as a heuristic device to produce better knowledge for Women and Gender Studies in China. However, during this endeavor, one inevitably comes under the hegemony of the source system. But if we accept that a major concept can never be exactly translated from one language into another, then it is clear that “to seek for ‘exact’ translation and ‘exact’ definition is not only wrongheadedness, but also leads to muddled analyses and muddled arguments” (Overing 1987: 76). The question is, instead, how to better understand translation itself. Perhaps the important thing to grasp is that “it is not the ‘word’ that we must translate, but another way of understanding things about the world that we must comprehend and learn” (ibid.). I agree with Liu that rather than arguing about how to properly translate the term “gender” into Chinese:

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one might do well to focus on the ways in which intellectual resources from the West and from China’s past are cited, translated, appropriated, or claimed in moments of perceived historical contingency so that something called change may be produced. In my view, this change is always already different from China’s own past and from the West, but have profound linkages with both. (L. Liu 1995: 39)

What needs to be grasped is the what and why of the translation xingbie or shehui xingbie, and the particular framework in which it is used and how this relates to the political and cultural situation of China.

Interpreting Gender In 1998, when I was writing my MA thesis on translation, it had been five years since the term “gender” was introduced into China at the Tianjin workshop in 1993, and since then both xingbie and shehui xingbie have been used for the term “gender” in the Chinese language. However, using gender as a category to analyze society, history, and culture was still rare (Min 1998). As Lin Chun has commented, “To what extent the new word can be articulated in the Chinese language and context as a useful category remains to be seen” (1997: 18). Indeed, how to interpret the concept of gender and use gender as a category of analysis in a Chinese context remains a question. I had this puzzle in mind when I started my Ph.D. fieldwork in China in 1999. In Beijing I was given articles on Women’s Studies and gender in China by Liu Bohong and Li Huiying, two of the most prominent advocates of “channeling xingbie (gender) consciousness into the mainstream of policymaking.” This channeling was promoted by the ACWF, and from these two articles, it is possible to see some active Chinese interpretations of gender. Liu Bohong’s article (1999) claims that the introduction of gender theory into China implies a “revolutionary meaning.” She describes three different aspects of the xingbie perspective in China: (1) the xingbie perspective stands for equality between women and men, (2) the xingbie perspective should be channeling into the mainstream of policymaking, and (3) xingbie as an analytic category. Perhaps due to her position in the ACWF, Liu tries to mix the gender perspective and Marxist women’s theory in promoting the development of gender theory in China. Interestingly, Li Huiying (1999) strongly criticizes the “misinterpretation” of the term “gender” by the ACWF. Li argues that the ACWF takes the individual subjective consciousness out of xingbie consciousness and blurs the distinction between xingbie consciousness and Marxist women’s theory. Li Huiying explained these points in my interview with her:



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Xingbie consciousness includes a gender perspective. When it came from the West, it embodied the meaning that everybody has their own right and dignity, and it also emphasized that people are independent and have initiative. But xingbie as the ACWF have interpreted it is just the difference between men and women, but didn’t consider the rights that men and women both should have, but presently don’t have, to be an independent person. They dismissed this aspect of gender. Women and men, rather than being treated as individual persons, have been equally treated as a kind of “tool” by the government. For example, population policy takes women as a “tool” of reproduction. It is impossible to let the ACWF question this, for it would affect the policy of the state. The ACWF had to find a meeting point with the government. Gender was misinterpreted by the ACWF, but this is an unavoidable thing in China. (Interview, March 3, 1999)

Li Huiying’s comments show how the relationship between Chinese women, the ACWF, and the government can be affected by the translation of the term “gender” in China. This particular interpretation of gender is based on the view that in the west gender theory equates with “individual rights.” Although one could argue that gender theory means something else in the west, the point I am making is that when the term travels in China, its meanings change as speakers and writers assimilate unfamiliar knowledge to familiar patterns. Ironically, while Li Huiying was criticizing the ACWF’s misunderstanding of the meaning of gender, she may not have seen that something similar could be said about the approach of Women’s Studies scholars. The ACWF, too, needed a new interpretation and new language in these times of change, and gender theory offered them the possibility for dialogue both outside and inside China, in a way that would include both Marxist women’s theory (past) and xingbie (present). A third approach to the interpretation of gender focuses on gender as a form of power. One of my interviewees told me: My understanding of gender is quite brave. Gender is a structure of power. The issue of politics and law includes power and rights. Gender is power. Only with power can you have rights. If you want a right, you must strive for power. You can use gender either as academic or as political. It is a vital power. (Du Fangqin, interview, April 7, 1999)

She repeated the word “power” many times in what she said. Even though she is not an English speaker, she used English terms when she conveyed the terms “gender,” “power,” and “rights” in order to emphasize their “original” meaning. For her and many other Chinese Women’s Studies scholars, gender theory does indeed bring power, for by promoting gender theory they receive political, academic, and finan-

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cial resources that they could not get before. Consequently, I was curious that the term “gender” seemed to be a substitute for the term “feminism.” Gao Xiaoxian’s explanation bore this out to some extent: I take gender as a part of feminism and don’t divide them into two parts. Gender theory offers me a very useful viewpoint to deconstruct the old theory and phenomena in traditional culture. (Interview, July 14, 1999)

In Kunming, Zhao Jie, a feminist researcher, said this in considerably stronger terms: In our Gender Studies Group, most members would like to accept gender, but not feminism. I have argued with them on this issue. I think feminism concerns the social relationship behind the gender relationship and involves questioning why women and men are different. That is why I think feminism and gender should be joined together. One of the members of our group asked, “Is it because feminism has become a dead end that they talk about gender?” I don’t think so. (Interview, March 30, 1999)

It is evident that gender was extremely influential in the 1990s in Women’s Studies and the women’s movement in China; sometimes, it took over from the term “feminism.” What we have to learn from these various interpretations of gender is, as de Lima Costa remarks: Ideas and concepts—which are never totally “pure” or “native”—flow out from locations that are already imbricated with other places and saturated by other ideas and concepts and subjects of enunciation, therefore opening up routes that attend closely to a rhizomatic logic: there is no clear point of origin nor an unequivocal end point. (2001: 2)

I think that, besides the political needs of the ACWF, there are two additional reasons why the travels and translations of gender have opened up important routes in China. The first is that xingbie is an old word meaning sexual difference in Chinese, and this fits well with the emerging understanding of differences between the two sexes in China. The second reason is that it links with traditional Chinese culture, which has always emphasized harmony between the two sexes. Here some Women’s Studies scholars have argued that the idea of xingbie consciousness can be used to promote the coordinated development of the sexes, thereby avoiding a widening gap between them. In short, the term “gender” is more accepted because it has roots in Chinese society and culture. In addition, the strong influence of feminism in in-



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ternational organizations such as the FWCW and in connection with America during the 1990s helped produce the routes that gender has taken in China.

Ruminations: Questions and Challenges The current wave of Chinese Women’s Studies and feminism is quite different from that of the 1980s. If the trend of Chinese Women’s Studies in the 1980s was dominated by Chinese scholars and activists, in the 1990s there was a shift because of important changes in the global context. The new wave of Chinese Women’s Studies during the 1990s cannot be seen as isolated or merely local developments, but instead as part of global patterns. The ACWF and Women’s Studies scholars and activists have employed the idea of jie gui to challenge existing internal hegemonies and to assert that “global” and western feminist ideas represent advanced, progressive thought. In the meantime, this trend may have blocked questioning as to who and what represents the global and the international community. It also has hindered exploration of the limits of “global feminism” and prevented more critical thinking about just which western feminisms traveled and why. I would rather see gender as an analytic category that has a more contradictory history in China. On the one hand, this concept was useful to the ACWF and in Women’s Studies academic circles as a means of deconstructing the old discourse of Marxist women’s theory and opening up new ways to tackle issues of discrimination. On the other hand, in many places, the use of the category of gender meant only a change of label, not of content. For some academics, Gender Studies was more appealing in the sense that they could continue to do Women’s Studies without running the risk of their work being called feminism. Perhaps the trend toward the depoliticization of academic feminism should be noted as a very marked feature of the broad changes occurring within Women’s Studies. There are challenges that face Chinese feminists: Challenge 1: The CSWS was a very important element in the process of translating key works of gender theory into Chinese. Most of the literature they have translated comes from America and very little comes from elsewhere. In order to get rid of sexual essentialism in Chinese Women’s Studies, these translations emphasized the distinction between sex and gender. In the end, gender became a dominant word in Women’s Studies circles. For example, at the end of 2001 I received an academic exchange proposal that was written in both English and Chinese from the Women’s Studies Centre at a Chinese university. In this document, the term “gender” was translated as “social gender.” I would guess that this translation came from the Chinese shehui xingbie (social + sexual difference). It would be possible to argue that this Chinese translator was not familiar with western feminism, and that

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she (or he) was unaware of the debates occurring in the west on the distinction between sex and gender. But the point I draw from this example is very different: because of the lack of feminist discussions and debates on the relationship between sex and gender, as gender theory traveled to China and was translated into Chinese, it “lost” meanings. The term “gender” became simply another word for “sex,” and thus the need for my feminist correspondent from this university to qualify it as social gender in writing to me. However, I am curious about this because the writer completely ignored an earlier body of literature on this issue in which feminist social scientists challenged the distinction between sex and gender and asserted that sex itself was a social construction (see Jackson 1999). Perhaps the explanation is simply that this was primarily European social science and was not known to scholars of CSWS in the United States. It is curious that Chinese scholars should be fixated exclusively on American material. Still, the question remains as to what political and economic machine makes some languages of feminist thought legitimate and others illegitimate in areas of the Chinese women’s movement. What feminist thought traveled well, and what other important feminist thoughts have not yet traveled to China? The power relationship behind this global flow of feminist thoughts, publications, and activism should be revealed, and this is clearly an area of work to encourage. Challenge 2: The term “gender” travels in most cases with projects of development from the developed “north” and “west” to the developing “south” and “east.” The term “gender” has not only been transmitted and received in academic circles, it has also been translated from “global” meanings into “local” practices in the women’s movement. Accordingly, we should be concerned about the differences between the routes feminism has traveled to academia and those it has traveled to the women’s movement in China. Gender, despite being one of the most important propositions of feminist theory in China, still remains on very fragile ground, especially when it travels to women at the grassroots level. For most activists who are involved in projects of gender and development, the concept of gender is still a very difficult term to understand. But if they cannot understand this concept, as one researcher has noted, the field of gender and development becomes nothing more than an “Italian opera” that is appreciated by a small group of people (Xiang 2002). The question is, therefore, how do women in grassroots organizations deal with the concepts of gender, if they do not appreciate the Italian opera? People often make appropriate adaptations in the light of specific conditions. In Yunnan, with the extensive projects of gender and development that have been carried out since the 1990s, even women in rural areas have been linking to international organizations and transnational feminist ideas, and the term “gender” was familiar to them. The cadres of the Women’s Federation in Yunnan told me that they interpreted the



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term “gender” into “women and development” and “women and men are equal.” These are terms familiar to the local people. In the words of the cadres: “In the villages, you have to use the language of ordinary people” (interviews, February 2003). In this process the Italian opera has been rearranged into local opera. The cadres translated transnational feminist ideas into local praxis, according to their local political views, projects, and daily lives as activists and collective subjects. Moreover, this story posits a challenge within a challenge: What does the Women’s Studies movement do about this? Where is the meeting point between Women’s Studies academic scholars and activists of the women’s movement in this transnational feminist process? Challenge 3: Changes in the use of the term of gender in China are not only related to changes in transnational feminism (which are related to international agencies and funding facilities) but are also related to changes in Marxist women’s theory. Considering that Marxist women’s theory is still the directive thought for the Women’s Federation, this third challenge entails building up a renewed kind of socialist feminist thinking and acting, which is now grounded in debates on interwoven discriminations and inequalities. Although the Women’s Federation has been re-examining Marxist women’s theory through the lens of socialist feminism and liberal feminism since the 1980s, dialogue is needed urgently between Marxist women’s theory and the theory of gender and other feminisms. Chinese Women’s Studies circles and the women’s movement must not ignore these travels and translations.

Notes I wish to thank Vrinda Dalmiya, Kathy Ferguson, Mary Madden, Monique Mironesco, and Lucinda Peach for their help and support; the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on this article; friends from the Conference on Globalization and Gender at the University of Hawai‘i in April 2004 for their feedback; and my husband Allen for his endless support. Epigraph. Friedman 1998: 151. 1. The Chinese Society for Women’s Studies (CSWS) was formed in the United States in 1989. It is a feminist organization for students, scholars, and activists interested in Chinese Women’s Studies, and it promotes the exchange of ideas and collaborative research and training projects in the field.

List of Interviews Interviewed by Author Du Fangqin, April 7, 1999, Tianjin, China

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Gao Xiaoxian, July 14, 1999, Oxford, United Kingdom Li Huiying, March 3, 1999, Beijing, China Liu Bohong, March 4–5, 1999, Beijing, China Zhao Jie, March 30, 1999, Kunming, China Zheng Fan, October 1, 1999, Manchester, United Kingdom Interviewed by Li Chunrui, Tong Jiyu, Yang Jing, Zhao Jie, and the Author Ji Xuemei, February 23, 2003, Kunming, China Li Yi, February 26, 2003, Kunming, China Yang Hong, February 23, 2003, Kunming, China Correspondence Hu Haili, personal letter, July 24, 1998

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Gaze Upon Sakura Imaging Japanese Americans on Japanese TV

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he critiques of portrayals of Asian American women by American media are numerous. On film, stage, television, and magazines, the Suzie Wongs have blended far too easily into the Madame Butterflies, conflating Asian Americans with Asians, exoticizing both as mysterious and sexually alluring. We are sakepouring geishas, kung-fu dragon ladies with slanted eyes and other body parts, or more recently a Charlie’s Angel with a twist.1 Our hair is inevitably long, black, and straight, our bodies slight and presumably supple. We are both desirable and dangerous in our otherness. As bell hooks argues, otherness attracts as “a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling” (1998: 181). In spite of the Margaret Chos who have taken back the stage with hip raunchiness,2 American media falls back too easily on older stereotypes of difference that construct (Asian and) Asian American females as representative of a particular brand of femininity that is not only distant but also past.3 We thus become old-fashioned girls who know how to please men, if sometimes (and perhaps especially) in unexpected ways. What happens, however, when the representation of Asian American females is placed in the hands of Asian media? What are the processes and images of their representation? How do these overlap or contrast with that of American media? In this chapter I address these and other questions through one case study:4 a 2002 Japanese soap opera, Sakura, whose main character is a young female Nikkei (person of Japanese ancestry but not Japanese citizenship/nationality) from Hawai‘i. Sakura is a production of NHK (Nihon Hōsō Kyōkai, Japan Public Broadcasting Corporation), a noncommercial, “public” media network paid for by viewer fees and strong governmental support. In this drama the main character, Elizabeth Sakura (cherry blossom, symbol of Japan) Matsushita,5 travels to Japan, where she spends one year teaching English at a private middle school in the countryside. In the process, she proves herself “more Japanese than Japanese,” espousing traditional Japanese values, championing Japanese arts, and invoking the importance of kokoro (heart/mind/spirit), an unofficial centerpiece of Japanese spirituality and

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identity. In analyzing this drama, I ask, what is the work that this portrayal of a young female Nikkei intends? How does gender ineluctably shape the portrait? How do Nikkei, as prodigal Japanese, become exemplars of what Japan has lost? As Darrell Hamamoto points out, even though Japanese Americans have been part of American society for four and even five generations, and immigration to the United States has been drastically reduced since 1960, their depiction in American media remains frozen in time as newly arrived foreigners, producing a “symbolic containment [that] implies that Japanese Americans still occupy ‘probationary’ status within the larger society” (1994: 11). Nikkei, by these American media depictions, are forever foreign and always diasporic in their continuing tie to the “mother country.”6 And when we turn to Sakura, we find Japanese media depiction of Nikkei is in agreement with this American portrayal. Both, in the words of James Clifford, position Nikkei as “not-here to stay” in America (1997: 255). In the case of Japanese media depiction, however, the focus is not so much on the otherness of Nikkei vis-àvis Japan (although that is inevitably a part of their portrayal), but of the possibilities of their domestication as members of the Japanese self-nation. The potential domestication rests on an underlying racialism that creates a blood tie of all those of Japanese ancestry, and the extension of that tie to include not only blood, but an originary sense of culture as well.

The Media Context: NHK, the Asadora, and “Women’s Genres” The media context in which Sakura should be viewed is that of NHK and this particular genre of daytime television, the asadora (morning drama). The tie between NHK and the Japanese government is longstanding and deep. Japan’s Broadcasting Law, enacted in 1950, identifies NHK as a media arm of the government, which requires the following of the network: (1) to broadcast high-quality programs that will both satisfy the demands of the public and elevate the country’s cultural level; (2) to broadcast local as well as national programs; and (3) to contribute to the preservation of traditional culture and foster and publicize modern cultural events. (Takagi 1983: 172)

NHK by law assumes the responsibility of educating and cultivating the public in Japan directly through its programming. The sense of a national body finds resonance in NHK’s unofficial motto: minasama no NHK—that is, “NHK of, by, and for minasama,” an honorific form meaning everybody, everyone, the people. Who constitutes this minasama, how this process of cultivation takes place, including the role of gender, and what may be deemed beneficial for the good of this public are central to the ideological work of NHK’s programming.



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Viewers in Japan regard NHK as conservative broadcasting that is authoritative and prestigious. Few think to question NHK, except on trivial issues in which the motto minasama no NHK takes on a different cast: if NHK belongs to the people, then the people may take it upon themselves to criticize minor elements of the network’s offerings.7 This is not to say that NHK is viewed with enthusiasm by all segments of Japan’s population. Many young people, for example, feel ill-served by the minasama of NHK’s making, viewing the broadcast network as stodgy, oldfashioned, and out of touch with the latest trends. In addition, scholars such as Lisa Yoneyama (2002) have sharply criticized NHK for caving in to right-wing pressure in its presentation of Japan’s war crimes and the issue of comfort women. The asadora of which Sakura is a part is a genre particular to NHK that has been developed specifically for its time slot and target audience of primarily (although not exclusively) women. The genre distinctively frames the way Japanese viewers interpret what they see in the drama: asadora have a look, sound, and emotional texture that viewers have come to expect (see also Ang 1996). Sakura is the sixty-sixth NHK asadora since the inception of the genre in 1961. Each asadora is a fixed-length serial drama, typically broadcast six mornings weekly in fifteen-minute segments, over a period of approximately six months. NHK provides ample opportunities for viewing: there is first the regular broadcasting on NHK1, Monday through Saturday from 8:15–8:30 a.m., and these episodes are rebroadcast on those days at 12:45 p.m.; the shows are also available via satellite on NHK2, Monday through Saturday from 7:30–7:45 a.m., and there is a compilation of the week’s shows on Saturday at 9:30 a.m. Because asadora is daytime television, it is known as programming geared primarily to women, as well as retirees and young children. Others, such as elementary through high school-aged children, often watch as well, especially the earlier morning broadcasts. Nevertheless, asadora retain the air of women’s programming, which is widely acknowledged in Japan as conservative family drama. Asadora may be considered melodrama, or more specifically that subset of melodrama known as soap opera. Wimal Dissanayake defines melodrama as “a form of drama characterized by sensationalism, emotional intensity, hyperbole, strong action, violence, rhetorical excesses, moral polarities, brutal villainy and its ultimate elimination, and the triumph of good” (1993: 1). Although some elements such as strong action, violence, and brutal villainy are absent from asadora, Dissanayake’s overall characterization of melodrama applies to asadora in the following ways: (1) the prominence given to the experiences, emotions, and activities of women; (2) its exposure of the workings of ideology within its “emotional intensities and rhetorical excesses”; and (3) its revelation of aspects of culture, including “the diverse casts of mind, shapes of emotion, vocabularies of expression, imaginative logics, and priorities of valuation” (ibid.: 2). Melodrama reproduces mainstream values as well as suggesting ways that daily practices may cloak an intervention upon those values.

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As Christine Gledhill argues, “Melodrama addresses us within the limitations of the status quo, of the ideologically permissible. . . . Its possibilities lie in this double acknowledgment of how things are in a given historical conjuncture, and of the primary desires and resistances contained within it” (1987: 38). Ien Ang suggests three important dimensions of soap opera as a form of melodrama: personal life as its “core problematic”; extreme story lines and their emotional impact; and lack of narrative resolution (1996: 90–91). Soap operas thus display everyday life as outsized performances of hyperreality. Tania Modleski argues that soap operas build on female viewership in their narrative patterns, highlighting “female” skills in problem-solving and scheduling broadcasts around the daily rhythms of housewives and their work (1982: 105). These “gynocentric genres” of film and television, in the words of Annette Kuhn, build on “narratives motivated by female desire and processes of spectator identification governed by female pointof-view” (1987: 339). In these many ways Sakura and other NHK asadora constitute a gynocentric genre, in other words, a Japanese soap opera. But asadora are soap operas with a difference; they are geared to morning viewing in short broadcast bytes for Japanese audiences who do not necessarily want to weigh ponderous issues or complex story lines. NHK’s asadora may be considered “melodrama/soap opera lite,” without violence, heroism, or baroque plots. Instead, at least recent asadora contain a cartoon-brand of humor that alternates with tears as its expressive means. In comic scenes, actors mug before the camera and roll their eyes in an exaggerated fashion, to the accompaniment of light music that further trivializes their actions. By contrast, dramatic scenes are marked by extreme closeups on placid faces masking inner turmoil, accompanied by silence or a melancholy flute. Because the genre is based upon fifteen-minute segments, the drama tends to be cut up into short anecdotes as quips of action. Furthermore, most episodes begin with a brief recap of what had gone on previously; this allows viewers to drop in with minimal confusion, but it also reduces even more the time spent furthering the narrative action. The result is a drama that precedes much like a cartoon strip in short segments of action, but with continuing development of characters and their interrelationships. The brevity and daily broadcasting of asadora are ideally suited to housewives, who do not need to interrupt their daily chores for very long to maintain a working knowledge of and thus a relationship to this drama. The main characters in recent asadora are often young women who undergo some kind of personal hardship, resulting in growth and change.8 According to Aoki Shin’ya, assistant producer of Sakura, the actress chosen to play the main character of an asadora is typically an unknown or a newcomer to show business, which makes her appearance in the principal role part of the show’s appeal (personal communication, 6/2/02). Indeed, the publicity for Sakura repeatedly mentions that the actress in the leading role, Takano Shiho, was chosen from among



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nearly 2,500 aspiring actresses. The process of making the asadora, then, also becomes part of the Japanese audience’s viewer experience. Both NHK and the Japanese audience may be said to “discover” this new talent and participate in her public upbringing. The themes of Sakura—a young female put to the test in a new environment, growth and development through hardship, reinforcement of traditional values—are themes common to the asadora genre and therefore part of a Japanese viewer’s set of expectations when watching Sakura.

Sakura: Eye upon Nikkei In Japan Sakura had an audience viewership averaging approximately 23 percent,9 considered a success by NHK standards. Viewers in Japan enthusiastically welcomed this story of a fresh-faced young Nikkei who was much like them, yet posed challenges that disarmingly disrupted their business-as-usual lives. The character Sakura is a yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese American)10 who goes to Japan on a personal quest to discover her roots, as well as to teach English for one year. Her family lives as a three-generational household, and includes one person with direct ties to Japan in each generation except the youngest. Therefore, the presence of Japan is deep and immediate. Furthermore, those persons presently living with the most direct ties to Japan are all women—that is, the in-marrying women of this patriline are all issei, first-generation Japanese. Women become the biological and presumably cultural lifeline to Japan, even as men affirm the accruing and ongoing tie to Euro-America, via Hawai‘i. This gendered division parallels that found in early twentieth-century Japan, in which women were designated as the repositories of tradition, while men were said to be at the forefront of modernity.11 Japanese is the language of the home in Sakura’s family; not only do all family members speak it to each other, but so, too, does Sakura’s Caucasian fiancé, Robert, who spent part of his childhood in Japan. Within this heavily Japan-centered family context, Sakura is singled out as one with particularly close emotional and intellectual ties to Japan. Her interest in Japan comes through her paternal grandfather,12 whose favorite she is. He long ago imposed upon the family rules about speaking Japanese, eating Japanese foods, and following Japanese customs. Therefore, although the male side of the family enables a progressive investment in the United States by virtue of successive generations in Hawai‘i, those generations are filled with diasporic ties to Japan—through in-marrying women, as well as deliberate efforts to maintain Japanese ways and language. Grandfather acts as the family arbiter of things Japanese, even though he himself is not necessarily the one who has had the most direct contact with Japan. The relationship between Sakura, her grandfather, and their ties to Japan and the past in many ways parallels that between Nikkei in general and their ties

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to Japan’s past. Just as Sakura is a repository of her grandfather’s spirit, so, too, are Nikkei—and particularly Nikkei in Hawai‘i—said to be a cultural repository for Japan’s rural past, carrying on the ways of Japan as distilled from the regions and time period of their original immigration (1885–1924). Aspects of Nikkei immigrant culture in Hawai‘i are considered by many in Japan to be an example of marginal survival, in which the margins of a diasporic population tend to preserve particular elements of the home country, while adopting and adapting others. Nikkei thus represent nostalgic exemplars of who “we Japanese” once were. Although Sakura’s family explains their commitment to retaining Japanese language as a deliberate effort, it is easy enough for viewers in Japan to naturalize Japanese as the default language (and therefore a set of linguistic expectations) for anyone with Japanese blood. As Harumi Befu points out, the tie among land, race, culture, and language gets reinscribed repeatedly in nihonjinron (theories of being Japanese) and other nationalistic forms of discourse in modern Japan (1993: 115). However, Sakura and other Nikkei in the drama—performed by Japanese actors— occasionally stumble upon words and ask for help learning new vocabulary, creating a linguistic deficiency that calls upon native Japanese speakers for help. In many instances, these linguistic lapses sound at odds with the rest of their speech, which is perfect, colloquial, unaccented, native-level Japanese. The Nikkei characters performed by Japanese actors must be made to perform their overt linguistic mistakes through the workings of the script. By contrast, non-Nikkei gaijin actors in the drama speak in accented Japanese, but they never stumble over words or ask for linguistic help. The spotlight focuses on Nikkei and the processes of their becoming Japanese, and diverts attention from the non-Nikkei gaijin, whose attempts likewise to “become Japanese” may pose more of a threat to the Japanese nation. According to the NHK brochure that introduces the show, Sakura is one “whose outward appearance is Japanese but whose thinking is American” (2002: 7). One arena in which this American thinking is made public early in the series is in terms of gender relations. Japan’s notorious male chauvinism finds immediate critique from newcomer Sakura. She complains about being made to serve tea to men, as all female employees are expected to do. After a night of socializing with other teachers from the school, she complains to the vice-principal that she was the object of sexual harassment. The men in the office roll their eyes in bemusement, but even the women refuse to rise in her defense. Instead, they take the socially superior stance of experience, explaining that all women have at some point or other been subject to such behavior by men, but that mature women learn to brush it off with humor (Episode 11). Sakura, in other words, is both an outsider and a child in her complaints. What changes Sakura’s thinking is the advice from a fellow male teacher in whom she has been confiding. He accuses her of being “like all the other gaijin [foreigners] who say that they love Japan and then do nothing but complain



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and criticize. . . . If you want to understand Japan, you have to learn about it from the inside, not just superficially from the outside” (Episode 11). This advice sounds benevolent enough, but what this means is that Sakura must silence her opinion. “Learning from the inside” means playing the part of the insider, thus accepting existing Japanese cultural values and practices, including gender inequalities. The next scene shows Sakura’s resolution to her “problem”: she is shown serving the men tea with a broad smile and overly cheerful greeting. The men remark with amazement at the pleasant, but radical, change; Sakura’s smile turns to weary exhaustion as soon as the men are not looking. As a result of this change in behavior, Sakura is regarded more favorably as one who is trying hard to fit in. What is the process of gender socialization that Sakura undergoes here? It is little more than that of the performativity of daily life—of the efficacy of daily tea-pouring, of laughing off sexual advances—for the sake of the harmonious (male-dominant) whole. The lesson may be drawn upon this one young female Nikkei, but it extends to all others who live within the cultural whole: in order for the whole to run smoothly, each individual (and especially female individuals) must sacrifice some of their own desires. This split between social welfare and individual desire is succinctly summed up in the often-invoked distinction made between tatemae (public, social set of expectations) and honne (person’s true feelings), the subject of countless dramas, from classical Japanese plays to modern melodramas. NHK’s depiction of Sakura’s Americanness goes beyond thinking to bodily matters. She runs around with arms and legs flailing; she gapes, mugs, and grimaces with exaggerated facial expressions.13 Hers is a body out of control, like that of a child before it has been trained in Japanese ways of sitting, standing, and bowing. For example, when she and fellow teacher Mr. Katsuragi are conducting their first family visit to homes of their students, Sakura’s foot falls asleep, and she cannot stand up.14 Katsuragi:  Can’t you even sit properly? Sakura:  What? Katsuragi:  It was just for twenty minutes. Sakura:  But I’m an American. Katsuragi:  Don’t say that with a Japanese face. (Episode 16)

Later, when her family comes to visit Sakura in Japan, the same thing happens to her father, who ends up falling over when he tries to rise from the dinner table (Episode 55).15 Part of what redeems Sakura is the same thing that is often a source of consternation and rebuke—her body. She is small in stature, being both short and slight. She stands shorter than many of her junior high students and looks to weigh less. With her pixie haircut and thin boyish figure, she looks more like a shōjo (young,

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unmarried girl between the ages of approximately eight and sixteen) than the university graduate student in her twenties that she is in the story. Her clothes, too, tend to downplay any adult sexuality; she typically dresses in long pants and shirts that cover most of her torso and arms. In her conservative, childlike appearance, she presents little threat to Japanese viewers. She is the opposite of the stereotypical westerner who is tall, overbearing, and aggressive. Sakura is short and cute, if outspoken. She is also the opposite of the stereotypical Japanese American female depicted by the American media, who is longhaired, exotic, and sensual. By contrast, Sakura seems almost asexual, even though she has a boyfriend. People assume certain things about her because she is American, and at times she disproves them. For example, the first morning that she is served breakfast, her homestay mother serves her what she expects Americans to eat—two fried eggs and toast—while everyone else in the family eats rice and miso soup, a more typical Japanese breakfast. Sakura is dismayed and says that she prefers rice, explaining that in her family her grandfather’s policy was to have rice for breakfast. The homestay family’s teenage daughter is delighted to be able to eat Sakura’s toast, but the dialogue shows Sakura is making the correct choice. Grandfather:  Bread won’t sustain you throughout the day. Sakura:  I agree. Rice gives you power. Grandfather:  I agree. Father:  It looks like Sakura and Dad think alike. (Episode 19)

Several things are going on in this scene. Like many other aspects of life in contemporary Japan, food becomes dichotomized as Japanese (rice) or western (bread). What you eat for breakfast is interpreted as an indicator of who you are, including your relationship to things Japanese (Yano 2002: 206, n 3). The teenage daughter’s enthusiastic reaction to being able to eat Sakura’s toast pantomimes what is considered to be the appetite of Japanese youth for things western and, to some extent, urban. A teenager’s life in this rural village, then, becomes a period of biding one’s time until one may leave for life in the city, where one may presumably eat bread with abandon. In addition, rice is imbued with both physical and symbolic power (Ohnuki-Tierney 1993). Bread (that is, western ways) is a flash-in-the-pan quick fix; Japanese, according to this ideology, need rice (Japanese ways) to feel truly full and to sustain themselves throughout the day. Sakura is placed in the position of teaching Japan’s youth (and adults) the ways of their own forefathers. She is a cultural keeper, a position that links her more closely to grandfathers on both sides of the Pacific than to those her own age. In fact, Sakura becomes a catalyst for the Japanese around her to consider their relationship to Japan. In one scene (Episode 27), Sakura expresses great interest in



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her homestay family’s generations-old business of candle-making. The family craft stands in danger of folding for want of a successor to continue the business, and Sakura takes it upon herself to learn about candle-making. She watches the grandfather painstakingly making each candle, all the while taking copious notes; and we watch as the family, including young son Daisuke, watch her watching. In another scene Sakura and other non-Nikkei foreigners learn calligraphy from a Japanese master. Later, inspired by Sakura’s enthusiasm for the beauty of the art, her host family gathers around the dining table and practices calligraphy themselves. Grandfather:  It’s nice to sit down and use a brush and ink once in a while, isn’t it? Sakura:  Calligraphy is a wonderful tradition of Japan. Each Chinese character has a deep meaning. Grandmother:  Sakura, since you came here, you’ve made us think about a lot of things. Father:  It’s strange to have an American teach us about Japanese culture and tradition. (Episode 43)

In both of these scenes, grandfather leads off as practitioner of the traditional art form. Others may or may not follow Sakura’s example. But careful attention is paid to thirteen-year-old Daisuke, the youngest male of the family, out of concern for the patrilineal flow of past ways and practices. In her respect for tradition, Sakura becomes both the taught and the teacher, the observer and the observed, in a kind of embedded triangulated relationship between younger Japanese, older Japanese—particularly males—and Nikkei, here female. Gender plays an important role in this triangle. For many reasons, Sakura could not have been a man. Adopted into this host family, she can become another daughter who, within the patriarchal family system, must be brought up, protected, made marriageable, and then let go. Daughters, in other words, have the mobility to travel by way of marriage as daughters-in-law. They function as mediators between persons, families, and communities. Their in-betweenness makes them sojourners in transit who accommodate themselves to those around them and are therefore necessarily attentive to the subtlest conditions and requirements. Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law within this system have a stereotypically tense relationship as trainers and trainees into the ways of the household. The past image of women in rural Japan is as caretakers of family traditions, especially as practiced within the household. (In this regard Sakura stands in contrast, because it is the homestay grandfather who upholds his family’s public tradition of candle-making, and it is Sakura’s paternal grandfather in Hawai‘i who took it upon himself to impose family/Japanese traditions upon his family.) Rural women also held (and still hold) a

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particular relationship to tradition as the ones who move from their natal household to their conjugal one. Unlike men, they undergo the processes of being an outsider, a trainee, and then ultimately a tradition keeper. Sakura fits into this family system not only as a daughter, but also as a daughter-in-law, an outsider trainee, and eventually caretaker of the ways of Japan. More than a woman, however, Sakura is a shōjo. She is kawaii (cute), physically and socially. These elements bundle together being vulnerable, dependent, hapless, childlike, and endearing. Her dependence—to some extent linguistic, as she makes some implausible blunders for her otherwise native facility with Japanese—calls upon those around to help her, thus sealing their relationship to her. She is the one that the community of Japanese must raise. If the Sakura character were a boy, he would need to be raised as well, but placing a male in that position would emasculate him. Sakura’s dependency only further feminizes her. In this drama, then, Nikkei become shōjo, bound to dependency through their hybridity. Nikkei retain this liminal state of pubescence—not fully adult, not fully Japanese, but always with the potential to learn and become. The tightrope for Nikkei as depicted by NHK is their very hybridity, with one foot in each country, both child and adult. Being Japanese for Sakura becomes something that she must be taught, but something that she can learn because she has the racial foundation that justifies the lessons. Japaneseness incorporates both the racial and cultural, both nature and nurture, a balancing act between something that is taught, but where students are restricted to those who can claim the birthright of race. Part of the lesson of Nikkei in the NHK drama is that they can learn to become Japanese because their blood gives them the ability as well as the right to do so. In the process, Sakura herself becomes a lesson to Japanese viewers on being Japanese, not only through the arts that she appreciates, such as calligraphy and candle-making, but more importantly through the spiritual qualities she embodies. In one scene, the homestay grandfather and Sakura have a long talk late at night while drinking sake during which he reveals the responsibility he places in her: Grandfather:  Why do you think I let you stay with us here? Sakura:  I don’t know. Grandfather:  It’s because I felt that you’d understand the heart of the Japanese. Sakura:  The heart of the Japanese? Grandfather:  The heart that even the Japanese today have forgotten. The humility it takes to give in to others. . . . A strong determination to take on something without blaming others. I felt that you had those qualities. Sakura:  No, I don’t. Grandfather:  You could say that it’s the heart of Japan.



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Sakura:  The heart of Japan? Grandfather:  . . . The heart of Japan. Sakura:  I’d be so happy if that were true. Grandfather:  Don’t ever forget that heart. Sakura:  I won’t. (Episode 101)

The scene is shot almost entirely in close-ups and reaction shots, flipping from one face to the other. As the words “the heart of Japan” (nihon no kokoro) ricochet gravely from one set of lips to the other, this becomes NHK’s mantra of Japaneseness, passed down from grandfather to this adoptive Nikkei granddaughter, on display to the minasama of Japan. The ideological hand here is overt and weighty. What about others who are not racially Japanese? In this NHK drama, there are various gaijin (foreigner) residents of Japan. One has even married a Japanese woman and operates a tōfu restaurant where the customers are primarily other gaijin. The restaurant serves Japanese food exclusively and has a “speak Japanese only” policy, not unlike that imposed by Sakura’s grandfather on his own Nikkei family. It is, in other words, a place for gaijin to practice or play at being Japanese—eating Japanese food, speaking Japanese, learning calligraphy from a wizened old master. These gaijin take Japanese as a pursuit of benkyō (study). There are limits, however, to this space of becoming Japanese for the gaijin who participate. For one thing, it is a bounded space, owned and operated by gaijin. It is not a Japanese space, but one set aside for those who want to study and practice the language and customs. As such, it is always set apart and performed as gaijin doing Japanese things, such as eating Japanese food (cooked by gaijin) and speaking Japanese (primarily with other gaijin). The patrons are young, unmarried, multiracial, and transient gaijin from America, Canada, France, Senegal, and Brazil. In fact, the extent to which these gaijin can become Japanese is limited. They are always quarantined by their phenotypic difference, hitting a glass ceiling of acceptance because they do not have the racial qualities to fully adopt these cultural ways. Unlike Sakura and other Nikkei who always have the potential to become Japanese, these non-Nikkei gaijin can only practice and perform; they can never become. In contrast to Sakura is her younger, teenage sister Stephanie Momo (Peach) Matsushita. Momo is physically taller, with a darker complexion, long hair dyed brown, and a broad, open smile. Her size stimulates attention and wonder, especially from the teenage boys at Sakura’s school, who describe her as iroppoi (sexy). Seated at a lunch table with her when she is visiting from Hawai‘i, they ask her questions such as “How tall are you?” and “What are your measurements?” which she blithely ignores. Instead, she eats hungrily and even finishes the lunch of one of the boys. The boys look at each other in amazement, commenting, “No wonder she’s so big!” (Episode 58). Unlike Sakura, then, Momo has a gaijin’s body and sexuality. She greets

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people with a smacking kiss on the cheek, leaving traces of her lipstick in a trail of boisterous interactions. The presence of Momo heterogenizes NHK’s portrait of younger female Nikkei, but her effect is limited, especially given her minor role. In addition, she speaks Japanese as well as Sakura, and she ultimately shares the same values, even if they come bundled in a rougher, less palatable form. Like all children, Momo simply needs to learn that there is nothing fundamentally “wrong” with her. What is right is that she is racially Japanese. Her shortcomings, then, may be overlooked because they are similar to those of others—including children and young adults in Japan— who also only need to learn how to become culturally Japanese. NHK paints this version of Nikkei unproblematically: Sakura is young, attractive, fluent (except for occasional gaffes), highly educated, and in love with Japan. She is not confronted with some of the negative stereotypes of Nikkei as “dumb Japanese” who lack the cultural knowledge that should course through their veins, or as “failed Japanese” who in their own historical past could not succeed and were forced to leave the country as immigrants. Instead, she is welcomed, in part because of her Japanese face, her disarming, childlike ways, and her admiration for Japan. She retains her distinctiveness from native Japanese by her candor, impulsiveness, expressiveness, and high energy; yet, these elements of difference never fundamentally challenge the status quo. If anything, they become nostalgic prods for change back to the people the Japanese supposedly once were. Nikkei become selectively retro-Japanese, modeling Japanese as tied to tradition, appreciative of their rural lives, and treating each other with compassion. Furthermore, these catalysts for change come within the packaging of shōjo— young, female, desirable—and are tied to Japanese culture through grandfathers, both biological and adoptive. The drama also paints an historical picture of Nikkei as Japanese brethren who have undergone great hardship. When Sakura’s natal family visits her in Japan, her father is asked to speak to the students and teachers at the Japanese school. The speech he chooses to make highlights the pain and suffering that Japanese immigrants went through in their struggle to make a living under harsh conditions in Hawai‘i and elsewhere. He describes their backbreaking labor, and the debt he owes those who came before him. He turns hole-hole bushi, a work song and lament sung by Japanese immigrant women as they toiled in Hawai‘i’s sugarcane fields, into a Nikkei anthem. And his speech, as well as a moving performance of hole-hole bushi by Sakura’s grandmother,16 elicits tears from his audience, including Sakura and the rest of her family. Hawai‘i, Hawai‘i This was our dream



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Tears roll down In the midst of our secrets. The rain is pouring And my laundry is getting all wet The child on my back is crying And the rice is burnt. When I left Yokohama I cried and cried But now I have children And even grandchildren. (Episode 59)

This becomes an emotional climax of the drama, and the one time in which Sakura’s now-deceased paternal grandfather makes a ghostly appearance. In this immigrant story, Nikkei—in particular Nikkei women—emerge as heroic in their suffering. What is significant is to consider Nikkei who go unacknowledged in NHK’s drama. This includes Nikkei who may pose any kind of threat to patriarchal, heterosexist stability: political activists,17 gays, the homeless, criminals, or female leaders. It also includes Nikkei who disrupt the category of Nikkei, such as persons of part-Japanese descent, now common among yonsei, as well as Okinawan immigrants and their descendants, who have often faced discrimination by other Nikkei from Japan’s main islands of Honshū and Kyūshū.18 This includes Nikkei who increasingly populate Japan’s work force—that is, primarily men from South America engaged in blue-collar jobs.19 Although the Japanese government has made accommodations for this influx, such as creating Japanese-language learning opportunities in public schools for some of the children who have immigrated, the general public tends to regard these Nikkei with suspicion and unease. By contrast, the Nikkei who inhabit Sakura are mirror images of unproblematized Japanese upheld as models of family life: a middle class urban family living in a three-generation household led by a male breadwinner. They engage in the practices of Japan: eating Japanese foods, speaking Japanese, espousing the values of a past era. These Nikkei become nothing less than Japanese who happen to live overseas, forever diasporic in their close ties to Japan. They are the prodigal offspring of Japan—here, shōjo busily learning the ways of their new/old home.

Concluding Thoughts A survey I conducted of Japanese American viewers of NHK’s Sakura found mixed reactions. Many of them enjoyed the program, even though they found little in

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common with the Nikkei on screen. But some of them were deeply offended. Glen Fukushima, former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, echoed many of the criticisms and discrepancies I raise above in NHK’s depiction of Japanese Americans: the flawless Japanese, knowledge of Japanese customs, and overemphasis on the hardships of their lives in America (2002: 31). Others criticize Sakura’s clothing, hairstyle, and lack of physical displays of affection when with her white American boyfriend. Those Nikkei viewers who were offended were attempting to gain agency over a foreign media’s depiction of their lives and histories, thus policing the accuracy of their representation. In general, their critiques go little acknowledged by Japanese viewers or media producers. The issue of representation on both sides of the Pacific remains problematic. In the United States, Nikkei have become stereotyped as a model minority, quietly assimilating and adopting the American dream, even as their media depictions show them as “forever foreigners.” In Japan, Nikkei are being stereotyped as a different kind of model minority—one with a dream of Japan as the homeland to which one returns. NHK’s tying of this homeland to fourth-generation Nikkei suggests that the dream of “home” continues well past those with any ­direct connection to Japan. According to this, Japan can become a homeland by virtue of blood. What does it mean to say that Sakura is “more Japanese than most Japanese,” that her sense of cultural identity—of being and doing Japanese—surpasses that of Japanese? At the most fundamental level, it suggests that identity is external to oneself; that there are different degrees possible of being Japanese; that cultural identity is a process, an act, and an achievement; that one may lose one’s identity while another person may gain one. Yet identity within the racialized ideology of NHK remains tied to biology: Sakura is, after all, of Japanese blood and therefore carries within her what is taken as a certain birthright. Therefore she stands in contrast to the many gaijin in Japan who may attempt, like Sakura, to learn the language to near-native fluency, adopt many of the customs, and enthusiastically pursue a life in Japan, even in some cases marrying Japanese. They may “do Japanese,” but they can never “be Japanese” like Sakura. How does Sakura surpass other Japanese? She does so by a Nikkei time warp that has distilled the values and some of the practices of a previous era of Japan and maintained them in diasporic outposts. In this, some Nikkei have become nostalgized exemplars of what Japan has lost. Moreover, Sakura becomes “more Japanese than Japanese” by her enthusiasm and passion, which stands in direct contrast to the blasé approach of native Japanese, who take their identities for granted. This critique in particular is leveled by older, more conservative Japanese toward young people who are considered to have strayed too far from their own identity as Japanese. Sakura and the Nikkei within the drama, then, become a media primer on be-



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coming Japanese, taught by one whose blood makes her an insider, even while her citizenship makes her an outsider. The question arises, why now? Why does Japan look to Nikkei in particular at this point in time? I take it as no small coincidence that close to the time of Sakura’s broadcast, three different museums on Nikkei immigrant history opened in Yokohama, Hiroshima, and Oshima. I suggest that several elements contribute to this focus on Nikkei in Japan. Ever since the economic downturn of the 1990s, Japan’s tightly knit system based in postwar growth and prosperity has been called into question. Media and government have pointed fingers in various directions to address what are perceived as not only economic, but also political and social ills, targeting the very foundation of institutions such as the family, education, and the workplace. In the 2000s, calls for reform to address this crisis have often taken a nostalgic, even nationalistic, turn, suggesting that the way to move forward is to look backward. According to this approach, Japan has lost its way through the haze of western-based modernity and must return to its own fundamental spirituality and values. One place to find living examples of these roots lies overseas in communities of Nikkei. I am deliberately pointing out the irony of Japanese looking to Nikkei as a repository of their roots, even as Sakura travels to Japan to find her roots. Both are looking at and past each other. This attitude toward Nikkei comes at a time when Japan’s relationship to the foreigners within its boundaries, as well as to the United States, is tenuous and fraught with a great deal of ambivalence. Foreigners (including Nikkei) have become part of Japan’s putative and public multiculturalism. Increasingly, themes of internal others—the disabled, resident Koreans, Okinawans, burakumin (a traditional outcast group), Nikkei, and more—proliferate in the media, suggesting an opening up of the country to its own heterogeneity. And yet these internal others remain distanced by boundaries continually reinscribed by the media gaze. Their faces may be increasingly part of public discourse, but that discourse does not necessarily include their voices. Japanese media representations of Japanese Americans within this context say little about the actual status or experiences of Nikkei or of other foreigners in Japan. In fact, Sakura ignores the realities (and problems) of Nikkei within Japan and looks instead to overseas Nikkei, and even more specifically to the most “benign” of them, in Hawai‘i. Overseas Nikkei, however, are more than past Japanese. They are past Japanese who can frequent cosmopolitan circles because of their fluency in English and their familiarity with Euro-American ways. Unlike the Japanese, the Nikkei in this drama carry American passports. Although Euro-America may not always accept them fully, they stand with one foot in the door more easily, perhaps, than native Japanese. Here language and citizenship play crucial roles. In fact, many Japanese—especially young women—may be the truer cosmopolitans because of their

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international travel, as well as their knowledge of foreign (particularly European) ways, foods, and products. But Nikkei show Japanese one way to walk a tightrope, “more Japanese than Japanese,” even as they live outside of Japan. Hawai‘i plays a significant role as a setting and context for this drama. For one, it is a frequent tourist destination for Japanese not only as a beautiful locale, but also as the home of many Nikkei. Hawai‘i is both foreign and familiar, an overseas destination with signage in Japanese, Japanese restaurants and department stores, and, most importantly, a sizeable population of ethnically Japanese (both Japanese nationals and Nikkei). Second, among Nikkei in North and South Americas, those in Hawai‘i hold an enviable place as a numerical and cultural nonminority enjoying particularly favorable living conditions in a highly desirable setting. In spite of the hardships of earlier years, Nikkei in Hawai‘i since the mid-1950s have occupied positions of political and economic dominance to the extent that they are considered one of the major ethnic power wielders in the state. Third, compared with other Nikkei in the United States, those in Hawai‘i are considered to be less assimilated to whitedominated American ways. Hawai‘i’s Nikkei, in other words, are thought of as living closer to the values and practices of Japan (past) than other American Nikkei, who exemplify primarily white American lifestyles. Sakura, in effect, can more easily adapt to Japan because she has less of a gap to overcome. Thus NHK’s decision to create a drama based upon Hawai‘i and its Nikkei creates an altogether attractive physical and sociocultural portrait from the perspective of Japan and its viewers. This portrait stands alongside others on both sides of the Pacific that racialize Nikkei and depict them as inextricably tied to Japan. Nikkei in both Japanese and American media portraits are inevitably diasporic in their identity, not Japanese American so much as Japanese residing in America. Nikkei on NHK become part of the minasama/everyone fold of race. Furthermore, these Nikkei become exemplars for contemporary Japan as themselves, forever Japanese through language, food, bodies, practices, and values, even while those in Japan are said to face constant threats to their national-cultural identity. The contrast is made all the more palatable by placing it within the attractive figure of the cute shōjo. The fact that Nikkei can become “more Japanese than the Japanese” suggests that in this NHK world, identity may boil down to eating rice rather than bread and drinking tea rather than coffee, as long as one starts from the common ground of race. The lessons of NHK’s Sakura-viewing become lessons for all Japanese on the seeming simplicity of “doing Japan” (nihon suru, so to speak) in order to “be Japan.” Sighting Japanese Americans on Japanese television reveals Japan as a predicate in search of a subject, the whereabouts of which may be found in Honolulu more readily than in Tokyo. How does gender figure in all this? One aspect is the contrasting role of women vis-à-vis Japanese tradition in Sakura’s natal Nikkei family as opposed to her home-



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stay Japanese family. In the Nikkei family, women act as the regular and direct infusion of Japan (and its traditions) into the household. Except for Sakura and her sister, all the women from each generation have been born and raised in Japan. Within this Nikkei patriline, then, women re-tie the family to Japan. By contrast, in the homestay Japanese family, women are the ones who marry in and must thus learn the traditions. Each generation includes pairs of mother-in-law and daughterin-law as teacher and apprentice of tradition. In both the Nikkei and the Japanese case, grandfathers are the public linchpins of Japanese tradition. Enter the shōjo. This drama hinges throughout on the relationship of Sakura as shōjo to her grandfathers. Both homestay and natal, her phantasmic grandfathers paternalistically guide her through the doubly liminal period of her stay in Japan, as well as her very shōjo state. As the drama is told through the narration of her natal grandfather, we viewers become grandfathers to Sakura. By extension, Nikkei become shōjo—that is, offspring sharing one’s blood, pubescent, dependent, kawaii/cute in their helplessness—to Japan. It is not quite that the United States is infantilized in relation to “adult” Japan. Rather, its ethnically Japanese citizens are reconstructed ironically as both budding Japanese as well as ur-Japanese. Nikkei such as Sakura bridge the child and the grandparent, as Japanese-to-be whose very core retains the values and spirit of older Japanese. Here, then, is a representation of Japanese Americans (especially females) by this Japanese media text—not as sexual objects, but as presexual almost-women, racing the stage, “doing Japan,” and in this way showing Japan how to do itself. Nikkeias-Sakura becomes the prodigal girl-next-door, lusting after her roots, she, the wet dream of NHK’s Japan.20

Notes 1. A humorous compendium of female stereotypes lists two for Asian/Asian American females: (1) Pearl, China Doll, with a Sumiko the Geisha variant option (“Pearl is every man’s dream come true! She’s beautiful, exotic, and eager to please. Her meekness and obedience are legendary. Pearl is ready to replace any troublesome and demanding Caucasian wives [sic]!”) and (2) Madame X, Dragon Lady (“Aggressive and scheming, this doll will keep you bewitched and bewildered for hours! . . . She’ll seduce you and then sell you down the river. All this without a shred of remorse or a second glance through those inscrutable slit eyes and her expressionless face.”) (Guerrilla Girls 2003: 85). 2. Cho (b. 1968) is a Korean American stand-up comedienne and actress known for her frank, off-color humor, including gay references. She moved from underground comedy to mainstream entertainment when she was featured in a short-lived situation comedy All-American Girl from September 1994 through March 1995 on ABC network. For more, see her website: http://www.margaretcho.net.

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3. This parallels what Lutz and Collins found in their examination of the National Geographic—that is, images of nonwestern women homogenized as “a repository for the lost femininity of ‘liberated’ western women” (1993: 184). 4. Although there have been other Japanese media depictions of Japanese Americans, most notably NHK’s Futatsu no Sokoku (Two Motherlands) from the 1980s, I do not include discussion or comparison of these here. 5. Cherry blossoms have been symbolic of Japan since the premodern era. Their symbolism derives from their association with spring, life force, agrarian productivity, and gendered female reproductivity (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 27–33). Furthermore, their beauty is not permanent but extremely transitory, symbolizing youth and the profound wistfulness of evanescence. The practice of having an English first name and a Japanese middle name is common among Nikkei families in Hawai‘i, especially through the third generation. It is less common in Nikkei families in the continental United States and in general with subsequent generations. Even less common is the practice of calling a person by their Japanese middle name, rather than their English first name. 6. I do not deal here with the media depiction of Asian Americans by Asian Americans, a topic addressed in Xing (1998) and Hamamoto (1994: 206–237). 7. One woman I spoke with recalls the flood of complaints that NHK received when an asadora had rock music as its theme song. The typical complaint was that viewers did not want to hear such jarring music so early in the day. 8. The NHK 2001 asadora preceding Sakura was Churasan, about a young woman from Okinawa who moves to Tokyo to become a nurse and in the process becomes an exemplar of Japaneseness. Many other parallel themes in Sakura can be found in Churasan as well. NHK’s 2003 asadora is Kokoro (heart, mind, soul, a theme repeatedly invoked in Sakura), about a young woman who quits her job as a flight attendant to eventually take over her mother’s restaurant business. 9. According to Aoki, the program garnered a number one weekly viewership ranking of all television programs in Japan during several weeks of its broadcast. The following statistics speak to the growing popularity of Sakura during the first twenty-one weeks of its run: Week 1, 20.7 percent (Tokyo area only); Week 2, 21.5 percent; Week 3, 21.3 percent; Week 4, 21.7 percent; Week 5, 21.8 percent; Week 6, 22.0 percent; Week 7, 22.6 percent; Week 8, 23.2 percent; Week 9, 23.3 percent; Week 10, 23.3 percent; Week 11, 23.3 percent; Week 12, 23.8 percent; Week 13, 23.3 percent; Week 14, 24.3 percent; Week 15, 24.5 percent; Week 16, 24.3 percent; Week 17, 24.1 percent; Week 18, 22.8 percent; Week 19, 23.2 percent; Week 20, 23.3 percent; Week 21, 25.7 percent (Aoki, personal communication). 10. Although the television show identifies Sakura as a yonsei, a fourth-generation Nikkei, NHK’s reckoning of generations seems to be based on age, rather than actual generations. Her mother is from Japan, making her nisei or second-generation on her mater-



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nal side. Even on her paternal side, her grandfather may have been born in Hawai‘i, justifying Sakura’s yonsei status, but her grandfather lived from the age of six through twelve in Japan, making him far closer to issei culturally. Furthermore, her grandmother was born in Japan, making Sakura sansei or third-generation. By my count, then, she is 2.75 generation. This counting suggests a mathematical splitting of hairs, except as it impacts the individual in terms of ethnic-cultural identity. 11. One historic contrast to this stereotypic division is that of the moga (modern girl, the Japanese equivalent to the flapper) in the 1920s, whose self-proclaimed stake in modernity focused on consumerism and mass media. Barbara Sato calls her “a quintessential icon of consumerism” as a symbol of fashionable urban life during Japan’s interwar years (2003: 45). By the 1990s and 2000s, the roles have been somewhat reversed. Young women typically working as “office ladies” (OL’s, secretarial/clerical staff) are the cosmopolitans, traveling the world and gaining firsthand knowledge of Euro-American cuisine, wine, and fashion, while men are more strongly tied to things Japanese. 12. In fact, Sakura’s grandfather is kibei nisei, a Japanese American who is born in America, raised in Japan, and subsequently returns to America. Kibei nisei typically speak Japanese as a mother tongue and are culturally far closer to Japan than to the land of their birth. 13. To a certain extent, exaggerated facial expressions are not uncommon in NHK asadora, as I previously mentioned. But Sakura’s mugging stands out, especially in combination with her frequent expressions of “Wow!” when she is amazed or excited about things Japanese. 14. The English translations of the dialogue come from NGN’s English subtitles. 15. Note, however, that it is not only Americans and other foreigners who become the butt of jokes regarding the pains and discomforts of sitting on one’s knees. The 1987 film O-sōshiki (The Funeral) by Itami Jūzō mocks Japanese people’s discomfort when sitting on the floor; he shows them squirming, rubbing their feet together, and even falling over when trying to rise from a seated position, just as Sakura’s father did. 16. In this episode hole-hole bushi is sung by Sakura’s grandmother, an in-marrying urban issei who never worked a day in the sugarcane fields. NHK, then, conflates all older Nikkei women as ones who underwent the hardships of plantation life. 17. In retelling Japanese American history, Sakura fails to mention the role of Japanese American labor activists who led major plantation strikes in 1909 and 1920, organized labor unions in 1946, and continue to stand at the forefront of labor unrest, especially in white-collar unions where their numbers dominate. 18. Hirabayashi, Kikumura-Yano, and Hirabayashi assert the importance of discussing Nikkei identities in the plural to acknowledge differences based in prefectural background, the type of destination (urban or rural), the dynamics of community formation, and gender (2002: 20). 19. In 1990, Japan revised its immigration laws to permit overseas ethnic Japanese to

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enter the country as long-term residents in hopes of building a supply of ethnically acceptable unskilled workers. As of 1996, there were 233,478 South American Nikkei registered as residents in Japan, making them the third largest minority group in Japan (Roth 2002). 20. I use “wet dream” here to refer to the symbolic lusting after originary ties as well as my own coupling of the common Japanese idiom of “wet,” connoting emotion (in opposition to “dry,” connoting rationality), with the notion of dream.

Chapter 7

Globalizing Gender Culture Transnational Cultural Flows and the Intensification of Male Dominance in India

Steve Derné

A

rjun Appadurai famously suggested that increasing transnational movements of people and media prompt people to “consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before” (1996: 53). This process of globalization suddenly intensified in India in 1991 when the Indian government acceded to International Monetary Fund (IMF) demands that the economy be opened. With decreased restrictions on media and the desire of advertisers to reach the newly available Indian market, new foreign media flooded into India from western centers. While Indians of diverse classes began enjoying the new media and were attracted to cosmopolitan fashion and consumption, the celebration of love and women’s freedom of movement in global media did not lead many Indian men to consider new gender and family arrangements. Rather, most Indian men were instead attracted to transnational media that celebrated male violence, offered new pornographic images that intensified women’s objectification, or trumpeted new body ideals that highlighted male strength and female vulnerability. While some scholars suggested that cultural globalization might introduce new imaginations that would improve the status of women around the world, it has often merely provided Indian men with additional cultural resources, which they layer on top of existing meanings, to strengthen existing gender privilege.

Globalization in India Until the 1980s India pursued economic development with limited global entanglements. When the oil price rise associated with the 1991 Gulf War led to a crisis of foreign-exchange reserves, the Indian government turned to the IMF for a bailout. In response to IMF demands, the government ended licensing for most industries, reduced restrictions on multinational investment, and devalued the rupee. Within five years, imports doubled, exports tripled, and foreign capital investment quintupled (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 21–25). Cultural globalization followed economic liber-

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alization, as cable television offerings suddenly competed with state-run television and Hollywood films competed with local Hindi films. Fueled by advertisers trying to reach the new Indian market, the number of television channels grew from one state-run channel in 1991 to seventy cable channels in 1999. Access to television increased from less than 10 percent of the urban population in 1990 to nearly 75 percent by 1999. In 1991, cable television reached 300,000 homes; by 1999 it reached 24 million homes. With the easing of foreign-exchange restrictions, Hollywood films were dubbed into Hindi and screened widely, capturing 10 percent of the market (Thussu 2000; N. Gupta 1998; Munshi 2001; Sharma 1996). While economic and cultural globalization has transformed India’s media landscape, like elsewhere, this transformation has been mediated by local interests, sensibilities, and resistance. Finding that they could make a profit with rudimentary technology by hooking up as few as 200 homes, thousands of small-scale cable operators selected programming to meet local demands (Page and Crawley 2001: 89–93; S. Mishra 1999). The first Gulf War and concurrent dramatic events in the communist world attracted English-speakers to cable television, but cable only took off in October 1992 when Zee TV began to screen local-language programming alongside global hits. Producers of local television serials, while influenced by global productions, nonetheless aimed at local viewers. I consider the effects of globalization by comparing the gender culture and family arrangements of ordinary middle-class Indian men in 1991 (just as globalization was intensifying) with similar men’s gender culture and arrangements ten years later. In 1991, I conducted a study of middle-class men’s reception of Hindi film in Dehra Dun, India. Ten years later, after cable television, Hollywood movies, and the growth of consumerism had transformed the cultural landscape, I replicated that study. A comparison of men’s filmgoing and men’s responses to questions about films and about family in the two periods allows me to identify transformations and continuities in these middle-class Indian men’s gender culture and family in the face of globalization. Data Sources This study relies on two sorts of evidence. First, I compare participant observation with filmgoers in Dehra Dun that I conducted in 1991 and 2001. Each day over the course of three months in each year, I hung around the eight movie houses in Dehra Dun, participating in filmgoing rituals and watching people watch films, noting when they laughed, when they sang along, and what dialogues they knew. A comparison of filmgoing in the two eras provides insight into gender presentations that appealed to filmgoers. Second, I compare interviews I conducted with filmgoing men in 1991 and 2001. In both years, I approached men in and around movie halls.1 I asked men to tell me about their fa-



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vorite films, their favorite heroes, and their favorite heroines. In both years, I asked men about love marriages celebrated in particular Hindi films. Consistent with the demographics of the male Hindi-film audience, the men I interviewed were mostly unmarried (86 percent in 1991 and 84 percent in 2001) and in their teens or twenties (91 percent in 1991 and 94 percent in 2001). The overrepresentation of young men usefully captures those who may be most influenced by global media since the young are big consumers of television and movies. As LiPuma notes, an understanding of changes in thinking and ways of being should focus especially on “those who are coming of age,” who are often in the throes of “forging their identity” (2000: 63). While the main empirical data for this study focuses on young men in a small city in the Hindi-speaking region, I also cite evidence from elsewhere in India to suggest that the dynamics I focus on may be common among non-elite middle-class Indian men. Non-elite Middle-class Indians’ Encounter with Globalization One distinctive feature of this study is its focus on non-elite middle-class Indians. The English-language Indian press now commonly refer to a growing so-called middle class that passionately aspires for consumer goods, even luxury goods. But this consuming, so-called middle-class world actually applies to very few Indians. Just 6 percent of households have a scooter, 9 percent of households have a refrigerator, and 26 percent of households have a cassette recorder (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 28). Just 5 percent of the population speaks English well (Page and Crawley 2001: 77). The number of people who travel abroad every year may be substantial, but it is a minuscule percentage of the population. Income figures are unreliable, but the best estimate is that in 1996, only about 2.9 percent of households earned above Rs.96,000 annually (around US$2,150) (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 31). This study focuses on what I elsewhere distinguish as a locally oriented middle-class (Derné 2005). Locally oriented middle-class Indians lack the English-language skills and global connections that would allow them to take off with the global economy. Earning Rs.45,000–96,000 (US$1,000–2,150) annually, locally oriented middle-class Indians constitute 16 percent of households India-wide, perhaps 40 percent of the urban population. They work as clerks, police officers, teachers, government transportation workers, and so on—jobs that are oriented to the local Indian economy. Lacking high incomes, they buy few “global” products, preferring the Rs.50 restaurant meal to the Rs.300 Pizza Hut meal, the Rs.300 Indian-made shoe to the Rs.3,000 Nike. They may be able to afford a scooter, television, and perhaps a refrigerator and will try to send their children to private English-language schools, although the quality may not be as good as it is for the affluent. This class’s local orientation is shaped by the class’s structural realities: lacking English-language skills or global connections, the locally oriented Indian middle class is in fact

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limited by local markets for employment. Lacking money to buy global goods, they are in fact limited by local markets for consumption. Despite the discourses in western scholarship and the English-language media that identify affluent consumers as middle class, the locally oriented middle class that is the focus of this study also see themselves as India’s middle class—below the position of the “great people” who drive automobiles and travel to foreign places, but well above the position of those who live in slum areas, cycle miles to work, and survive from day-to-day earnings (for example, Dickey 2002; Saavala 2001). Locally oriented middle-class Indians distinguish themselves from the poor by purchasing nonnecessities like televisions, while their sober avoidance of wasteful spending opposes the vulgar consumerism of affluent, foreign-influenced Indians. The locally oriented middle class takes particular pride in embracing Indian gender arrangements, which they criticize the affluent for abandoning (Derné 2005). The men I interviewed are members of this locally oriented middle class. They had secure jobs or job prospects, but lacked English-language skills and global connections. They were professionals or successfully self-employed people (23 percent in 1991, 16 percent in 2001), undergraduate or postgraduate students (41 percent in 1991 and 50 percent in 2001), successful laborers or holders of lower-middle-class jobs such as office clerk (36 percent in 1991, 34 percent in 2001). While they could afford consumer goods like televisions and scooters, their income was insufficient to fully enter the utopia of consumption celebrated in transnational media. Cultural Globalization in Dehra Dun The effect of economic liberalization on job prospects of middle-class Indians like those I interviewed has been modest: Liberalization has made some goods more available, but these men’s limited global connections and poor English-language skills have kept them from pursuing high-paying global jobs. Yet the cultural globalization that has taken place in the ten years between the two studies dramatically changed the cultural landscape of middle-class Indians. In 1991, no Hollywood film screened in the three months that I worked in the city, but in 2001 dubbed Hollywood films were the main fare at the city’s two most prestigious theaters. Audiences could watch Hollywood films about adventurers traversing dangerous snowy peaks (Vertical Limit), B-grade films aiming at sexual titillation (like Yeh kaisi chahat [This sort of desire]), a dubbed version of the low-budget Hollywood film Sexual Intent, and action films with spectacular special effects like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Arnold ka mukabla (The confrontation of Arnolds, a dubbed version of Hollywood’s Sixth Day). While in 1991 none of the men whom I asked had seen Hollywood films, nearly 60 percent of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 had watched such films and fully half watched dubbed films as part of their regular film consumption.



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Perhaps more important than the growing popularity and availability of American films is growing access to television, especially cable. In 1991, few of the men whom I interviewed had access to television and even those who had televisions were limited to state-run Doordarshan programming (as satellite TV was completely unavailable). In 1991, Doordarshan’s hits were family serials, serialized Hindu mythologicals, and (at the top of the hits) a weekly Hindi film and a weekly program devoted to Hindi-film songs. By 2001, television had rapidly expanded so that nearly 88 percent (28 out of 32) of the men whom I interviewed had access to television. The expansion of cable was tremendous. While none of the men whom I interviewed in 1991 had access to cable television, by 2001, about 69 percent (22 out of 32) had at least some access to cable television. How has the gender culture of locally oriented middle-class men changed with this rapidly enhanced access to global media?

Attachment to Existing Family Arrangements The advent of globalization offered new celebrations of autonomy and individual choice. The idea that young people’s love for each other should be the basis for marriage is reasserted by cable television’s American serials that show young people in pursuit of the “right one.” In the increasingly global media world, love as a basis for marriage becomes more and more a celebrated goal. Yet despite the transformed media landscape and the increased celebration of cosmopolitan European and North American lifestyles, the men whom I interviewed in 2001 remain as committed to arranged marriages as the men whom I interviewed in 1987 and 1991 (Derné 2000: 84–88). Vinod, an unmarried twenty-twoyear-old laborer from the depressed state of Bihar, enjoys cable’s Zee TV, but remains committed to arranged marriages: “Love marriages are only stories in films. In real life they are not possible. I haven’t given a thought to marriage, but I know I’ll marry according to my parents’ wishes.” Such sentiments were voiced by the range of ordinary middle-class men whom I interviewed. Virendra, twenty-two, a Jat Hindu in a postgraduate engineering program who lives in a family headed by his father, a local superintendent of police, and full-time mother, remains similarly committed to arranged marriages: “In reality, [love marriages] are not successful. In actual life, a love marriage is not possible. I’ll marry with my parents’ wishes.” Despite a decade of cultural globalization, similar percentages of men voiced an on-balance disapproval of love marriages (68 percent in 1991 and 66 percent in 2001). While in affluent circles (and in the media that cater to them) there is a widespread belief that globalization has encouraged dating and love marriages, my study’s systematic comparison showing little change in ordinary middle-class Indians’ attitudes toward marriage is confirmed by a number of other studies. Geographically extensive systematic evidence of the sort we would like is lacking, but

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most sober commentators (for example, D. Gupta 2000: 49–50; Uberoi 1998: 307; Shurmer-Smith 2000) see little increase in love marriages, and the few systematic studies we do have suggest ongoing attachment to arranged marriages. A mid-1990s study found that 68 percent of urban college students wanted to have their parents arrange their marriage (Pathak 1994: 48, 59). Page and Crawley’s 1998–1999 survey of fifteen- to thirty-five-year-olds in Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur, and Lucknow found that 65 percent tried to obey their elders “even if it hurts” (2001: 176). Abraham’s 1996–1998 study found that a “majority” of low-income, English-speaking college students in Mumbai thought that love marriages were unsuccessful (2001: 149–151). The students Abraham interviewed “preferred an arranged marriage for its stability and security.” College men focused on how love marriages might lead to “conflicts within the family.” Like the men whom I interviewed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the college men Abraham interviewed believed love between husband and wife should be tempered by joint-family demands. Absent a change in most Indians’ structural realities of family life and economy, a decade of global media celebration of love has apparently done little to change men’s views. While transnational media have intensified favorable images of independent women who often work in the paid economy (for example, the popular Ally McBeal), ordinary middle-class men seem no less attached to gender arrangements that limit women’s public activities and freedom. As in 1991, men are the primary consumers of fighting-and-killing films, and even at screenings of the more respected social films (where women might make up one-third of the balcony audience), there are few women in the cheap floor seats. Men enjoy homosocial bonding in this all-male world. In 2001 (as in 1991), they shout out to greet friends both in the hall and while waiting outside. They joke, dance, and roughhouse together. Some men seem to enjoy their exclusive use of cinema-hall public spaces, while emphasizing how this contrasts with women’s home-based lives. Tahsin, a married twenty-five-year-old, describes his compelling attraction (chaska) to Hindi film as so strong that he sees at least two movies a week, but he proudly relates that his wife is so “home-loving [gharelu] that she even objects to seeing movies with her own husband.” For Tahsin, the cinema hall is a place that men enjoy, while women should remain at home. Tahsin does not watch television at home much. “It’s for women and children,” he says. In both 1991 and 2001, men’s discussion of their favorite heroines showed a focus on women’s home responsibilities (see Derné 2000: 127–128 on the 1991 data). Tahsin does not like many of today’s heroines, saying that they expose too much of their bodies. Tahsin’s favorite heroine is Kajol because of her innocence (bholapan). A twenty-five-year-old who likes satellite television and American films like Titanic and Godzilla similarly told me that Aishwarya Ray was his favorite Hindi film heroine because of her generosity, referring to her widely reported willingness to donate



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her eyes to science after her death. This man likes women who are willing to sacrifice for the broader society. Other local surveys show non-elite middle-class men’s ongoing attachment to gender arrangements that make women primarily responsible for home duties. Abraham’s interviews showed that college-going men want women to be “simple,” “home-loving,” and in possession of a “compromising nature” that makes them “respect elders” (2001: 142), views which closely parallel men’s views in previous decades (for example, Derné 1995, 2000). Non-elite middle-class men who benefit from existing gender arrangements are not influenced by global media challenges to these gender arrangements. Indeed, their limited ability to pursue the utopia of consumption celebrated in global media may increase their attachment to male privileges. Media celebration of unattainable lifestyle-standards may heighten men’s attachment to existing gender arrangements that provide them a fictive measure of status in a world of limited opportunities.

Resistance to Gender Challenges in Global Media Men’s loyalty to their own male privileges may be one reason so many non-elite middle-class men are uneasy with new media that appear to challenge these arrangements. Virendra, the prosperous twenty-two-year-old postgraduate engineering student with cable television, is committed to Indian gender arrangements. He wants an arranged marriage and enjoys living in a joint family headed by his police-officer father and full-time mother. He likes new fashions, but is uneasy about the influence of global media. He avoids American films, having seen only one, and he also claims to avoid the cable television his family has at home. He complains that Dehra Dun has changed because of satellite television. “Satellite TV,” he says, “is making the younger people too mature. During my earlier years, I didn’t know what kids know today.” Umesh, a civil draftsman whose marriage has just been arranged, likes Hollywood movies and enjoys watching STAR TV and Channel V in the joint household in which he lives, but claims to be disturbed by programs that “give the message that fathers should booze with their sons and a brother should allow his sister to go with her boyfriend to watch a movie. These are not good things,” he says. “They’re not possible in real life, so they shouldn’t be shown on television.” Sanjay, a prosperous unmarried thirty-year-old living in a joint family that includes his parents, brothers, and bhabhis (older brothers’ wives), enjoys the suspense serials he sees on late-night Zee TV and especially likes American movies for showing things “as they actually are.” Yet Sanjay finds it pathetic that “young people” only care about how the hero and heroine look, rather than the “message” that they should learn from the roles the hero and heroine play. Such concerns about global media images have been the source of protests

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against globalization. Although often orchestrated by political elites, these protests resonate with less international middle-class men because so many feel that cultural change threatens gender arrangements they want to maintain. In recent years, protesters have targeted Valentine’s Day celebrations. Observers believe Valentine’s Day has grown in popularity because of cable channels like MTV and the economic liberalization that spurred the Valentine’s Day card industry (India Abroad 2000b; Sengupta 2001). In protesting Valentine’s Day, activists in Delhi attacked couples in restaurants and forced them to flee. Activists in Kanpur blackened the faces of hundreds of couples celebrating Valentine’s Day. Elsewhere activists have burned Valentine’s Day cards (India Abroad 2000b) or thrown stones at shops selling such cards (Sengupta 2001). Protestors are uneasy with Valentine’s Day’s celebration of love that would threaten the institution of arranged marriages and the basis of joint-family living. Discotheques, another institution that seems to push young people toward love, have been similarly protested for “spoiling the minds of youth” (India Abroad 1999). Protests have also targeted women’s embrace of foreign fashion. Kanpur youth associated with the Hindu fundamentalist BJP persuaded the principal of a local college to bar college women from wearing jeans and skirts, an action that was protested so violently by other women that the college was forced to close for two days (India Abroad 2000a). A Pune college responded to a rape on campus by barring women from wearing revealing clothes (India-West 2002a). Wide-ranging groups including farmers, students, and trade-union activists from around the country protested the 1996 staging of the Miss World pageant in Bangalore as a threat to Indian womanhood (Oza 2001: 1067; Fernandes 2000: 625). Some protested because beauty pageants objectify women. But many middle-class Indian men protested pageants because clothing and exposure in these competitions threaten the modesty that so many men value as a sign of women’s commitment to family duties. The concern that it is transnational media that are the source of trouble is apparent in the fact that so many protests target this aspect of globalization. Groups affiliated with the Hindu fundamentalist BJP often protest revealing clothing on television (Fernandes 2001: 158; 2000: 624; S. Ghosh 1999: 234; Brosius and Butcher 1999: 14; India-West 2002b). Protesters have sometimes succeeded in stopping cable serials that they find offensive (for example, M. John 1998: 368). The focus has been especially on the “obscenity” associated with satellite television (Oza 2001: 1072). At least some husbands who worry that cable television would encourage their wives to become independent have tried to keep their wives from watching particular serials (Page and Crawley 2001: 167). Far from destabilizing men’s attachment to oppressive gender arrangements, cultural globalization has more often prompted non-elite middle-class men to resist the global media that may threaten arrangements to which they remain strongly at-



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tached. Transnational media have not led these men to experiment with new gender relationships. If it has made them aware of a “wider set of possible lives,” cultural globalization has only increased their vigorous defense of local cultures of gender and family and the conventional male privileges those cultures entail.

Intensifying the Association of Maleness with Aggression While locally oriented men often resist transnational media that threaten existing gender arrangements, they often eagerly embrace new imaginations introduced by cultural globalization when they can be used to bolster these arrangements. The cultural association of maleness with violent aggression has been an important cornerstone of male dominance. Local fighting-and-killing films continue to celebrate such male violence. Members of the male audience continue to clap and shout when heroes beat up their opponents. But today cable television and foreign movies may be intensifying the attraction to violent masculinities. Nearly 60 percent (11 out of 19) of the men I interviewed who watch foreign films regularly say that they do so because of the excellent action sequences in these films. Men talk of Jackie Chan or Arnold Schwarzenegger as favorite heroes because of their fighting ability. They say they like American films, like Gladiator or Godzilla, because the action appears more realistic than in Hindi films. As I sat watching the previews before one screening of a Schwarzenegger film, one of the men I interviewed smiled broadly on seeing Jackie Chan. “Jackie’s a good fighter,” he said with a grin. Ramu, a twenty-year-old Brahman medical student, says that he likes watching Hollywood action movies because the Hollywood industry has the backbone to make the action more exciting and realistic. Anand Patwardhan’s documentary film Father, Son, Holy War (1995) shows boys, teenagers, and young men in Mumbai who are attracted to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body building. Patwardhan shows one twenty-five-year-old man saying that he was so “inspired” by watching videocassettes of “Arnold’s movies” that he “started to exercise until” becoming an “expert.” Patwardhan shows adolescent Mumbai boys’ attraction to World Wrestling Federation (WWF) characters. In one scene, boys in a room decorated with posters of Hit Man watch this WWF hero on cable television. They smile, make faces, roughhouse, and imitate the headlocks they see on television. “That’s Hit Man, the World Wrestling Federation wrestler,” one says. “He hits hard. He’s good.” One boy who had another boy in a headlock says, “only boys” wrestle “because boys are heroes.” Pressed by the interviewer, the adolescent says he does not play with girls “because girls wear saris, because girls are a calamity, because girls make too much fuss, because girls are girls and boys are boys.” In another scene, boys react enthusiastically to WWF wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage, who makes a local appearance to promote WWF on

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local cable. Boys chant, “We want Macho; we want Macho” in anticipation of the hero’s arrival. “Macho, Macho, Macho,” they chant as he comes into the promotional tent. One boy says that he likes “Macho Man because he’s strong and tough. And, also, he’s macho.” The boy says that he would like to be like Macho Man because he’s “quite dangerous and well known all over the world and fights quite well.” The increased realism men find in foreign media’s presentation of male violence may increase their attachment to male strength and violence as an actual possibility. The violence in Hindi films has long been presented as a fantasy, which is clearly separated from the day-to-day world. The special effects are both wildly unbelievable (like heroes jumping incredible heights to the tops of buildings) and crude (accomplishing the jump upward by reversing the film). “By exaggerating the violence out of all proportion,” Ashis Nandy argues, Hindi films create the “overall impression” of a “fairy tale” or “comic strip” (1989: 48–49; see also Derné 2000: 64; and Dickey 1993: 69 on Tamil films). By contrast, many cable television events, from violent American sports to WWF wrestling, appear to be an actual social reality. Some men may believe that the violence they see is common in foreign societies with which they have no real experience. Several men commented that they liked foreign films precisely because the world they present appears authentic due to their realistic special effects. The cable television and movie preferences of Sanjay, a prosperous unmarried thirty-year-old, suggest a strong attraction to media that emphasize male violence and villainy. For Sanjay, American films are especially pleasing because, he says, they “show things the way they actually are [actual hota hain].” Rather than successfully introducing new cultural blueprints, then, cultural globalization may more often offer new resources that intensify the attraction to existing hierarchies. The intensified celebration of male violence influenced by foreign media serves to reinforce the ways that popular culture has long contributed to male dominance in India. The re-energized association of masculinity and violence only reemphasizes that men are active while women are passive. The greater violence serves to emphasize even more than in the past that women are vulnerable to such assaults and so should limit their public actions.

Foreign Pornography Cultural globalization has brought more foreign pornography to India. In 1991, two cheap theaters showed Indian-made pornographic films, carrying an A (Adult Only) rating. In 2001, these theaters continued to operate, but one of the two most prestigious theaters in town also routinely showed dubbed foreign films that were marketed with the A rating usually reserved for pornography. Low budget and dubbed into Hindi, these foreign films aim at soft-core titillation, for Indian cen-



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sors bar all nudity. The foreign pedigree and prestigious venue attracted good audiences that included ordinary middle-class men and male adolescents (as age restrictions were not enforced). More hard-core foreign pornography has also become available on video. Boys now watch these films in video halls with their peers (for example, Abraham 2001: 139). Mainstream film magazines increasingly carry advertising for phone sex. Abraham’s 1996–1998 study of English-speaking college students in Mumbai revealed, for instance, that more than half of the male students had seen pornographic films. Pornographic films, she concludes, are “the main source of information for many boys on matters concerning sex” (ibid.: 144). Catharine MacKinnon rightly argues that the construction of women as existing for men’s pleasure is a fundamental part of male dominance: So many distinctive features of women’s status as second class—the restriction and constraint and contortion, the servility and the display, the self-mutilation and requisite presentations of self as a beautiful thing, the enforced passivity, the humiliation—are made into the content of sex for women. Being a thing for sexual use is fundamental to it. (1989: 130, my emphasis)

A woman, she says, is “identified as one whose sexuality exists for someone else” (118). She argues that this “sexual objectification” is “the primary process of the subjection of women” (124). Hindi films have long played a role constructing female sexuality as existing for men’s pleasure (see Derné 2000: 149–150). The theme especially comes through in dance scenes. The sensitive hero of the preglobalization superhit Maine pyar kiya (I fell in love, 1989) guides his beloved in dancing for his pleasure in a number of sexy rooftop dances. The skimpy dress the heroine wears prompts the hero to gaze spellbound, causing a look of pain on the heroine’s face. Prior to globalization, ubiquitous fantasy dance sequences made usually modest heroines wear jeans or shorts to please their beloveds. In fighting-and-killing films, villains try to victimize women for their own pleasure—often to the delight of males in the audience—while in social films, heroines often focus on pleasing the hero. The availability of foreign pornographic films has reinforced the emphasis on women’s “to-be-looked-at-ness” and the construction of women as existing for men’s pleasure. Thus, at screenings of A-films in Dehra Dun the wholly male audience whistled their enthusiasm at any scene suggesting sex. “Oh, oh, oh,” men would shout as a female character in a dubbed film took off a sweater (even though she was only revealing a shirt underneath). The cultural emphasis on men as active and women as passive, on men as positioned to look and women as positioned to be looked at, and on the imperative that

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women act for men’s pleasure has been reinvigorated by the newly available transnational cultural resources. Dr. Neelam Gore of a Pune women’s organization reports that because of pornography more and more women complain that men demand sex more often—often in ways that women see as “perverse” (Page and Crawley 2001: 168).2 Mark Liechty’s pathbreaking study of the effects of newly available foreign pornography reveals dynamics in Kathmandu, Nepal, that may also be taking place in urban India. Liechty found that men’s use of foreign pornography increases the demands that they make on women. One woman commented on the sexual aggression induced by foreign pornography: “I mean, while watching these films, in what a bad manner [men] think of others! Even their own sisters they begin to look at in this way! This is what they do once they have become like that” (quoted by Liechty 2001: 46). Liechty found that Nepali women who “condemned the content of pornographic videos based on their own identities as individuals and Nepalis” nonetheless believed that the videos portrayed a valid sexuality for “other women” or people from “other places” (48). Women, Liechty says, understand “the images of women in ‘blue films’ to be not merely male fantasies, but the realities of some other place” (46). Liechty suggests that “critical perspectives” on pornography are limited because of pornography’s association with the cult of “imported ‘modern’ consumer goods” like VCRs and televisions and the lifestyle associated with them (49). Cultural globalization, then, often provides new meanings that become additional resources that strengthen the hand of men. Abraham’s study of low-income college students found that while foreign pornography had given boys a sense that they had knowledge of sexual practices, girls often felt that they did not “know that much” about sex (2001: 147). One girl, who said that she had no proper understanding of sex, said that by contrast “boys know all this” (ibid.). With the new access to foreign pornography, men are frequently incited to increasingly objectify women. Liechty suggests that valued modernity often becomes associated with “free” lifestyles that men associate with the objectification of women. Rather than offering alternative resources for the disadvantaged, cultural globalization ends up providing new meanings that already privileged men act on to further advance their position.

Changing Body Ideals for Men and Women Raj, a twenty-year-old student whose father is a Dehra Dun shopkeeper, is attracted to western fashion. He wore jeans and a silk shirt to an afternoon screening of a dubbed Schwarzenegger film, which he watched with three hostel mates. He laughs and jokes with these friends, enjoying a day of leisure. Raj says he likes only American films and is derisive of my own taste for Hindi films, which he calls “stupid.” Cable television and foreign films have introduced new standards of beauty in India. The previous voluptuous female standard of beauty is being replaced by the



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ultra-thin model currently popular in the United States. Similarly, a more fleshy standard of male beauty is being replaced by a more muscled look. India’s winners in recent beauty contests have prompted feelings of national pride (see Munshi 2001: 89; John 1998: 379). Raj wanted to know if I, too, found that Indian women had become more beautiful than American women. Yet Raj makes this judgment using a new standard of beauty. “Indian women are more beautiful and they’re looking more American now,” Raj says. Referring to the exercise regimes that produce the new bodies, Raj says that Indian beauties have “gotten smaller from working out, while the heroes are getting bigger from working out.” The new standards of beauty, which were introduced through cable television and foreign films and have been adopted in local media products, like Hindi films, end up contributing to male dominance by intensifying the focus on male strength and female weakness. Influenced by international standards of beauty, the well-rounded, voluptuous heroines that characterized Hindi films through the 1980s have been replaced by thin beauties (see, for example, Munshi 2001: 83, 85). The biggest 1970s heroine, the curvy Sridevi, fits an older Indian standard, which is rejected by the taut Karishma Kapoor or Kajol of the 1990s. The heroines of today’s hit Hindi films are as thin as the stars of the American serial Friends. When the 1990s’ top heroine Madhuri Dixit came on the scene in the mid-1980s, she was “summarily dismissed by both the audiences and the industry as being too thin,” as one celebratory fan retrospective recalls (Raheja and Kothari 1996: 139). While in earlier eras, English-language fan magazines referred to Sridevi as “thunder thighs” without too much disapproval, today fan magazines routinely praise heroines’ weight loss, indicating the rise of new regimes of female beauty. Describing Shamita Shetty’s workout regime, one fan magazine praises the actress for turning herself from the “once-upon-a-time pleasantly plump person to the toned-to-almost-perfection personality.” Another film magazine praises Rani Mukherjee for making herself “yummy-licious” by losing “oodles of weight” through an “exercise program and spartan diet” (Filmfare 2001). Even non-elite women may be influenced by advertising in Hindi-language fan magazines, which now commonly advertise books that offer a “ladies slimming course” (English transliterated to Hindi). These Hindi-language fan magazines, which aim at literate non-English speakers, have a largely local allegiance. They only rarely carry advertisements for global products, like Nike shoes, or use cosmopolitan endorsers, like Pete Sampras. That the new standard of beauty is a foreign one, however, is apparent in the fact that advertisements encouraging “slimming” use the English word transliterated into Hindi. That the emphasis on slimming has entered such locally oriented magazines shows the widespread influence of the new standard of beauty. The new emphasis on transnational standards of female beauty has of course been partly driven by industries that want to instill consumer desires for everything from makeup and fashion to diet drinks and health clubs (Munshi 2001: 87;

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S. Ghosh 1999: 22). But the effects on women are particularly harmful. As elsewhere, some women influenced by the new standards end up suffering from physical problems like bulimia and anorexia (Basu in Parukelar 2001). But perhaps more important, the emphasis on thinness as the new standard of female beauty supports the belief that women are vulnerable and depend on men for protection. A thin woman seems less able to fight off a brute than a more substantial woman. When one of the young heroines in the 2000 hit Mohabbatein (Loves) is thrown into a pool, her drenched thin body can be easily carried out by the buff young hero. She looks embarrassed and vulnerable, but relieved that a man is nearby to help her. Perhaps the thinness of the new heroines (coupled with the buffness of the new heroes) is one reason why the once-common, usually humorous, gender-reversal scenes that showed women fighting strongly (Derné 2000: 73–75) appear to have declined as a standard element of Hindi films. The longstanding protests of Indian feminists against the objectification of women in the mass media (for example, Gandhi and Shah 1992: 68-69, 75) show that many Indian women recognize how the new images of beauty harm women’s interests. The increasingly muscled and strong ideal male body furthers the focus on female vulnerability and the need to rely on male strength. In contrast to the muscular, lean gods of western art, Hindu imagery used to depict “rounded masculine gods with incipient breasts” (Kakar 1995, cited by Chodorow 1999: 119). R. Kapur (1993: 75; cited by K. Jain 2001: 199) describes the characteristic iconography of Ram, the most revered Hindu male deity, as “soft, smooth bodied,” and “almost pudgy.” In traditional iconography, Ram is “smiling . . . , benign, and above all gentle and tranquil.” One artist for the respected Amar Chitra Katha mythological comic series said that a god’s body should be “gentle and beautiful. . . . There won’t be any muscles” (Jain 2001: 203). Through the 1980s, it was not uncommon for Hindi film heroes (such as Rishi Kapoor or Shammi Kapoor) to fit this ideal. Foreign movies and serials introduced a muscled look, and this has increasingly become the standard of male beauty. Analysts note that even recent religious iconography now shows Ram as a muscular god (Jain 2001: 200). The new ideal is clear throughout the Hindi film world. Film stars, fan magazines, and the popular Indian press all comment on the strong bodies of male actors. Since the early 1990s, fan magazines have included spreads featuring heroes’ new strong bodies (M. Jain 1991: 32; Movie Mag International 2001). The top hero, Salman Khan, is renowned for his broad chest, which is often featured in fan magazines. One recent issue of a Hindi-language fan magazine featured four articles on Salman that were illustrated with five photos of his shirtless chest (Muvi Chitrahaar March 2001). Fan magazines praise heroes for their strength and height, for winning “muscle contests,” and for working out and dieting to achieve muscular bodies (D’Souza 2001: 16; Movie Mag International 2001: 46, 49). In fan magazines, heroes often comment



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that the need to develop muscular bodies has resulted from the new global standards. One hero, Bobby Deol, comments that while “in the past, it wasn’t a big thing, . . . today physique plays a really important part in an actor’s career because audiences have changed.” Teenagers, whom Deol says “form the major chunk of the audience, are greatly influenced by the West and the West, as you know, has always been into fitness” (D’Souza 2001: 15). Another hero comments that “fifteen years ago” heroes “went around with paunches,” saying that “today if we don’t have cuts on our stomach people will spit on us” (Sai 2001: 32). Male filmgoers like the new muscled look. Two men I interviewed said that Salman Khan was their favorite hero and mentioned his muscled body as a key attraction. When I asked one twenty-year-old construction worker why Salman was his favorite hero, he replied, “You’ve seen his bare body, haven’t you?” One twentyyear-old student told me that he especially enjoyed looking at secondary heroes, for, he said, they often have beautiful bodies too. More than one-third of the men I interviewed who gave reasons for liking a particular hero focused on the man’s body, dancing skills, or fighting ability. Indeed, men in theatres greatly enjoy watching their favorite heroes fight and dance on screen (Derné 2000: 159–160). At screenings of Hindi films, the male audience consistently responded with deafening whistles when heroes showed their bodies in fights. It is difficult to know how much films and film culture push ordinary men to work out to develop muscles. Anand Patwardhan’s (1995) documentary film shows a young man who says his body-building was inspired by watching videocassettes of “Arnold’s movies.” Page and Crawley report that in one Maharashtra town, the “idolising of film stars” has led to a “new interest in physical development,” which has generated a number of “health clubs and karate classes . . . , something quite new to the culture of the town” (2001: 161). As in earlier eras (Derné 2000: 133, n. 18), film magazines continue to advertise guns and other weapons, judo and karate lessons, and potions to increase men’s height and strength. In 2001, 70 percent of the Hindi-language fan magazines that I examined included such advertising. In Dehra Dun in 2001, billboards advertised a “mega mass” supplement to help men build the Hercules-like body of muscles that was prominently featured in the advertising. While few, if any, of the men whom I interviewed showed signs of building such bodies, they, too, may be influenced by cinematic messages that heighten their association of maleness with strength. The new bodies intensify the association of men with aggression and of women with the need for protection.

Women’s Resistance to the Global Gender Order Indian feminist groups have long targeted media portrayals that use women’s sexuality as a commodity, suggesting that these portrayals play an important role

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in male dominance. Even prior to globalization, protests of Hindi films and media advertisements were not uncommon (Gandhi and Shah 1992: 68–75; Manushi 1981; Ghosh 1999: 237). Such protests have continued as women’s groups have petitioned courts and regulators to halt “obscenity and vulgarity” in film songs, which encourage sexual harassment (Ghosh 1999: 239). On International Women’s Day in 2001, Lucknow University students scraped vulgar movie posters from hostel walls, painting slogans supporting women’s empowerment over where the posters had been. The women targeted the posters because they believed them to be a major source of sexual harassment, charging that men pass “lewd remarks . . . inspired by the posters” (Times of India 2001: 4). The fact that more and more women direct their protests against depictions in global media suggest that such media seem to particularly disadvantage women. In 1996, progressive Delhi women’s organizations filed writ petitions in court, charging that satellite and cable companies violated federal law prohibiting the “indecent representation of women” (Oza 2001: 1072–1073; see also Ghosh 1999: 239, on other petitions). Pramilla Nesargi, a BJP member of parliament affiliated with women’s groups, criticized the government for allowing MTV into India, claiming that the result has been a 100 percent increase in sex crimes, for men who watch MTV commit rapes and murders. She asserted that, because of foreign media, “eve-teasing [sexual harassment] is happening every day” (Dalrymple 1998: 182). While some progressive women’s groups that protested India’s 1996 staging of the Miss World pageant focused on how the pageant encouraged the entry of multinational corporations into India (Oza 2001: 1079), many criticized the pageant as encouraging sexual harassment (see Ghosh 1999: 248) and commodification of women (Oza 2001: 1081). Sexual harassment and rape have long been a primary mechanism of male dominance in India, but the widespread protest by women activists from both ends of the political spectrum against the transnational media’s depictions of women is nonetheless important evidence suggesting that cultural globalization may only intensify women’s oppression.

Conclusion Men are attracted to newly available global celebrations of male power, privilege, and aggression precisely because these depictions are consistent with existing gender hierarchies men like. Men find the newly available cultural meanings appealing because they can be layered on top of, and mobilized in support of, desired gender inequalities. Dreaming of monopolizing transnational mobility that is newly valued gives men a fresh sense of their privilege as men. The seemingly realistic portrayals of male strength in the global media heighten men’s attraction to the privi-



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leges that they already enjoy, while foreign pornography appears to offer exciting new dimensions of male privilege. Transnational cultural flows sometimes depict new possibilities for women. But because these new possibilities are inconsistent with men’s interests and structural opportunities, middle-class men tend to resist messages that celebrate new freedoms for women. Rather than destabilizing the existing order, then, cultural globalization often merely provides new cultural resources that already powerful people can use to further advance their own interests. As R. W. Connell (1998: 17) argues, the “emerging global order” is not a “hotbed of gender progressivism.” Rather, the global forces that may increase ordinary men’s awareness of cosmopolitan lifestyles beyond their means often lead them to “reaffirm local gender orthodoxies and hierarchies” (ibid., emphasis in text). In addition, cultural globalization often also gives men new ideas about how to act out oppressive gender hierarchies.

Notes 1. While the interviews were not systematically random, I approached men who were purchasing expensive balcony tickets and cheap floor tickets at all of the theaters in Dehra Dun and at showings of hit films and run-of-the-mill films, fighting-and-killing films and love stories, Hindi films and English-language films. The rate of refusal was low. The interviews were conducted in Hindi and took about thirty minutes. The taped interviews were conducted in public in and around cinema halls. In both years I conducted the interviews with the help of a journalist for a regional Hindi newspaper. 2. Women’s responses to pornography differ. The affluent English-speaking Delhi women whom Puri (1999: 123–127) interviewed enjoy watching “blue” pictures on video and cable. Despite their pleasures, however, pornography may still play a role in inciting the public sexual aggression of men that these women find threatening and injurious (75).

Chapter 8

Performing Contradictions, Performing Bad-Girlness in Japan Yau Ching

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have been teaching media production workshops to teenagers in reform and correctional facilities in various parts of East Asia since 2000. This chapter will focus mainly on the issues raised during my teaching at a girls’ reform institute in Japan in 2002.1 This public institution operates like a school, devoting part of the girls’ time to a regular high school curriculum, but with more emphasis on discipline and conformity. The girls, who have committed diverse levels of offense, reside at the institute and are not allowed to leave it. The group selected by the institute to participate in my workshops ranged in age from twelve to sixteen and consisted of girls considered most “difficult”; they were not studying in the main curriculum and therefore had “spare” time to be in my workshops. Most of them had been at the institute for years, except for one girl, who had just arrived the week before. In 2002 I was invited by the artist-in-residence program funded by the Japan Foundation to be a visiting artist in Sapporo, Japan, for three months, where I was asked to create an art piece and participate in an exhibition to be held at the Hokkaido Museum of Contemporary Art. I used the opportunity to ask to teach a series of media workshops, in photography, video, and sound, in a female juvenile reform facility and to create artwork together with the girls there. After a long process of negotiation with the institute, I was able to conduct workshops for five girls, twice a week, each session lasting three hours, over a period of a month; I was also granted the permission to have the girls’ faces photographed. I interviewed all the girls and gave them access to media production equipment including digital cameras, disposable cameras, video cameras, and sound recorders during and outside class time. I also provided guidelines for several exercises. Unlike the usual types of activities planned and designed by staff at the institute, my workshops included tapes not previously screened and censored by higher authorities, and the girls were able to use media production equipment outside class. Seeking to tackle several intersecting problems through amalgamating strat-



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egies of media analysis, sociocultural critique, art education, and artistic production, my project transgressed traditional disciplinary boundaries, as well as boundaries between “practice” and “theory,” through utilizing my multiple resources and interests as an educator, an artist, and an academic. One of my intentions was to explore and understand how young women in such a socially marginalized context would devise their own negotiations with media representation in ways that would enable them to experience themselves as authors and performers of their lives. Through their negotiations, I searched for practices by which they might possibly recast themselves in a light different from that in which they have previously been cast. As McQuaide and Ehrenreich say of the incarcerated woman: “To see [her] only as the prison creates her is to falsify her and to reduce her to her current social status” (1998: 243). I was trying to understand how opening up forms or ways of representation might shed light on issues of subjectivity in relation to disempowered gendered subjects in Japan, on possible forms of resistance, negotiation, and agency among young women conventionally labeled as “bad girls,” in relation to formations of globalized and localized capitalism in Japan. There were several dimensions to this project. It was, first and foremost, an emotionally intense learning experience for me as a researcher and educator to catch a glimpse of these individuals’ lives; some of my findings form the basis of this essay. I learned much more about myself through the bonding that gradually developed between myself and the workshop participants. On the final day one girl made the following video about my departure: Tomorrow is the last [day] with Y. C. It’s sad that it’s ending. Very sad. By all means, come again. And work hard and take care of yourself, too, for your own self. For you, and those that have helped me, I seriously want to work hard. Not only for my own sake, but also for those around me. [Eyes to camera.] It’s been really fun doing Y. C.’s videos [repeats from a different angle facing the camera]. Please come again.2

Alongside the media and cultural analysis, the video and photo images are an integral part of the project. Although not following a traditional “life history” approach, the video, photo, and audio works produced by the participants during these workshops are testimonies of their lives in inventive ways: the participants explored ways of speaking to themselves, to each other, and to an audience out in the world through me as a medium, ways that were not made possible for them otherwise. The workshops were a collective creative experience, in which I first gave the participants clear, though minimal, parameters for producing their self-representations, showed them samples that have been done before in similar environments, discussed with them their ideas, and taught the techniques needed. For the still camera work, I asked them to represent themselves to people “who want to get to

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know them.” For the audio and video work, I asked them to narrate their “best memories,” to describe their hobbies, the music/films/books they liked, dreams they had had, and what they wanted to do/become in the future. I also asked them to write two video letters to themselves five years from now. In addition to these exercises, they could add whatever they wanted. Then I passed out the media tools to the participants and collected them within certain timeframes. The participants were allowed to use the equipment without much interference from the staff of the institute and in absolute privacy. The staff were not allowed to see the works produced unless the participants let them, while I got permission from all the participants before and after the exercises to show these works publicly in other cultural contexts, with my own selection, juxtaposition, and editing. Since I have been conducting similar workshops in other parts of Asia and will continue to do so, I showed the girls in Japan works done previously by girls in similar situations. These become mirror images for the young women in different contexts to register each others’ and also their own humanity.3 They could see that they were not alone in their confined worlds. These mirrors also speak powerfully against the prevalence of stereotypical images of delinquents as “criminals,” often internalized as a stigmatizing self-image by the teens themselves. The cumulative method of screenings gives the workshop participants a conception of how their works will appear to future audiences. It also gives them an imaginary audience or community with which to communicate. I believe that the creative moment is most fruitful when the workshop participants, who have been deprived of many rights of freedom, choice, and privacy, most of which we outside the criminal justice system tend to take for granted, begin to register that they have an opportunity for self-(re)definition as well as an opportunity to imagine their existence beyond their immediate environment, that they may possibly communicate with people otherwise inaccessible. In my workshops, I combine methodologies from visual self-ethnography, art education and therapy, media, and cultural theories of representation to explore new ways of interrogation in order to more effectively respond to the questions and problems presented or epitomized by the teens themselves in their predicament.

Abjection I tried to protect the identities of the girls by not telling people where they came from when we went outside on special occasions. However, the girls themselves did not necessarily see this as a problem and would tell people unashamedly that they were from the “Reform Institute.” That really pisses us off!

When I was at a high-security juvenile correctional facility in Macau, one staff member complained to me about the difficulty of keeping the girls’ identities “a



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secret.” In my experience working with the girls who have been locked up and silenced in these institutions, their desire to communicate with me, telling me who they are, why they are there, and what they have done, is often met with strict institutional regulations that aim to produce shame in them about their differences from an imaginary social and sexual normalcy. The Macau staffer’s complaint exposes bluntly the differences between the ways these institutions look at the girls and how the girls look at themselves. Operating on a shaming discourse in the name of protection, the institutions perpetuate the disempowerment of the girls, by marking and closeting their differences from those who are assumed “normal” (and therefore socially superior to them), thus exiling the girls to the position of the abject. As Bruce Federick (1999) points out, most incarcerated young people tend to suffer from the so-called “revolving door” effect—they are released from detention centers only to be returned to them again—due to the “closed doors” that these youngsters face in society as a consequence of their first detention. I have come to realize through this project that this revolving-door effect similarly applies to many kinds of marginalized positions, including people of nonnormative genders and sexualities, sex workers, and incarcerated girls, in the sense that the notion of shame evoked produces a predicament of permanent abjection as “not-yet-subjects” (Butler 1993: 3). The process of abjection uses the illusion of education, “reform,” therapy, or the possibility for betterment to justify incarceration or closetedness while it simultaneously creates conditions for “never-subjects,” who are forced into a kind of social, psychological, and/or emotional immobility because exposing or changing their conditions would render them even less as subjects. The correctional institutions’ failure to achieve their educational or reform goals is partly a result of their inability to register the girls’ identities as they are performed socially and privately because these identities are closely linked with the registration, revelation, and embodiment of the social contradictions in these societies. The institute in Hokkaido sought to build an entirely artificial environment segregated from the outside world geographically and culturally. Although close to a city as metropolitan as Sapporo, it is not located within walking distance of any urban environment. Anything that smacks of the material culture is denounced. One day I brought in a teen magazine, some manga books, and some CDs that the girls had told me they liked so that we could discuss them. When I said that I wanted to loan these items to the girls for one day so we could have further discussions the next day, the institute administrators refused to let me. When I asked the girls what or whom they missed most, one told me it was her computer, because they were not allowed any computer access in the institute. Some of the presumptions on which these institutions operate reflect and perpetuate the presumptions that have sent the girls to the institutions in the first place.

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Sexed Bodies in Shame Scholars have argued for over a decade that the majority of young women drawn into the criminal justice system are there not because they have committed offenses but rather because of “concerns about their perceived sexual behavior and/ or because they are seen to be ‘at risk’ of ‘offending’ against social codes of adolescent femininity” (Hudson 1989: 197). In this the authorities are guided by ideologies that invest female bodies with “dangerous sexual powers” (Faith 1993: 1; see also Carlen and Wardaugh 1991; Worrall 1999). Kerry Carrington (1994) has argued that society controls the unacceptable sexual behavior of men through controlling the sexual activities of girls. During my workshops in Japan, the girls were forbidden to talk about why they had been arrested and sent to the facility. When I asked them how they got there, they were under pressure to seek special permission to respond from the social worker, also known as “sensei” (teacher), who watched us during class. Q: What did you do? Hitomi: I can’t say. What should I do in this case, Mr. K? Q: Why? You can’t say it? H: Running away from home and . . . (to Mr. K) . . . is it okay [to speak]? K: I think it will upset her if she tells the “strong” part of the story. H: No, I can talk properly. I can talk. Well . . . it is stealing bicycles and enko. While Hitomi resisted her sensei’s repressive and paternalistic overprotection of her feelings by insisting on speaking for herself, my interpreter was so embarrassed by this response that she could not translate it for me verbally, but instead showed me her electronic dictionary, which said “prostitution.” Gradually I learned that about half of my workshop participants had been arrested due to acts related to “enjo kōsai,” also known as “enkō,” literally translated as “assisted companionship” or “compensated dating.”4 Difficult to translate, the term is often seen by U.S. feminists as a form of teenage prostitution and then framed as a form of child abuse or survival sex, where girls, as victims, are forced by pimps into sexual acts in order to survive. Most of the contacts for enjo kōsai in Japan, however, are made via “telephone clubs,” where girls use their mobile phones or computers to call into chat rooms to arrange for meetings with potential customers directly. The girls and the customers themselves fix a date to meet and agree on the details and price of the desired social or sex act. Criminologists Meda Chesney-Lind and Randall Shelden point out that in the U.S. juvenile justice system, when girls are committed for real or supposed prostitution, the institutional milieu, also driven by the protectionist rhetoric, is often ori-



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ented toward “protecting the girl from the street, the customers, and the pimp” and generally toward the “salvation of fallen girls” (Kersten 1989: 36, in Chesney-Lind and Shelden 2004: 224). While they powerfully question the U.S. “courts’ historic commitment to the jailing of large numbers of girls in conflict with society and on the streets” (Chesney-Lind and Shelden 2004: 230) and argue for decriminalization of status offenses, less institutionalization, and less monitoring of sexual behavior of girls in the U.S. context, they fail to register the need of similar changes in Asian contexts: “One sees clearly in these countries the wretched interface between sexual and economic exploitation. In an increasingly global society, young Asian women are being reduced to expendable, sexual commodities to feed the jaded appetites of prosperous males” (50). Jennifer Liddy, an American freelance writer and a high school teacher in Japan, after interviewing several of her students whom she suspects are engaged in enjo kōsai, concludes: These girls are victims. Sufferers of poor choices, of a pedophile who can come and shell out paper for young bodies and escape justice. These girls are prostitutes in one of the richest countries in the world. They are sucked into having what everyone else has and their need for it is like a drug. Brand name buys the reputation. The want for their young bodies rises each month.5

Because no pimps or visible exploiters appear in these young girls’ narratives, Liddy feels a need to reposition the girls as victims of global capitalism, as pathological products of consumerism and materialism. Similarly, the institute I worked with in Japan positions itself as “rescuing” the girls from being “victimized” by the sex industry and their customers. This kind of mainstream media attention paid to the phenomenon of enjo kōsai in early to mid 1990s in Japan provoked an international outcry against the “problem,” while serving to further police and colonize the private sphere of bodies and sexualities in the name of upholding statist values in the disguise of morality.6 In the Japanese anti-enkō discourse, shame and moral panic are often interlinked with nationalistic sentiments: “Media make it look as though every teenage girl is doing enjo kōsai in Japan. It’s [the] same old stereotyping and overgeneralization. I’m ashamed of the problem.”7 As Lees remarks, adolescent socialization for girls, in the form of “(hetero)sexualization,” is fraught with discontinuity and contradictions. Girls’ femininity has to be regulated constantly according to cultural ascription, while at the same time their identities as persons in their own right have to be developed in contradiction to this. This kind of socialization, in forms of abuse, seeks to “control single girls and steer them towards marriage as the only legitimate expression of sexuality” (1989: 31). Rika Sakuma Sato points out that the commodification of shōjo (girl) in Japan is a result of the sexual prohibition on the male demanded by the capi-

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talist economy, which “defines the relationship between the market and the family” (1998: 39): The consecration of the purity of women and children is at the basis of the cult of domesticity, an ideological foundation of the modern bourgeois family. Therefore, what is significant about the spread of schoolgirl prostitution in Japan is not the behavioral change of the female adolescents, but the breakdown of the fundamental prohibition on men. The breaking of the taboo should undermine the very status of men as guardians of the family against the terror of the market. (39–40)

Notions of (Euro-Americanized) Japanese modernity—including Japanese self-imaginary as a democratized, urbanized, highly industrialized, and capitalist nation-state whose population growth depends on monogamous, consensual marriages and reproductive sex—need to carefully prescribe the denial of contradictions produced by notions of modernity; the contradictions, as I have come to realize through this project, are found in forms and expressions of sexualities that remain as taboos and are criminalized.8 By consciously packaging and cashing in on their bodies as domesticated and sexualized objects/subjects, could these young women be seen as directly exposing and challenging the binarism of the family and the market required by modern capitalist nationhood? Could acts like enjo kōsai be read as ways in which girls devise their own sexualized, socialized, but non-marriage-oriented forms of identity by turning the patriarchal and capitalist laws of the fathers and the bosses on their heads?

“I’m Not Pure” versus The Pure Nation The song and music video “Goodbye Summer Boy,” sung by Aya Matsuura, former member of Morning Musume and an idol for all the girls in my workshop in Japan, figures a complex web of purity, lies and silence that both illuminates and contests the dominant national sexual imaginary. The music video of this song features Matsuura in schoolgirl uniform, with wet hair. The lyrics go as follows: I’m not as pure a girl as you think Goodbye Boy Most likely the lie will be revealed for what it is Because of that I can’t say anything Goodbye Boy.

Living with the nationalist rhetoric of harmony and modernizing progress, postindustrial Japan is a society with a rapidly declining birth rate and increasing divorce



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rate. “More marriages are ending in divorce, more families are single-parented, and more women are staying single and childless” (Allison 1996: 174). The state apparatus produces and strictly regulates a social order in which sex for pleasure remains fetishized, while reproductive sex marks the moral nation. Allison has argued that the popularization of shōjo in the public imaginary as a sign of, and for escape from, reality outside one’s comfort zone refers to the role once assigned to and assumed by mothers in the matricentral family life of Japan. I would go further to suggest that the popularization of the fetishized shōjo as a sex symbol can also be read as a social need to respond to and depart from the hegemonic statist bondage of marriage and motherhood, both of which also signify adulthood and therefore degenerated sexuality. The collective desire to consume signs and bodies of young girls, and the conscious marketing by girls of their own bodies in public and in private, can also be seen as such responses. Young girls’ selling of their own bodies to older men simultaneously replaces and rejects the chauvinist ideals of motherhood, while embracing the modernist construct of the consumer child and both utilizing and embodying the capitalist logic of brand management to upset Japan’s own modernist myth of the labor-free child (“the lie will be revealed for what it is”). Enjo kōsai rejects the nationalist logic of reproductive sex yet upholds the capitalist logic of hedonistic and individualistic consumerism. In such light, enjo kōsai can be seen as an inventive lifestyle that embodies, enacts, and performs many of the contradictions acutely felt and lived by young women in Japan today and as a response to the social changes and ideological apparatus they have internalized and need to utilize for their own benefit and for survival. Why did enjo kōsai raise so much moral panic in Japan, furthering the cause of controlling young girls’ bodies? The modernist capitalism of Japan has constructed growing up as a process of rapid degeneration, denigrating childhood into a fetishized fantastical realm of purity and innocence, and old age into a void of spent utilitarian value, so old men and young girls are placed in powerless positions while they are ironically at either end of an economic spectrum.9 The fetishization of young girls translates into commodification and sexualization of them, especially by older men, who are considered to be “castrated by society.” In order to be innocent and pure again, one sleeps with the innocent and pure. This contemporary enterprise of young girls and the responses it elicits epitomize the convergence of several dominant social fears embedded within the intersections of the contradictory forces of capitalism, nationalism, and chauvinism. These fears include having to address adult male self-hatred, because it is so bound to the work ethic that drives the Japanese modernist discourse forward for the “good” of the nation, the fear of women and children who are engaged in sexual acts for pleasure and not conforming to reproductive-oriented ideologies of heterosexist marriage, and last but not least, the fear of the teenage female body perceived by the state apparatus and the patriarchy as be-

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coming uncontrollable. While all of these fears have been produced by late capitalism, the first fear contradicts male supremacy and the last two upset the logic of the growing nation and of chauvinism. The state’s investment in regulating the sexuality of children and teens is founded on a self-contradictory paradigm of claiming innocence for them while at the same time denouncing their sexuality as inherently dangerous and therefore evil. Sabine Frühstück studies how the formation of sexology as a discipline is closely related to the building of an imaginary nation and the nation’s demand for social control in Japan’s modernization process: On the one hand, children were to be protected from both their own (unconscious) desires and the corrupting dangers of modern society—since a “fallen society” threatened to destroy the education of children. . . . On the other hand, the national body had to be protected from those children who could not be protected from indulging their desires and who thus became mentally and physically diseased. (2003: 59–60)

When girls use their bodies to skillfully and playfully act out this paradox of being sexual and innocent at the same time, and employ this effort to strengthen their material base and enrich their sexual and social experiences (Ho 2001), they become the social scapegoats, the national “problem” to be condemned.

Childhood as Trope Although the girls in my workshops ranged between fourteen and eighteen years of age, the institute reminded me repeatedly, as in these instructions, that I should address them as “children”: When you display works that show children’s faces at exhibitions in Japan, 1. Please notify us in advance. 2. Please use the expression “Work(s) produced in full cooperation with the children” and never use the word “institution.” . . .10

However, as can be seen from the following remarks from one of Hitomi’s video letters, many of these young women yearn to be independent and to be seen as grown up, precisely so that they can help and care for the people around them. I hope to be able to help my mother, but I worry if I’ll be able to do that. I want to get over my emotional dependence and go out into society. Here at sixteen, I’m doing my best to make that happen.

Chika voiced similar yearnings in her video letters:



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I hope to be self-reliant. I want to be able to stand on my own feet, to find my own way and choose things by myself. That is the type of person I want to be.

While the girls resist being confined in the institution of childhood (which is how their being under “care” is justified), the use of these reform facilities to (re)establish childhood as a stable and “safe” institution in Japan can be seen as a way to tighten the state’s control over young bodies, denying them their rights to define their own gender and sexuality and to individualize their process of growing up.11 In the overall paradigm of Euro-American modernity, current panics about youthful disruption are often mixed with nostalgia for the previous generations, so that “youth” is simultaneously a metaphor for renovation and progress on the one hand, and for turmoil and social crisis on the other (Emler and Reicher 1995). Could it be the case that noncompliant children, instead of being incapable of transmitting “traditional values”—as if these values are static and nonchangeable—are actually actively participating in and sensitizing others to the contradictions embedded in social changes? These young people have become the scapegoats for being “a biological explanation for a breakdown in social relationships” (James and Prout 1997: 12– 14), hence the development of the discourses of the “lost generation,” “contaminated values,” and so on, in order to justify their being put under more social control. In this era of a globalizing first world that comes with a third world inside, widespread economic uncertainty, unemployment, and decreased public services have drastically affected minority communities, including children and teenagers. Norma Field (1995) argues that the cultural construction of childhood is rapidly disappearing in Japan, due to the logic of ceaseless production that becomes endless hours of schooling and homework in the educational system. According to Field, it is the logic of global capitalism, mediated by the nation-state, implemented by the schools, articulated with certain historical values and practices, and legitimized by notions of traditional culture that propels the contemporary loss of childhood in Japan. She positions the work ethic and the need for social conformity, programmed by the logic of global capitalism, as the binary opposite of the creative, exploratory play associated with “modern childhood.” Satoshi Kotani also has criticized the impact of materialist capitalism on youth; he characterizes Japanese youth today as “passive politically and socially” and “bound by a sense of resignation” (2004: 39). However, what is modern childhood if not also a culturally and historically specific construct that helps to regulate and perpetuate the supposed adult work ethic of modern man, who earns and consumes in order to keep his child from laboring while simultaneously training her/him to become a dependent consumer? Can the reconfiguration of sex as a business—with the aid of many electronic and media tools no doubt—also be seen as a means to actively pursue a form of social change and a way of saying no to “resignation”? Instead of sighing with nostalgia that childhood has disappeared in

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Japan when children all become laborers and consumers, and that sex becomes only a commodity bought with work, I suggest that exactly because labor-free and sexfree childhoods are mythical constructs very much defined by a universalizing, modernizing discourse, childhood in Japan today is being redefined in its own cultural-specific, material, and glocalized context, as much by the children and young people themselves as by others. I have found that it is precisely in the teenagers’ “deviant” relationship to global capital and the ideological and legal operations of their nation-state, in acts like enjo kōsai that landed the girls in reform and correctional facilities, that I have seen the most spontaneous “play” at work. These teenagers have reworked the binary opposition of work versus play, challenged the necessity for egalitarian love in sex, and explored new forms of human bonding not defined by marriage and statist, reproductive-oriented sex. Growing up enmeshed in global capitalism, young people today nurture, internalize, and express an intimate relationship to material and consumer culture. An integral part of their identities is constantly informed and produced by the nation’s capitalist development but may also contradict and challenge that same nation’s self-image of moral acceptability. The fact that social scientists around the globe working under the legacies of feminism and Marxist social critique have difficulty acknowledging and encouraging the possibilities of agency in teen sex work helps to perpetuate the ideologies of sex being inherently shameful, and thus in need of being sublimated into something else.12 This failure also perpetuates an ideology of childhood as a privileged site for innocence, spontaneity, play, and freedom, also a historically limited construct inseparable from the globalizing forces of a EuroAmerican-centric discourse, experienced in highly concentrated forms in East Asia under the auspices of accelerated capitalism. The overarching moral imperative of reading young people as inherent victims of material culture renders it impossible to register the potentiality of young women using their bodies and their access to material culture to realize their subjectivity and reconstitute their sexualities through localizing and individualizing forces of global capital, which could also be read as forms of resistance against its homogenizing forces.13

Embodying Popular Culture Acts like enjo kōsai are closely connected to other forms of behavior associated with notions of deviance that are then used to justify punishment by the shaming discourse and other forms of exclusion. When I asked the girls in Hokkaido if they liked to sing or dance, the girls all started to tease one girl, Hitomi, whom I found out later had a reputation of wanting to dance all the time, despite the fact that, according to the head of the institute, her previous school had expelled her “because she danced too much.” So one day I brought in Hitomi’s favorite CD,



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the very popular, all-girls group Morning Musume performing “Shabon Dama.” The song goes: You’re the one I love. I’ve never been in doubt but I’m a girl. O girl, he always controls my emotions I said I liked you from the bottom of my heart. I’ll do everything for you. Tell me if I was wrong. C’mon, c’mon, please. I’m talking to you! Cut off the power! You know that I liked you and you asked me out, right? You like me!!! Yes, hold me tight! Hold me tight!14

In the “Shabon Dama” music video, the girls from Morning Musume are dressed up in hyperfeminine clothes, as sexualized, desirable objects to be consumed, while at the same time, they slowly turn their bodies towards the audience in a rather aloof and detached manner, to convey a sense of inaccessibility, which of course further commodifies them as objects of desire. Hitomi knew this video by heart. I asked Hitomi to dance to the song, and the way that Hitomi danced contrasted sharply with the representation of the female body as marketed by the teen music industry. Her own dance reconfigured the power dynamics of the song in such a way that her young gendered body manifested a forcefulness and a form of body heat that was rather out of control while at the same time quite autonomous and individualized. While the Morning Musume girls collectively waver between being inaccessible and energetic, Hitomi fully inhabited the lead singer’s performance— she looks directly at the camera when speaking between sections of song—and the lyrics’ potential in being dominant and submissive at the same time, in knowing, announcing, and in fact demanding her desire to be desired (“I’m talking to you! Cut off the power! You know that I liked you and you asked me out, right?”). The combination of demanding desirability, being out of control, and exhibiting autonomy constitutes a kind of teenage female sexuality that not only defies normative femininity but also contradicts—talks back to—her gym uniform, one of the tools originally used to regulate and manage the teenage body within the educational and state apparatus (McVeigh 2000). The playing, performing, and body management seen in Hitomi’s singing and dancing, not unlike the girls engaged with enjo

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kōsai, can be seen as a form of resistance against the omnipresent official gaze (seken), as more “active” versions of the seemingly more “passive” ones often noted by scholars (McVeigh 2000: 43–44; 2002: 185–202), including tobokeru (pretending not to know or feigning ignorance), “rudeness,” speaking without sounds, lack of motivation, or simply absence. Seen in this light, is the active expression of the desire to be desired among young women in these societies an act to be punished after all, while globalized capitalist societies advocate and welcome such positions in the form of material consumption? In devising their own forms of resistance and inventing ways to express their subjectivity, the outcast girls with whom I worked use the rituals of consuming, internalizing, and/or transforming popular and material culture to manage a kind of playfulness and spontaneous expression to counterbalance the puritanical, capitalist work ethic that is imposed on them. Reform facilities work them very hard: one of my biggest problems in the workshops was the fight for time. Their “teachers” constantly told me not to give them “too much homework” because their schedules were already totally packed every day. The kind of play that the girls invented by appropriating the language of pop and material culture can be seen as a kind of repetitive yet creative, consumerist but non-utilitarian, emotional and physical work they were performing on themselves and on others to internalize and negotiate with the logic of globalized nationalist capitalist economy, whose ideological structure the educational system and the juvenile justice system both serve as socializing agents to rationalize, normalize, and manage. In this light, bodily acts like enjo kōsai and compulsive dancing and singing can be seen as forms of resistance in which the girls work to transform themselves playfully into consumable objects in order to gain stronger consuming power in a hegemonic material economy. Similar forms of challenge posed to the work/play dichotomy are abundant in the popular culture that girls grow up consuming today. In a DVD known as Idioms TV Comic: Kotomic (2003), featuring Miki Fujimoto and Aya Matsuura, the two popular teen idols use word play, feigned ignorance, and illiteracy to poke fun at Japanese idioms and proverbs as well as at the patriarchal seken, all of which aim at ensuring the work ethic, patience, and complacency within the capitalist economy, among other things. In an episode where they play “maids”: Aya complains about their salary, as compared to the wealthy people they work for. A: . . . but tsume ni hi o tomosu. Miki imagines from the literal sounds of the words: fire on one’s fingertips makes one feel cool. Miki takes time to enjoy what she sees. Announcer: Actually it means that although someone is wealthy, they are still worried about everything.



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This episode, while mocking the Japanese proverb in normalizing and therefore perpetuating the capitalist logic of unequal power relations, also suggests a rather creative albeit laughable position of the laborer as turning masochist, in this case, for her own enjoyment. The internalization and transformation of, and negotiation with, the capitalist logic simultaneously takes place from and within the position of the worker here, performed by teen idols easily identified and consumed by teenage girls who also live through such negotiations. Part of the “fun,” of course, is caused by the irony of presumably rich teen idols acting as “maids,” which considerably dilutes the possible class critique involved. Viewers’ consuming this irony further reinforces the hierarchical contrast between the idol singers and the domestic workers, at either end of the social ladder, and further channels the viewers’ desires into wanting to become or be like the idols.

Nonnormative Genders Female offenders have been traditionally represented as either lacking in femininity (“masculine in appearance”) or having too much of it (“attention-seeking or promiscuous”) (Worrall 1999: 38). Chesney-Lind and Shelden (2004) have found that educational programs in U.S. correctional facilities tend to emphasize traditional feminine pursuits like home economics, cleaning, and gardening. In Hokkaido, when I asked the girls to give me a tour of the facility, they showed me the rooms where they were taught cooking, sewing, tea ceremony, and pottery, again mostly activities that seek to (re)socialize/heterosexualize them into modes of normative femininity. But when I told them on the first day I got there how I failed all my home economics subjects in high school, they were all jumping up and down, eager to tell me they also had the same experiences. In contrast to the ways the system sets out to demarcate the girls into a class of delinquents (supposedly distinct from a university professor like myself), I was constantly reminded that we shared very similar positions as adolescents having to fight traumatic and at times impossible battles with social control. One of the exercises in my workshops was to write a series of short video letters to themselves five years from now, describing their current selves to an imaginary future self. One fifteen-year-old participant, Chika, recalled in her video letter how she wished she had “toughed it out” by not fighting with her previous teacher, for it was part of the reason she was incarcerated. In another video she made when I asked her to talk about anime and manga characters she liked, she said she liked Metal Gear Solid because there was a character, Snake, who was a good fighter: It’s exciting. Anyway, fighting in the game, killing people—but it isn’t killing; it’s about the fighting. I’d like to be strong. I don’t like being weak. I want to grow

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stronger and stronger, to become “cool girl” [flexing her arm muscles in front of her camera].

When asked whom she wanted to fight, Chika said “bad people.” When I asked if they were here in this facility, Chika smiled and said she could not say more. When the girls took pictures of each other in the workshop, they were all eager to show each other (and me) how cute and yet how tough they were, creating images of themselves that conformed to and yet simultaneously upset the stereotype of feminine adolescence in Japan: kawaii (categorically similar to cute but not the same), happy, healthy, but gentle and submissive young women often marketed by mainstream media.

Normative Self-Disclosure Using media for the purposes of self-disclosure today carries multiple implications in our globalized social environment that is filled with U.S.-influenced media. Nick Couldry analyzes the form of actively looking for and constructing self-disclosure in American media as a form of contemporary ritual, expanding the boundaries of the private experience by submitting that experience to the power dimensions of the mediation process. Instead of submitting one’s voices and inner being to the authority of the priest, doctor, or therapist, one submits today to the authority of media. These media rituals of self-disclosure build on and reinforce a “general spread of the languages of confession and therapy” (2003: 116) and create spaces of therapeutic significance to the participants. Confessional, therapeutic, and self-disclosure models seek to redeem deviance through naturalizing a set of uneven power relations. Participants in narratives of self-disclosure are often placed in positions of victimization and pathologization, and through the act of self-disclosure, they engage in a process of normalization, of self-cleansing, achieving the possibility of becoming good again and thus capable of assimilation by and into the community of onlookers. The normalization of the narrative self is constituted by the very presence of this “normal” spectator, while the narrative of the normalized self reinforces the assumed normalization of the spectator. In confessing to the media, one submits oneself to the scrutiny of the social gaze and consents to the cleansing effect offered by the supposed moral authority of the social collectivity. On the one hand, these narratives of self-disclosure may challenge the idea that the storyteller’s position is shameful by making the position more visible. Yet on the other hand, visibility also serves to reinforce the positions as shameful by granting the public a position of normativity and moral righteousness from which to judge, regulate, and punish. The normalizing power to judge, regulate, and punish the outcast in Japan is, however, manifested more in veiling than in disclosing. All of the reform facilities I



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have negotiated with have expressed much difficulty in allowing me to let the girls show their faces to the camera. I was further told by my translator, an art journalist, that she could not recall ever seeing any media representation in Japan that shows faces of female delinquents under age twenty. According to both her and the staff at the reform institutes I have visited, self-disclosing devices revealing the girls’ identities are considered harmful to the girls themselves, with or without their consent, because of the stigmatization they would face after release from these institutes, if this information were exposed. These strategies of representation—claiming to “protect” the girls, but speaking for and through them—are mobilized by a shaming discourse that further abjectifies and disempowers them by depriving them of the basic right to choose forms of self-disclosure and self-representation. In other words, these strategies that claim to normalize the girls and “protect” them from being identified as deviant in the future in fact shield society from seeing its own internal contradictions and contribute to the revolving-door effect for all nonnormative subjects. “A video letter to my future self” was designed as an exercise of potentially imagining, describing, remembering, and also self-disclosing. One parameter set up for this exercise was that the letters could be written as “secrets for now,” that the girls could choose to limit viewing of these videos to themselves, to me, and to people on the outside who could only be accessed by me and not by them. This parameter granted the girls the right to deny the workers at the facility, the girls’ peers, and their families access to these self-narratives. In this fashion the girls could imagine themselves speaking to people considered “normal” without the scrutiny of those who “know” that they are different. Almost half of the girls in my workshop chose to disclose a self to the camera that had been marked by a physical difference that is denounced as a site of shame by the social collectivity: scars from self-injury.

Disclosing Self-Injury Chika showed her wounds on her wrists and told the camera how she had hurt herself; Hitomi also had a scar on her wrist; Manami showed a konjo-yaki scar, a kind of injury made to prove one’s toughness, often under peer pressure such as a gang situation. Chika rolled up her sleeve, put her wrist in close-up to the camera, then said with a straight face: Look at this [shows a scar on her wrist]. Do you remember this? I made these marks [on arm] with the desk, etc. Many teachers told me not to hurt myself like that. But actually at first, I read a book called Life. Watching my blood running and enduring it, I thought, “If I can do this, then I could endure a lot of things.” Now that I can’t cut my wrists here, I vomit instead. If I can’t do anything for myself, then I can’t endure anything.15

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Hitomi said: “I hope this scar will go away by the time I reach twenty-two [shows scar on wrist]. Hopefully, I’ll be happy. I hope I’ll be able to remember to care for people, and live that way in society.”16 Through a deliberate showing of these acts of self-injury that talks back both to confessional television aesthetics and the dominant shaming discourse, these videos seek to upset conventions of normative femininity, adolescence, and social normalcy, seek to build a community of abject subjects, and in fact abjectify any viewers assumed normal or not, thus perhaps creating major discomfort in the viewer who has assumed him/herself to be normal. Before the workshop, a teacher there told me that Chika had been “very emotional” since her arrival, and had been hurting herself, but again, we were not allowed to discuss this in class. After the workshop, I conducted an interview with the same worker, and he particularly emphasized to me that he did not want his interview to be shown next to any images of the girls showing their scars. This sense of normative fear and shame around women’s acts of self-injury echoes the shame and caution conveyed by narratives of women who have had experiences of self-injury in the United States: “Some women are too ashamed even to tell therapists that they repeatedly, secretly injure themselves at home and at work. Self-injury appears to be the most taboo subject to talk about, the last secret a woman is willing to disclose” (Hyman 1999: 23). Grounded in classical feminist ideals of egalitarian sex, Hyman implicitly positions these women as abject because, constructed by their childhood experiences of sexual abuse, they seek out unequal power relations that bring them pain and also pleasure in their sexual experiences. This reading and contextualization of the narratives explains and reinforces the shame and stigmatization women living with self-injury experience. Through the narratives of the girls in Japan, I was led to experience a form of self-representation that suggests a rather different relationship to pain and injury, and to shame and sex, which is similar to forms of “performance of pain and injury” that Chris Berry has discussed in relation to the Taiwanese film Viva l’Amour directed by Tsai Ming-Liang. Berry relates this to a formation of subjectivity that “enables and demands a particular kind of spectatorial relationship” (1999: 158) that is related to the Japanese affective term amae (its meaning being close to “the desire to be indulged”). As Berry notes, amae is similar in structure to narcissism, but amae is seen as a positive quality in Japan, whereas narcissism is seen as negative and regressive in Freudian psychoanalysis. Fran Martin concisely recaps Berry’s insights in interpreting the film as a deliberate, public laying bare of injury before spectators with the implicit idea that the revelation of this injury will evince an active response in the spectators so positioned: a sympathetic response—in Berry’s terms, a kind of “loving” one—that is precisely what the characters lack and crave. (2003: 224)



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It is noteworthy that this “sympathetic response” is not designed to evoke a sense of pity or shame for the subject. She further expands this study to shed light on other representations of abjectified sexual subjects in Taiwan, including representations of tongzhi or queer-affiliated cultural producers like those of novelist Qiu Miaojin: How can one interpret, and what insights might one salvage from, representations that to some extent abjure the sassy celebration and proud assertion of tongzhi identity to linger instead on the “negative” elements of shame, pain, depression, alienation—in short, subjective injury—which, they seem to suggest, are in some way constitutive of the subject of the tongxinglian? (Martin 2003: 244)

The public revelation of a constitutionally wounded tongxinglian self in Qiu’s fiction, in Tsai’s films, and in the tongzhi masking tactic could be understood precisely as an attempt to reconstitute the interpersonal bridge between the tongxinglian subject and the social collectivity, even as it is also a tactic whereby the social collectivity is held to account for that subject’s injury in the initial shaming (Martin 2003: 245). The self-representation of subjective injury, according to Martin, foregrounds the ways the social collectivity has contextualized and constructed the abjectified sexual subject, while at the same time seeks to rebuild a dialogic relationship between the normative collectivity and the abjectified subjecthood. The representation of suffering and pain, according to Berry, foregrounds an inadequacy of communication—thus demands to be indulged further. Drawing from these inspirations, can viewers perhaps see the videos made by the girls in my workshops in a similar way? Instead of the girls’ stories being normalized as in the context of religious confession or mainstream talk shows, can viewers become assumed participants in the collective wounding and indulgence of the abjectified self, and through the girls’ acts of self-disclosure and performance be placed in the position of the abject as well, thus allowing reconstitution of a new interpersonal bridge between the abjectified subject and the social collectivity? In contrast to the women living with self-injury in the United States, none of the self-representations made by the incarcerated girls show that they are ashamed of their acts of self-injury. Rather than putting herself in the position of the victim—a deviant self who has been abused and needs to be healed, corrected, or rescued—Chika offers a social critique of heteronormativity in her society right after she shows her marks of self-injury: “I can’t stand to see how men get close to women to talk to them; men touching women when they hand you things, etc.” Self-injury in this case could be read as an affirmative act that enables the teenager to formulate a critical relationship to the society around and within her: “If I can do this, then I could endure a lot of things. . . . I cannot sit around doing nothing.”

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Making one’s body “malfunction” by throwing up or slitting one’s wrist, according to Chika, can be seen as a sign of showing her strength, being able to stay sensitive to the world around her, the proof of her being alive, to counterbalance the forces of complacency in the workaholic, capitalist, and material culture that put teen idols and teenagers to sleep constantly. Before Chika planned her video, I showed her videos made by girls in similar situations. So her video was done within a context of articulating and prioritizing a language of subjectivity by making presence to each other, rather than making oneself visible to those in positions of power. It is exactly the refusal and failure of those in social positions of power to register the subjectivity embedded in these acts, stigmatizing and silencing them, that have isolated the girls and brought them to where they are.

Conclusion Young women today, heavily guarded and wounded by glocalized capitalist, modernist, paternalistic, chauvinistic, and nationalist values, often find themselves punished for acts and behaviors in which they seek to explore creative ways to perform their subjectivity in response to their societies. Through stigmatizing these young women’s behaviors, isolating them, and then further stigmatizing the isolation itself, the nation-state and its conspirators refuse to register and address how the behavior of these women relates to the society’s shaming discourse and the always already woundedness and abjectness of the social collective selves. Through these possibilities of self-representation, disempowered subjects use media to simultaneously disclose, register, and problematize the always already sexualized, materialized, and wounded selves in glocalized societies and foreground the ways social and legal forces in these societies conspire to de-sex, dematerialize, and wound subjects while simultaneously requiring them to veil their wounds through stigmatizing the exposure of woundedness. Through photographs, videos, and audiotapes the girls in these workshops narrate and perform a shame that talks back to the shaming discourse produced and perpetuated by the legal-social ideological apparatus and demands a reexamination of the power relations that position their audience—judges, policymakers, law enforcement officers, teachers, social workers, and the presumably good men and women as well—to simultaneously question their roles in the abjectification of the girls as well as to see themselves as being abjectified also. These girls’ “shame/ xiuchi” is therefore also “no-shame/wuchi” of the entire social collectivity and the mutually producing contradictory relations in-between.



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Notes 1. Some of the names of the workers at the institution have been changed to protect their identities. Special thanks to David J. LaPorta, Satomi Fukutomi, and Eiko Saeki for helping me with the translation. 2. From Chika’s video letters. 3. The need for “mirrors” for stigmatized subjects echoes the stories in P. Johnson (2003) and Pierce-Baker (1998). Pierce-Baker wrote: “I needed a mirror. The ones available were all distorted. I now know that I was not as alone as I thought. There were, in fact, other black women looking for themselves in mirrors—equally without success. All of us were looking in the glass silently” (1998: 83). 4. Enjo kōsai is not a phenomenon unique to Japan. It has been a widespread “offense” quite common in other parts of East Asia, including Taiwan and Korea recently. Before it was coined as such, the “problem” of young women using their sexuality in exchange for material benefits had probably always existed in many cultures. In researching juvenile delinquency in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Irving Epstein wrote: “Female delinquents are more likely to be incarcerated for sexually promiscuous behavior, theft, and activities less violent than those committed by males, contributing to a double standard that occurs internationally.” http://www.iwu.edu/~iepstein/Jd.pdf (accessed on 5/10/2007). Such data from Japan were not available to me, but comparing the group I was working with in Hokkaido with data available from Chinese contexts suggests some striking similarities. 5. Newsweek. PR Newswire (8/10/2003) www.prnewswire.com (accessed on 12/12/2003). 6. For example, the feature news story “She’s Only a Little Schoolgirl” (as told to Kate Drake), “Sex in Asia,” TimeAsia.com (2001). http://www.time.com/time/asia/features/ sex/sexenjo.html (accessed on 12/10/2003). 7. Web user “Ayuka” wrote to http://www.japanguide.com (signed and dated 4/25/2001) (accessed 12/11/2003). 8. Bland and Mort (1984) discuss expressions of sexualities like “amateur prostitution” that were coded as undesirable practices according to puritanical notions of modern nationhood. 9. Yamamura (1986) has traced how the historical “sanctification of the child” is linked with old beliefs seen in Japanese folklore, later modified by Meiji importation of western modernization, and this has resulted in the somewhat contradictory mixture of ideas today about child purity, adult inferiority, and the emphasis on discipline. 10. “Important Guidelines to be Observed,” handed to me at the reform facility in Japan regarding my right to exhibit works produced by the participants in the workshops. 11. For example, Shaheen and Spence (2002) use the argument of childhood as a site for “innocence, curiosity and energy” to advocate for parents “taking charge,” in the name of “protection.” For discussion on the ideological construct of childhood in the

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Euro-American context, see Holland (2004); Heinze (2000); Jenkins (1998). For moral panic with regard to the “youth crisis,” see Davis (1999). 12. See Flowers (2001); Tattersall (1999); M. White (1994). Also see media representations on teen sex work in Asia: Sisters and Daughters Betrayed: The Trafficking of Women and Girls and the Fight to End It (Chela Blitt, 1996, video) about sex work in Nepal, Thailand, and the Philippines; and The Selling of Innocents (Ruchira Gupta, 1997, video) about teen sex work in India, for example. 13. According to Aaron Tang Ming-pun (1990), a social worker as well as the officerin-charge of Noncustodial Offenders Services, the Society for the Rehabilitation of Offenders in Hong Kong, those who have committed “offences against public morals” are characterized as follows: “Influenced by undesirable social surroundings and have weak personal/moral judgment, these kinds of offenders are often highly materialistic and pleasure-seeking yet reluctant to earn by working. Consequently, many of them will join the ‘street-people,’ offering their bodies and souls for monetary gains. In addition, many females who are addicted to illegal drugs will be unable to work and sooner or later, join their sisters in prostitution.” 14. Lyrics from “Shabon Dama” (Soap bubbles), sung by Morning Musume. 15. Chika’s video letters. 16. Hitomi’s video letters.

pa rt i v

Labor, Migration, and Families

Chapter 9

The Social Imaginary and Kin Recruitment Mexican Women Reshaping Domestic Work

Maria de la Luz Ibarra

I

n the twenty-first century, the processes of globalization have helped shape a new organization of social reproduction in the United States. This organization is characterized by reliance, on the part of families and individuals, on paid workers to perform a broad range of domestic tasks in private homes. This new organization is also characterized by the fact that the domestics are migrant women from the third world, women who have left their homes because of structural and social constraints and have come to the United States due to an expanding low-wage service economy and the maturation of social networks. Thus domestic work and migrant women have become intimately linked. Domestic employment in this globalized economic context is both similar and distinct from past patterns. While the characteristic “maid of all work”—the woman who cleans and cares—is an intrinsic part of the market, there is also increasing specialization, professionalization, and flexibility within the occupation (Ibarra 2000; Romero 1992). Change has come about due to employers’ specific demands, but also as a result of worker agency. In this essay I interrogate some of the ways in which workers’ imagination and gendered “transnational” practices “from below” shape domestic labor. I focus on the edited life histories of two Mexican immigrant women, one in Santa Barbara, California—a traditional site of Mexican migration—and one in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, a relatively recent site of migration. In my analysis of their narratives, I foreground their gendered social imaginary as a potent force shaping not only their desire to migrate, but also, once they have done so, to recruit female kin. Recruitment is an attempt to fulfill affective obligations and create closer-knit families within a transnational context that physically alienates people. The end result of these recruitment practices is the transformation of domestic employment into a group-centered activity, which may provide women with greater opportunities not only for economic gain but also for more intimate forms of community.

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Transnationalism from Below and the Social Imaginary Since the early 1970s the United States and global economy have been transformed from a Fordist to a more “flexible” model of capital accumulation (Harvey 1990). This model of “globalization” is characterized by the unprecedented movement of capital, goods, ideas, and people across nation-state boundaries (Basch and Schiller 1995). These processes have spawned a burgeoning literature that addresses the repercussions of globalization on economies, work structures, and popular culture in different regions of the world (Appadurai 1996; Sassen 1988). A number of scholars working against the primarily economic logic of this macro approach have also sought to explore transnational responses “from below,” that is, the everyday agency—the discrete practices—of ordinary people and their impact on social conditions and culture (Mahler 1995; Pessar and Mahler 2003; Ong 1999; M. P. Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Goldring 2001). Recently Pessar and Mahler have emphasized the under-researched and undertheorized importance of what they refer to as the “gendered social imaginary” and its relationship to transnationalism from below. In their analysis, the social imaginary refers to the ways in which men and women, situated within complex power relations, imagine the gendered lives of their peers who are located within their transnational social fields and how this imagination influences agency (Pessar and Mahler 2003: 819). Looking into the social imaginary has led them to investigate such things as “fidelity, sexuality, and alternative masculinities and femininities,” which in turn appear to influence a person’s migration behavior (819). For example, imagined infidelities on the part of faraway lovers may lead women to migrate. Likewise, imaginings of more egalitarian gender relations or greater freedom for women in another country may influence migration. These types of studies are important for understanding the motivation that molds agency in a transnational context, but also for appreciating the nuances of individual women’s yearnings for a specific type of gendered self and community.

The United States and Globalization: Domestic Workers and Work Increasingly feminist scholars have become interested in the consequences of globalization on social reproduction, and in particular on the commodification of care in postindustrial countries (Anderson 2000; Ginsburg and Rapp 1995). In these countries, distinct structural conditions help shape a process in which families and individuals turn to the market to seek goods and services, but particularly important has been the feminization of the labor force. As middle-class women have given up their roles as full-time housewives, and men have not significantly altered their contribution to homework, a labor vacuum occurs in many households (Hoch-



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schild 1990). In this context, families purchase a range of services that include preparation of food, child and elder care (often at centers), and the private labor of migrant women (Sanjek and Colen 1990; Chin 1998; Gamburd 2000). Employers recruit migrant women because they are socially vulnerable, particularly if they lack legal residency status, a fact reflected in long work hours for little pay (Colen 1990). Employers also choose women because of evolving gendered and racialized discourses (Dickey and Adams 2000) about some women’s presumed natural capacities to care (Wrigley 1995; Constable 1997; Chang 2000). Nonimmigrant women, for the most part, shun domestic employment. For most of the twentieth century, domestic work has been characterized by low pay, low esteem, and— unlike most employments—conditions of isolation, where individual workers labor separated from other workers and—which is often in the case with transnational workers—from their home communities and families. Working alone is a result of the occupation’s particularities: most employers can afford to hire only one worker, the so-called maid of all work. This employee single-handedly does all the cleaning and caring and is supervised by the housewife in the household. Not surprisingly then, the analysis of worker agency in this arena is focused on the relationship between the “mistress” and the “maid,” or employer and employee (Rollins 1985; Romero 1992; Glenn 1992; Wrigley 1995). In the study of the relationship between domestic employer and employee, most scholars recognize the agency exhibited by both. Employers exercise “classic” forms of control by stipulating the content, conditions, and time frame of the work, while workers exercise agency by attempting to maintain their sense of “dignity” and “self-worth” in the face of demeaning conditions (Rollins 1985). Workers also attempt to change the conditions of the work itself. The practices the woman worker uses for changing the occupation reflect her social location: those who are more economically and socially secure may carefully screen, directly negotiate with, and in the worst case quit employers who are unreasonable. Sometimes this means that workers strive to “professionalize”: to create jobs with clear-cut tasks, hours, and pay (Romero 1992). More vulnerable migrant women, particularly those without legal resident status and with tenuous social ties in the host country, may use more subtle forms of verbal negotiation (Gamburd 2000), such as excuses, “white lies” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001), challenges to the meanings of care (Ibarra 2003), and, as a last resort, “blow-ups.” While these studies provide us with much information about domestic employment, the almost sole focus on an employer and her worker is no longer justifiable. Recent research on transnational domestics reveals that labor negotiations are not limited to the mistress-maid relationship. In the case of workers who are hired by international agencies, for example, negotiations also take place with agency representatives (Constable 1997) and in the case of worker abuse may even involve

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the host or sending state (Bakan and Stasiulis 1997). Likewise, research indicates that the traditional mistress/maid relationship is not the only type of domestic work relationship. Most female employers are themselves in the labor force, and not directly supervising workers. In this context, new types of domestic workers are also important, such as the labor contractor and her female employees. In the absence of the mistress of the house, labor contractors in essence supervise domestics. Another important type of domestic worker is an elder-care provider, who performs tasks historically assigned to female kin (Ibarra 2000). These new types of workers are, in turn, part of a complex set of relationships within and outside the workplace. For example, housecleaners may be responsible to both a mistress and a labor contractor who directly pays them. Likewise, elder-care workers may be accountable not only to their wards, but also to a ward’s absentee adult children who are their employers. Equally important is the fact that while migrant domestics clean and care for wages in the United States and other countries in the Pacific Rim, they retain ties and obligations back “home,” including the raising of children and caring for elderly parents and other kin (Constable 1997; Parreñas 2001). This transnational social field is partly characterized by bodily mobility towards home, but in the context of militarized borders (Andreas 2000) and strict contractual obligations (Constable 1997), a range of other economic and cultural phenomena also develops. Thus, the range and diversity of the jobs, as well as the relationships within and outside the occupation, are much broader than they were in the postwar period, and thus suggest a broader arena for imagination and human agency. In this discussion I develop insights from two themes in the transnationalismfrom-below literature: I pay attention not only to the everyday agency of workers but also to their gendered social imaginary. The social imaginary allows me to expand my understanding of the role of agency within an increasingly flexible domestic employment arena, as women’s imaginings directly affect the structure of their work.

Research Design The research for this essay forms part of a larger national project that focuses on Mexican women’s migration and domestic employment in three U.S. cities. These cities are Santa Barbara, Honolulu, and New York. The principal goals of the project are to determine the effect of globalization on the range of domestic work in these cities, whether there is a polarization between the occupations of human care and housecleaning, and the distinct forms of worker agency associated with different employment contexts.1 In this chapter I address Mexicana domestic workers in Santa Barbara, California, and Honolulu, Hawai‘i. In Santa Barbara, anthropological fieldwork took place between 1994 and 1995,



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as part of my dissertation research, and then again between 1998 and 2000. In total I interviewed sixty-five Mexicanas employed as domestic workers. Expanding upon my research in Southern California, I then undertook anthropological fieldwork in Hawai‘i during the spring and summer of 2004, from which data I initiated a preliminary assessment of Mexican women’s migration and domestic employment in Honolulu. In total I interviewed ten Mexicanas. In Santa Barbara the individuals I studied formed part of a large and diverse group of Mexican immigrants who had left Mexico between 1985 and 2000. They hailed not only from Mexico’s working class, but also from the middle class—a group hard hit by the country’s economic crises during the 1980s and 1990s (De la Rocha 1994). These women were married, widowed, and single, and ranged in age from twenty-one to sixty-two. Their educational backgrounds varied from no formal education to university degrees. All sixty-five migrated to Santa Barbara with the assistance of social networks, hoping to find work, primarily in domestic services. In my research protocol, the people who helped me make contacts would first talk to the potential informant and ask her permission for me to telephone her. If the woman agreed, I would call her, explain the project, and set up a time to meet at a location of her choice (home, work place, my home, or a public place). After building up some rapport with the household worker, I would ask for her help in contacting another household worker. Thus, the Mexicanas whom I interviewed formed part of a nonprobabilistic, snowball sample. I undertook initial semistructured and structured interviews in order to assess the range of household work in the city, as well as the range in the Mexicanas’ backgrounds. Thereafter, I conducted short- and long-term interviews, which yielded detailed life histories, as well as information about current working conditions, family relations, community activities, health histories, the labor process, the meaning of work, and strategies to change working conditions. Fieldwork in Honolulu was more limited in scope and took place over a period of two-and-a-half months during the spring and summer of 2004. I began by making contact with longtime residents, small business owners, and church organizations that I hoped would support the project and help me make contact with Mexicana residents. I was immediately struck, however, by the trepidation that my initial contacts had about introducing me to other residents. While they themselves responded freely to questions about their knowledge of the Mexican community, I was told on four occasions that people “were nervous” because there was an “undercover” Mexican resident working with the border patrol and turning in individuals who did not have legal residency documents. I made it clear that if anyone felt uncomfortable, I would not press for introductions to residents. Thus, my entrée into the small Mexican community in the city was slow, cautious, and often uncomfortable. On several occasions, potential contacts said they would be willing to be interviewed (at a place

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of their choice) and then cancelled or did not show up for the interview. Moreover, because the Mexican community is so small, anonymity for some well-known community residents who served as informants has been difficult to maintain. For this reason, personal identifiers are kept to a minimum. In all I interviewed ten women, six of whom were employed as domestics. Snowball sampling from this small group of domestics was also difficult, because unlike those in Santa Barbara, Mexicana domestics are a minority in Honolulu. Interview topics with women ranged from personal migration and labor histories to observations about identity issues and politics in Hawai‘i. The ten women had migrated to Hawai‘i between 1970 and 2003, with the majority having arrived within the last fifteen years. These women’s ages range from twenty-nine to sixty-seven. As in Santa Barbara, their class and educational backgrounds are broad. They range from university-educated women from middle-class urban families to women who barely finished elementary school and are from rural working-class communities. Unlike the women in Santa Barbara, none of the Mexicanas in Honolulu said they had come with the goal of finding domestic employment. With the exception of one woman, all of them had first come to Hawai‘i as members of family groups—either as brides, daughters, mothers, or mothers-in-law. These women came for a variety of reasons including to recuperate from illness, be with family members, or to help with household-based responsibilities, such as childcare. My small snowball sample yielded a high number of “middle”-class women. Seven out of the ten women came from families who owned small businesses or other property in Mexico, and most had at the very least a high-school level education. Sometime after arriving in the city, domestic employment had been offered to them through a third party.

Santa Barbara and the Domestic Labor Market Like other Mexican immigrants to Southern California, Mexicanas in my sample arrived in a city with a well-established Mexican/Chicano population. As territory once belonging to Mexico, Santa Barbara has a long-standing Mexican presence, one that has grown through chain migration as well as labor recruitment by the city’s principal industries. As in most Southern California communities, this growth has been explosive in the last twenty years. U.S. census figures show that between 1980 and 1990 the population of those of Mexican origin grew from 16,000 to over 26,000 people, and the 2000 data for the metropolitan area indicates that this population has continued to grow by more than 30 percent. Unlike Los Angeles, located just ninety miles to the south, there is very little settlement by other Latino groups in Santa Barbara. Like immigrant workers in Los Angeles and other Southern California communities, however, Mexicanas have experi-



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enced an ambivalent reception from existing residents (Chavez 1998), some of whom want to hire them while others are fearful about the economic and cultural impact of increased Mexican settlement in the city. Santa Barbara also replicates regional and national trends that have been linked to the expansion of a demand for household workers (Sassen 1988; Milkman, Reese and Roth 1998). Today, wealth polarization and the feminization of the labor force are central aspects of the city’s economy, and domestic workers are intrinsic to its proper functioning. The domestic labor market in the city is broad, specialized, and polarized: on one end of the spectrum are cleaning occupations, which tend to have better conditions and pay, and on the other are caring occupations. Within the last ten years, private elder-care has become particularly important in the city, which has a very large retirement-age population. In what follows I provide an edited life history of Consuelo Lopez, an eldercare provider. Her life history outlines the importance of gender relations and social/historical location in helping to shape her decision to migrate and enter the domestic labor market. Also apparent is the fact that her feelings of love and obligation are very strong and tied to a social imaginary about family and work. Her story provides insight into how the social imaginary has helped guide her actions, and ultimately how these actions have reshaped domestic employment into a group activity. Group-centered domestic work now allows her not only to support her family economically, but to be with them physically for longer periods during the year. Consuelo Lopez: Elder-Care Provider I met Consuelo in the summer of 2000 when she was fifty years old and employed as an elder-care provider in the city. She is from the coastal Mexican city of Ensenada, located about sixty miles south of San Diego. I began by asking her why she had migrated in 1985, and in particular whether gender relations had played a role in her decision to do so. Her answer covered the period through 1991. She said: My family is from Ensenada, and I married a boy I’d grown up with. At the beginning we were very happy and had five children—three girls and two boys. But after a while, I felt like he did not want to return from the U.S., since he would stay away longer and longer. That is when we started to have problems. . . . Later I left him. I remained with my children and had to think about what I was going to do economically. By that time, I was a mature woman—I was thirty-six years old, and I had my house and my obligations. I also had my family, who helped me, but it was not fair that they should shoulder all of the economic strain. That’s when I started to think about going to the U.S., because in Ensenada there were not many opportunities for earning decent money. I did not imagine that going to the U.S. would be easy, because in Ensenada I had my whole family, which is a type of support that no one

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else will give you. But I didn’t leave because I was a divorced woman—I mean I didn’t leave because I was ashamed about my divorce. Everyone was aware that Juan did not take responsibility for his family, and he more than I was judged. I did leave because after the divorce it became necessary for me to support my family, because I could not count on Juan contributing regularly. I had an aunt in Santa Barbara, and she told me, “Come over here,” and after a while I did just that. I went to help her care for two elderly couples, because she was sixty-four, and it was becoming more difficult for her to do all the work that was required of her. It was very difficult to leave my children, both because I love them and want to be with them, but also because I imagined what my absence would do to them morally. In spite of the fact that they had their grandparents, in my mind I saw them as abandoned children without a father and a mother. And that is when I resolved that I would find a way to be in Santa Barbara for short periods and then go back home. Many times one becomes stuck in a mindset that doesn’t permit one to see a different kind of solution, but from the very beginning I went to Santa Barbara knowing that I would think of a way to be with my children. At that time I did not even think about any possible problems with crossing the border, because the migra [Border Patrol] was not as tough as it is now. The two couples we took care of were in their seventies and eighties, and my aunt had been working for one of them for over fifteen years. The other couple—the older couple—she had worked for [for] six years. The first couple [the Nelsons] were friends with the second couple [the Smiths] and that is how she found the second job. She had started just cleaning for them, but over time as they got older, and they gained more trust in her, she began to help with other things, like helping them get dressed, bathing, and exercises. Mr. Smith had more trouble because he had had a stroke and was paralyzed on the right side of his body. His wife had a problem with her bones, and it was difficult for her to help him, so my aunt helped him. But I could tell it was difficult for her too, and I realized that part of the reason my aunt wanted me to come help her was so that I could take over. She had a lot of love for these people, and the Smiths especially needed more help. For the Nelsons we worked two days a week. We would go in on Monday and Thursday. We cleaned, washed, ironed, did grocery shopping, cooked, walked the dogs . . . everything. They paid my aunt fourteen dollars an hour for eight hours of work. At first she didn’t pay me very much, because she wanted me to learn the job and for the Nelsons to get used to me. Later, we would split up the day, and I would get paid for four hours and then she would come in and finish up the day. For the Smiths it was harder work, because they wanted my aunt to come in four or five times a week. These people had a lot of money, and they also needed the help. My aunt told me that their two children only visited during Christmas so that



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they don’t have anyone. We would go there Tuesdays, Wednesday, Friday, and also Saturday and sometimes Sundays. With them we did the same things as with the Nelsons, but also more physical things for them, since they had health problems. My aunt worked for them three days a week and then she told me I should take over on the weekends. The first year was the hardest of my life, and after working for a year, I decided to talk to my aunt about my idea. She said that she understood that I wanted to go home to be with my children, but that she couldn’t do all the work herself anymore. Then I asked her—how about if we get one of my nieces? We could train her and then she could stay here for a while [when] I go back home to my children. . . . Then my niece could go back to Ensenada and I could come back and work for another while. My aunt is a very good person, because taking care of older people makes you realize how short life is, and how important it is to love as fully as you can. So she understood what I wanted, and even though she said it might be more work, that she would talk to the Smiths and the Nelsons. With the Nelsons it was not a problem, but with the Smiths we had to do more convincing, including bringing my niece Sonia to meet them and telling them that Sonia would not take over for me until they felt comfortable with her. But finally it worked. It took almost a year and a half to make my thoughts a reality, but we made it work. Sonia would work from December through February, I would work from March through May, she would come back in June and stay through August, and then I would come back and work from September through November. I was gone half the year, but in shorter blocks, for about six years, so that I got to spend a lot more time with my kids. It was not as much money, but it was enough to keep the house running. For extras they had to talk to their father, because I was not willing to give up my life with them so that they could have nicer clothes or other things that kids want. This is not exactly the life I would have wanted for myself or my children, but given the reality, it was not so bad. I feel proud of myself.

The New Migration of Mexican Women to Hawai‘i Since the colonization of what was once northern Mexico, U.S. citizens have recruited Mexican workers, and Mexicans, in turn, have engaged in chain migration. In the contemporary period, however, Mexican migration is characterized by a broader range of migrants with diverse class and ethnic backgrounds and increasing numbers of women, who now form as much as 50 percent of the Mexican population in some areas (Cornelius 1992). Moreover, Mexicans’ destinations within the United States have expanded to include areas not traditional for them, such as the

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Northeast (R. Smith 1996), the Midwest (Cantu 1995), the South (Hirsch 2002), the Pacific Northwest, and recently Hawai‘i. A review of the academic literature reveals nothing on the new presence of Mexicans in Hawai‘i. Nonetheless, the 2000 census recorded 19,820 persons of Mexican origin in the state—13, 362 on O‘ahu; 2,639 and 2,888 on Maui and the Big Island, respectively. These numbers represent an increase of approximately 40 percent since 1990, making Mexicans the fastest-growing group of “Hispanics” in the state. In fact, Mexicans accounted for 80 percent of population growth among persons of Hispanic origin. Mexican migration to the islands dates back to the early nineteenth century, when King Kamehameha III first recruited Mexican cowboys—hispaniolos—to work with cattle given to him as a gift. These paniolos, as they would later be called, thus served as the first wave of Mexican immigrants. Later, between 1942 and 1964, Mexican men came to the islands as “braceros,” temporary contracted agricultural workers. Anecdotal information suggests that some of these men stayed—some married “local” women, while others brought their wives and children from Mexico.2 Later, in the 1970s and 1980s, the agricultural industry recruited Mexican men to labor in the pineapple and coffee fields. Likewise the booming construction industry on the islands contracted for and attracted more Mexican men, some of whom had social networks and others who were simply attracted to temporary highpaying work of fifteen to twenty dollars an hour. Interviews with longtime residents in the city suggest that this primarily male Mexican population was transient and seasonal. Nonetheless, as in all other migration contexts, some men stayed and settled and began the process of chain migration, with women and children eventually joining them. Some individuals opened up small businesses. Social networks matured, and by the mid-1990s, Mexican migration grew more quickly. Many of these migrants, moreover, had first lived and worked on the U.S. mainland—particularly California—and had migrated from there to Hawai‘i. Men migrated to labor in construction, agriculture, service, but also to work in professional occupations as dentists and doctors. Anecdotal information suggests that many of these men were recruited by specific industries. Interviews provide a sense about Mexican community formation. Most people say that after the year 2000, when the larger number of women and children created a more settled group of migrants, they began to feel a sense of community. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent government focus on terrorism have also contributed to increased settlement and less mobility for undocumented Mexican residents. Because the undocumented fear deportation due to increased security measures, they do not travel outside of Hawai‘i. Unlike other places with new Mexican migration, their community in Honolulu is not neighborhood-based at this time. A primarily Mexican barrio has



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not developed, although certain buildings have a large number of Mexican families. The general dispersal of Mexicans may be changing, however, as the influence of local cultural institutions, such as churches, provide greater cohesion. As particular churches attract more followers, the neighborhoods where they are based become attractive for settlement and for small businesses. Cultural events also help cement a sense of a broader Mexican community. In the short period I was in Honolulu, I attended the first annual Cinco de Mayo Festival, a Mexican luau, and several church activities that targeted Mexican families. For many, this new cultural presence of Mexicans represents a positive development. Elpidia Chavez (a leader in a local church) said about the growing Mexican presence: “It is very nice, because just a few years ago, there was no Mexican culture here. Now, there are dance classes [jarabe tapatio, a dance from Jalisco] and the people in this church are very united so there are always different events.” For others, however, increased Mexican migration is not necessarily a positive development. One woman said, “If I had wanted Mexican culture, I would have stayed in Mexico. . . . Many of these people are very ‘rough’; they come from places in the mainland where there is a lot of violence.”

The Domestic Labor Market in Honolulu Preliminary fieldwork in the city indicates that Mexicanas represent a new group within an occupation dominated by other racial/ethnic women, including Koreans, Filipinas, and Puerto Ricans. Interviews with a small sample of Mexicanas indicate that while the domestic labor market is broad and includes a variety of cleaning and caring occupations, Mexicanas are primarily engaged as cleaners in the city. Snowball sampling did not yield any human-care workers. In all cases jobs were obtained through third parties and paid between nine and twelve dollars an hour. None of the workers had benefits. Having not interviewed workers employed in distinct occupations, I do not know whether the labor market is polarized, as it is in Santa Barbara. In what follows I provide an edited life history of Veronica Chapa, a housecleaner. Her life history outlines the importance of gender relations as well as her social/historical location in helping to shape her decision to migrate and subsequently to enter the domestic labor market. Veronica’s life history also sketches her social imaginary about migration, in which her previously normalized absence of loved ones was challenged. Recruitment into domestic employment has been a powerful tool that has allowed her to conceptualize a less physically estranged family. Veronica Chapa: Housecleaner I met Veronica in the spring of 2004 when she was thirty years old and employed as a housecleaner in the city. She is from the central Mexican state of Jalisco,

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from a small rural community. I began by asking her why she had migrated in 1991, and in particular whether gender relations had played a role in her decision to do so. She answered: We’re from a small town in Jalisco—there are a lot of people from Jalisco here. I got married when I was seventeen and he was twenty-two. He and I have known each other since we were children, but we did not begin dating until after he was living in the U.S. He first worked in California with an uncle, but he did not like living there. He said there’s a lot more violence, and people are more aggressive in Los Angeles. So he talked to another uncle who lived here in Hawai‘i and has a construction company; he hired Carlos. After living in Hawai‘i for two years, he returned to our village, and we saw each other at a Christmas party. I had just had my coming-out party [quinceanera], but did not have a boyfriend, because my father was very strict. But Carlos is very correct, and he went to talk to my father, and he told him he wanted us to get married. My father accepted him [Veronica’s father and uncles had labored as braceros and had a respect for migrant men]; he said he seemed a good young man with a good future in the U.S., but he asked Carlos to wait. He told him I was needed at home to help with the other children. He also asked him to promise that when the time came for us to get married, that I would not have to work, because I was his favorite. My father said that a man should be able to support his wife and children, and Carlos accepted this because at the time he was earning good money. Carlos returned to Honolulu, and we began to write to each other and speak on the phone once a month. The truth is that our courtship was a little strange, because we hardly saw each other. He would write to me, and tell me what he was doing, and also that Honolulu was very peaceful and beautiful. For me Hawai‘i was another world, because I had never left my village. I could not imagine it, because I had never even been to the beach. But Carlos described it very beautifully, paying close attention to nature, since he was from a small village and appreciated plants and animals. So to a certain point, I imagined Hawai‘i to be like my village, but when I arrived I realized that it is very different. As an example, I had never met a Chinese person . . . nor seen tall buildings. But, I like it, more than anything because it is a calm place. I have three children, and I had never had to work, in part because of Carlos’s promise to my father, but also because someone had to take care of the kids. But two years ago my father died, and my youngest is now in school, and I began to say that I would like to find a job. Also at that time Carlos was having problems with his uncle, and had started to work with three Filipinos. To help with the rent, we rented one of the rooms out to one of the Filipinos. He later got married and left, but it was his wife who got me started in cleaning about a year ago. She was cleaning three houses at the time, and she asked me if I would like to work with her. She said she would pay me nine dollars an hour, which is low, be-



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cause I’ve heard that some women make fifteen dollars an hour. But because I wanted to try it out, I accepted. We do everything people ask us to do—from cleaning the house to washing the car and cooking. We’ve had problems because she is not as good a worker as I—she’s a little lazy—and the women [employers] can see this, so they prefer me, and this makes her angry. One woman even told me she would prefer it if I came to clean the house by myself, and she will pay me twelve dollars an hour. I told her no, because I feel indebted to Rosa, but at the same time she takes advantage of me too. Ever since I started working with her, she’s been able to find two more houses to clean, and I asked her whether she would be willing to hire my younger sister. I told her that with the three of us, we could do the work faster and maybe find more jobs. . . . My sister is still in Mexico, but ever since my father died, she’s been saying she would like to come to live with us. For me it would be good because I’m so far from my family, and after September 11th traveling became more difficult . . . so I talk to them on the phone and send letters, but of course it is not the same thing. I haven’t seen them in eight years. Rosa thinks it’s a good idea, but says we should find more jobs before hiring my sister. For the time being, I’ve started to think about other ways to make some money so that I can pay for my sister to come here. A friend of mine and I started to sell gold jewelry and also decorations for quinceaneras and weddings. My friend’s mom buys the gold for us in California and then she sends it to us by mail. They are small things—little bracelets and [religious] medallions. They are not very expensive, but here people really appreciate them, because you can’t buy them anywhere. The decorations we make for cakes and for tables, but I don’t know if this will work out because the materials are expensive. Before, I would not have been able to do this, but in the last few years, many Mexicans have moved here—especially a lot of people from Jalisco, and they are very anxious for Mexican things. Now there are two small stores, but they don’t sell this type of thing, so there is a need. Also, people from here like it. One of my bosses [a Korean woman] saw me wearing a little medallion, and she told me she wanted one, so I told her a friend of mine sells them, and she bought one. I didn’t want to tell her I sold them, because some people don’t like it if you earn a little more money. If we could, we would go back to Mexico, but the situation there is very bad. I miss everything about it—the people, the culture, my family. [During another conversation, Veronica spoke about how deeply she was affected by absence. She had not been part of important family events, and particularly painful was her inability to attend her father’s funeral.] Here, my children have more opportunity, but for us [her husband and herself] things are getting more difficult. We can’t rent a larger apartment because we don’t have credit [and a credit check is needed] . . . we can’t buy a house . . . and I can’t get a driver’s license . . . but things are calm here. I don’t worry about my children.

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Conclusion These workers’ narratives reveal that recruitment is not a one-time link, but an ongoing and complex connection discussed in a language of obligation, responsibility, and yearning. Moreover, each of these two stories of recruitment illustrate the importance of social positioning, imagination, and agency as well as the specific political and historical context that creates concrete power relations (Constable 2005: 16). Consuelo Lopez highlights the end of a marriage as a critical gendered relationship helping to shape her decision to migrate and labor as a domestic in the United States. Perhaps as important, however, her love for and sense of obligation to her children and parents also led her to consider movement. Her decision to migrate in order to fulfill her role as mother and daughter was facilitated by female social networks that provided her with support and a job opportunity. Thereafter her desire to spend as much time as she could with her children—to fulfill the requirements of what she considers to be a good mother as well as to fulfill herself—led her to recruit and rely on female kin to create a transnational work relationship that has permitted her to do this. She in essence shares the job, fundamentally reshaping the structure of the work. Her social position was critical in facilitating this: it was her aunt’s strong relationship with her employers and her aunt’s knowledge of what might help the employers accept more than one worker that helped make the new arrangement possible. Likewise, because her position in Mexico was not shaky— she owned her home, and she had the moral, physical, and economic support of her parents, she was not in a vulnerable position—she had some freedom within which to conceptualize a better life. On top of all this was the proximity of Ensenada to Santa Barbara and the historical moment in which Consuelo exercised agency: border enforcement was strong, but it was not yet as heavily militarized as it became in the early 1990s and then in the post-2001 period. Veronica Chapa’s story highlights the death of her father, changes within her husband’s employment, and her children’s schooling as precipitating factors that led her to seek employment as a household worker after having lived in Hawai‘i for eleven years. In essence, the death of her father nullified gendered expectations: her husband did not have to maintain his vow to be sole provider, and she did not have to worry about disappointing him. She expressed having a relatively egalitarian relationship with her husband, who did not perceive her desire for employment as an affront. Two social conditions, moreover, made it possible for her to conceptualize working: first, her youngest child was now in school, and thus need for childcare during the day was over; and second, a friend’s established social contacts and recruitment made it easy for her to consider the occupation. Once employed, she began to see domestic work as an opportunity for bringing her sister to the United States. If both she and her sister had jobs, then there would be no added economic



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burden upon her nuclear family. Her desire for her sister’s presence, while expressed mainly in economic terms within this short vignette, was much more than that. Veronica often felt trapped on the island and physically isolated from her family and natal community. The political and historical moment in which she and her husband have found themselves in Hawai‘i is one of increased vigilance on border crossers. Without “legal” documentation, Mexicans wishing to return to Mexico must first cross an ocean/state border and then, from the mainland, the U.S.-Mexico border. To come back they have to do the same thing—taking considerable risks. The near impossibility of returning to Mexico became real to her upon the death of her father, whose funeral she could not attend. The idea that her sister might come to stay with them—even if it were for a short while—created for her a sense of being closer to her family and of not being trapped. In this discussion I have focused on two edited life histories of Mexican women. In both cases I have foregrounded their gendered social imaginary as important to guiding agency. Women’s gendered social imagination about family in particular— be it their children or natal kin—is that these individuals should share the same physical space. Physical proximity and daily interaction in person are the source of intimacy and meaning, and thus actively desired. This social imaginary can be seen as a critique of what women imagine other migrants within their social field do. Thus their social imaginary is a reconceptualization of a taken-for-granted reality: long absences. For Consuelo, the most vivid examples were those of her husband and aunt, and for Veronica it was that of her father and other male kin. This social imaginary then guides practice. In both cases, recruitment of female kin into the domestic work force provides the key to meeting economic obligations, but recruitment is also an attempt to create closer-knit families within a transnational context that physically alienates them. The end result is the transformation of domestic employment into a group-centered activity, which may provide women with greater opportunities not only for economic gain but also for more intimate forms of community.

Notes 1. In Santa Barbara, the occupation is polarized, with cleaning occupations generally having better conditions and wages than human-care occupations. 2. In Hawai‘i, “local” has a specific, layered set of meanings because it includes the original, indigenous population of Native Hawaiians as well as subsequent groups of laborers brought by the Caucasian elite to work on the plantations; these included Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Portuguese workers (Kubo 1997; Rohrer 2005).

C h a p t e r 10

Breaking the Code Women, Labor Migration, and the 1987 Family Code of the Republic of the Philippines

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utnumbering their male counterparts since 1995, migrant Filipino women—a group that has been referred to as the “breadwinners of the nation” (Mission 1998)—contribute much of the remittances that sustain and provide the national economy with its largest source of foreign currency. In fact, former President Corazon Aquino, in a speech delivered to Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, acknowledged migrant women workers as the nation’s “new heroes” (Rafael 1997). Notably, we should add to this group the women in exportprocessing zones, as they generate another large source of foreign currency for the Philippines. Considering that women’s labor provides the nation with its two largest sources of foreign currency, one can claim that Filipino women have achieved tremendous economic power in the Philippines. Indeed, women have participated in various income-generating activities throughout history as informal peddlers who have subsidized the main subsistence of men, as agricultural workers who have assisted men in tilling the soil, and more recently as productive wage earners in dual income households (Eviota 1992). Yet migration without doubt magnifies the income contributions of women and in the process puts doubt on traditional notions of feminine domesticity. Migration initiates the complete removal of a great number of women from the domestic sphere, suggesting a breakdown of the ideology of women’s domesticity. Yet this ideology continues to haunt migrant women. Most significantly, the law even declares that mothers are the rightful caretakers of children. This belief is mirrored in society. Constructing migrant women as bad mothers, the media, for instance, depicts the children of migrant women as having been “abandoned” in a migration understood solely in terms of the denial of the biological mother’s care.1 Additionally, the view of women as only supplementary income earners limits their position in the labor market. For instance, Filipino women continue to lag far behind their counterparts in other nations as they still suffer from a severe wage gap, remain stunted by the sex segregation in the labor market and devaluation of women’s work,



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and continue to perform more housework than do men. Women on average only earn 39 centavos for every peso earned by men in the Philippines, a figure that has not increased correspondingly with the rising demand for women workers both in the domestic and international labor markets (IBON 2000b). Moreover, it is usually other women and not fathers who take over the care-giving responsibilities left behind by migrant women (Parreñas 2001). Indeed, women’s migration results not in an ideological shift but in an ideological stall. Embodying this stall is the view of migrant women as bad mothers, which clearly taints their image as “economic heroes.” Contradictory views of women as nurturers and income providers lead to the ideological stall in the families of migrant women. In this essay, I examine how these contradictory views manifest in the laws that govern the state as well as in the practices that maintain the family. The state via the law maintains the ideology of women’s domesticity, while its economy ironically relies on the labor-market participation of women. In the family, migrant mothers maintain greater responsibility for nurturing their children than the present but unaccommodating fathers left behind in the Philippines. Indeed, the ideological stall that confronts migrant women maintains the ideology of separate spheres and thereby creates the social pressure for migrant women to retain primary responsibility for the care of their children even from a distance. A parallel ideological stall occurring at the level of the state and the family should be of concern to those troubled by the continued burdens of income-earning migrant women in the family. To build my discussion, I first look at the state apparatus of the law and analyze the discursive construction of the family under the 1987 Family Code of the Republic of the Philippines. State legal discourse on the family promotes the ideology of women’s domesticity by maintaining women’s proper place to be in the home. Yet the export-oriented economy of the Philippines promotes the migration of women and spurs the reconstitution of gender relations in the family. This chasm in state ideological discourse produces a gendered moral economy that maximizes the productive labor of women by reinforcing the belief in women’s natural aptitude for reproductive labor while the economy is at the same time forcing them to work far from home. The gendered moral economy of the state results in the pressure on migrant women to retain the caring responsibility for their children even from a distance. The caring work of migrant mothers results in an unequal division of labor in mother-away transnational families.

Women, the Family, and the Law Illustrating the ideological belief that women’s rightful place is in the home, headlines on May 26, 1995, from two of the largest circulating newspapers in the Philippines read: “Overseas employment a threat to Filipino families” and “Ramos says

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Pinay OCWs [overseas contract workers] threaten Filipino families.”2 In a speech delivered to the Department of Social Welfare the day prior to the release of these newspaper reports, then-president of the Philippines, Fidel Ramos, had called for initiatives to keep migrant mothers at home. As President Ramos stated, “We are not against overseas employment of Filipino women. We are against overseas employment at the cost of family solidarity. . . .” (Agence France Presse 1995a). By calling for the return migration of mothers, President Ramos did not necessarily disregard the increasing economic dependency of the Philippines on the foreign remittances of its mostly female migrant workers. However, he did make clear that only single and childless women are morally acceptable migrants. The law, specifically the 1986 Constitution and the 1987 Family Code, upholds this moral stance. These two legal documents were instituted soon after the dictator President Ferdinand Marcos was ousted from office by mass rallies throughout the nation and forced to flee the country on February 25, 1986. The newly elected government of President Corazon Aquino instituted the new Constitution to restore democracy and freedom in the Philippines. As recent legislations, the Family Code and Constitution arguably reflect dominant ideological views in contemporary society. Ratified by an overwhelming majority of the people, the 1986 Constitution not only limited presidential power and reinstated the legislative branch of the Philippine government, it also unequivocally declared the “Filipino family” as the foundation of the nation: “The State recognizes the Filipino family as the foundation of the nation. Accordingly, it shall strengthen its solidarity and actively promote its total development” (Article 15, Section 1). Indeed, almost ten years after the ratification of the Constitution, President Ramos himself turned to the discourse of family solidarity to justify his call for the return migration of women. The ideological schism of simultaneously pushing women out and keeping them inside the home is reflected in the Constitution. Understanding the greater dependence of the export-oriented economy on women’s work, the law recognizes the right of women to enter the labor market freely. As section 14 of article 2 in the 1986 Constitution establishes: “The State recognizes the role of women in nationbuilding, and shall ensure the fundamental equality before the law of women and men.” However, the law simultaneously retains the belief that women should be regulated on the grounds of their primary role as the proper caregivers of the nation: “The state recognizes the sanctity of family life and shall protect and strengthen the family as a basic autonomous social institution. It shall equally protect the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception” (Article 2, Section 12). On the one hand, the family shall be “autonomous” of the state, but on the other, the state has the right to regulate the family. If the family is an “autonomous social institution,” on what grounds can the state justify its regulation of women



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through the protection of “the life of the mother and the life of the unborn from conception”? It does so on the grounds of morality and the moral values that are implemented as civic duties for its citizenry to follow through the provisions of the Family Code. As indicated by this constitutional provision, state regulation begins with women and their moral values, which from the outset asserts that women’s rightful place is in the home. The law does this by establishing that maternity, understood to include the care of the family, is women’s primary duty to the state, thereby reinforcing the moral obligation of migrant mothers to maintain transnational families. As article 213 of the Family Code declares: “No child under seven years of age shall be separated from the mother” in case of marital separation. Under the Constitution, the protection of the family justifies the state’s ownership of the bodies of women, who, as the mothers and wombs of the nation, are charged with the duty to reproduce the population.3 Women are thus subject to regulation, with proper womanhood defined by women’s role as the biological mothers of the nation. This sets the stage for the construction of women’s citizenship as defined by good or bad motherhood. Under the law, a child below the age of seven should not be separated from the mother unless “the court finds compelling reasons to do otherwise” (Article 213). Financial reasons do not fall within the range of what is compelling under the law. Instead, compelling reasons are determined solely by the moral values of a mother. Bad mothers are explicitly defined as those who maintain “a common law relationship with another man” or exhibit “moral laxity and the habit of flirting from one man to another” (Article 213, Comment). Following traditional Catholic ideological views on sex and reproduction, purity is a measure of women’s good morals under the law. Transnational families, particularly female-headed transnational families, threaten the civic duty of maternity. Geographic separation from the family, for instance, places women’s purity at risk. As such, a government-mandated training workshop for outgoing female overseas contract workers warns participants not to fall into the temptation of the “brother of homesickness . . . home-sex-ness” and the loneliness brought by their separation from their husbands (Meerman 2000). Women who leave young children in the Philippines also technically fall under the definition of bad mothers. By failing to fulfill their civic duty of maternity, women not only fall short of meeting their moral obligations to the family but also their duties to the nation. Under the modernization-building project of the Philippines, a strong family begins with a solid marriage, which starts with the obligation of cohabitation.4 As article 68 declares: “The husband and wife are obliged to live together, observe mutual love, respect, and fidelity, and render mutual help, and support.” Clearly the geographical distance in transnational families prevents such households from fulfilling the categorical definition of a “good Filipino marriage.” Under the law, “a spouse

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who refuses to cohabit without a justifiable reason will be deprived of the right to be supported and may be compelled to pay moral damages” (Aguiling-­Pangalangan 1995: 19). With marriage and cohabitation as its core, the “Filipino family” follows the script of the modern nuclear family.5 By defining the Filipino family as nuclear, the Code not only establishes this arrangement as the norm but also as the embodiment of the “right kind of family.” In fact, this kind of family reflects the dominant household pattern in the Philippines. Rapid industrialization in the last twenty years has brought significant changes to the Filipino family. In the Philippines, the dominant household pattern is that of the dual-wage-earning nuclear family (Medina et al. 1996).6 According to sociologist De Guzman (1990), the Philippines has witnessed the nuclearization of households, the percentages having increased from 72 percent in 1973 to 83.4 percent in 1986 and mean household size having diminished from 6.2 in 1973 to 5.3 in 1990 (Raymundo 1993: 20). As the “proper” household arrangement in the Code reflects that of the majority of families in the Philippines, we might conceivably consider the Code and its moral constructions to apply to the interests of the people. Yet the allocation of morals, whether they are negative or positive, through the construction of “a right kind of family” in the Code fails to recognize the plausibility of good morals emerging from other kinds of family arrangements, including single-parent, transnational, and polygamous households in the Muslim region of the South. If the nuclear family does indeed signify moral order, then other kinds of families represent moral decay. One such family would be the transnational family. The Family Code does make special mention of this type of household, which indicates its growing presence in contemporary Philippine society. One provision establishes that the transnational family can be considered an exemption to the obligation of cohabitation as long as separation does not cost undue stress to the “solidarity of the family.” As article 69 reads: “The court may exempt one spouse from living with the other if the latter should live abroad or there are other valid and compelling reasons for the exemption. However, such exemption shall not apply if the same is not compatible with the solidarity of the family.” What conditions would threaten the “solidarity of the family”? Morals define the strength of the family. As such, only bad morals could justify the separation of the family. In the Family Code, the few legal grounds for separation include immorality, such as perversion and the corruption of children; criminality, such as drug addiction and crimes worthy of six years of imprisonment; sexual deviancy as constructed by the law, which includes bigamy, homosexuality, and infidelity; domestic violence; and finally abandonment for more than one year (Article 55). Abandonment as grounds for legal separation raises a red flag regarding transnational families. Abandonment is the central trope that signifies moral decay in transnational



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families. But then why did President Ramos call for the return migration of mothers only and not fathers, as the living abroad of either could constitute abandonment and thus threaten “the solidarity of the family”? It is because under the Code women are still constructed as the primary caretakers of children and other dependents in the family. Thus abandonment, particularly the abandonment of one’s proper duties in the moral order of the nation, apply only to women in transnational and split-household units. This is not to say that the status of women has not improved under the Constitution and the Family Code. For instance, the Code grants women—particularly wives—the autonomy to “exercise any legitimate profession, occupation, business or activity without the consent” of their husbands (Article 73). Under the pre-existing 1949 Civil Code, women did not have the right to participate in the labor market without the consent of their husbands.7 Thus the law accepts women’s right to work outside the home. Acknowledging the Constitutional provision that the state “shall ensure the fundamental equality of women and men before the law” (Article 2, Section 12), the Code also establishes that “the management of the household shall be the right and duty of both spouses” (Article 71). Under the old Civil Code, it had been the husband who was solely responsible for the management of the household, a responsibility that legally enabled him to designate all of the housework to the women in his household (Feliciano 1994). Despite these gains, the Family Code still retains the figure of the father as the head of the household and gives him greater authority over children. As article 211 establishes: “The father and the mother shall jointly exercise parental authority over the persons of their common children. In case of disagreement, the father’s decision shall prevail. . . . ” With the father designated as the head of the household, the state’s understanding of the family subscribes to the sexual division of labor. It is an understanding that the state justifies with biologically based constructions of parenting. Under the law, the care of children and their property is the primary obligation of parents. As the law states: “The national and primary right and duty of parents in the rearing of youth for civic efficiency and the development of moral character shall receive the support of the Government” (Constitution, Article 2, Section 12). The state assists parents by providing free public schooling until the secondary level, instituting daycare centers, and establishing government-owned hospitals (Constitution, Article 13, Sections 11 to 13, Article 14). Yet the reproduction of the population still gives priority to biologically based relations between parents and children as the most fundamental and natural in society. As the law states: Pursuant to the natural right and duty of parents of the person and property of their unemancipated children, parental authority and responsibility shall include the caring for and rearing of such children for civic consciousness and efficiency

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and the development of their moral, mental, and physical character and well-being. (Article 209)

Public accountability for the welfare of children is slim and is not essential to earning a good moral standing under the law. Meeting the obligations to rear and nurture children only determines the morality of parents, not the government. The accountability of parents for the care of the youth assumes the priority of biological ties. Biologically based constructs of relations in the family extend to constructions of mothering. Only in dire situations can children be removed from the custody of their parents, particularly mothers, as is stated by the comments guiding article 298: Note that the child’s welfare is most important and this has been honored by the law in order to avoid the tragedy of a mother having her baby torn away from her. No man can see the true depths of a mother’s sorrow when she is deprived of her child, especially one of tender age. (Article 209, Comments)

Under the Family Code, women maintain a natural aptitude to care for children. The Code thus validates the categorization on the basis of the biological differences between the sexes. As such, the law considers biological mothers as those best able to care for children. This construction of women severely limits the emancipation brought by the recognition of their right to work outside the home and their significant contributions to the economy.

Economic Dependence of the Philippines on the Labor of Women Although the law maintains the ideology of female domesticity, the economy depends on the work of women not only outside the home but also outside the nation. On July 23, 2001, a headline in the Philippine Daily Inquirer read: “OFWs [Overseas Filipino Workers] Told: Stay Abroad” (Agence France Presse 2001). The article recapped a recent open forum with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in which she conceded that the Philippine economy depends heavily on the remittances of overseas Filipino workers as a main source of its foreign currency. As she stated: “Jobs here [in the Philippines] are difficult to find, and we are depending on the people outside the country. If you can find work there, and send money to your relatives here, then perhaps you should stay there.” The president continued by stating, “For now, sad to say, that’s about it. The reality is that for now and many years to come, OFWs will still be a major part of the economy.” Yet it is not just overseas workers per se but women overseas workers in particular upon whom the nation has increasingly come to rely as a valuable source of foreign currency. Since 1995 in the Philippines, the number of women workers deployed annually has surpassed the



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number of their male counterparts (Kanlungan 2000). Moreover, the Philippines has witnessed a steady increase in the number of migrant women, who constituted 54 percent of deployed workers in 1997, 61 percent in 1998, and 64 percent in 1999 (ibid.). By urging migrant workers to stay abroad, the Philippine state takes advantage of and relies heavily upon the growing need in the North for the low-wage services of poorer women from the South. The state promotes the deployment of women workers so that their earnings will cover the annual interest generated by the Philippines’ increasing foreign debt from its loans from multilateral institutions such as the Asian Development Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank. In the Philippines, structural adjustment policies dictate national development and direct its entrance into the global economy. Prescribed as preconditions for loans from multilateral institutions, structural adjustment policies have required the Philippines to cut expenditures on social welfare programs, open up markets to foreign investments, expand exports, and privatize state enterprises to facilitate the implementation of a less self-sustaining export-oriented economy (Chang 2000). In so doing, structural adjustment policies have not facilitated economic growth but instead have left the economy heavily burdened with foreign debt that by 1999 stood at $58.3 billion (Diokno-Pascual 2001). These loans saddle the Philippines with an annual interest debt of approximately $2.5 billion.8 As dictated by the market demand for low-wage service and manufacturing workers in the global economy, reduction of this debt depends greatly on women’s participation in the labor force. Filipino women help provide the economy with sufficient foreign currency to cover the interest of this debt in two ways primarily. First, as the majority of autonomous labor migrants, women generate foreign currency via remittances. Second, as 70 percent of manufacturing workers in free trade zones, they produce most of the goods exported from the Philippines (McKay 2001). Migration and manufacturing, two economic spheres dominated by women, are in fact the two largest sources of foreign currency for the Philippines. The work of women keeps the economy afloat. In 1999, overseas Filipino workers remitted almost $7 billion (Bureau of Employment and Labor Statistics 2000). As the journalist Gina Mission describes it: “In the past decade, the number of overseas workers has risen beyond everyone’s expectations to become an essential part of the economy. Between 22 to 35 million Filipinos—34 to 53 percent of the total population—are directly dependent on remittance from migrant workers” (1998: 15A). Another main source of foreign currency is electronics manufacturing, which generates 250,000 jobs for the local economy and approximately $3 billion per annum (McKay 2001). Considering that women constitute the majority of both international labor migrants and export-processing zone workers, one could speculate that women

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generate more foreign currency than do men. Yet government reports on the remittances of overseas contract workers indicate the contrary. According to a survey of overseas Filipino workers, the average cash remittances of men are higher than those of women. In 1995, women remitted an average amount of 19,622 pesos compared with 32,004 pesos for men, and in 1996, women sent an average annual remittance of 19,389 compared with 33,508 pesos for men (NSCB 1999: 116). Notably, the disparity between men and women’s cash remittances have since grown; men sent twice as much to the Philippines from April to September 2002, totaling 45,528,102 pesos, compared with the 22,183,752 pesos remitted by women (Republic of the Philippines 2002). Men consistently remitted more funds than women regardless of their country of employment.9 This is explained by men’s greater concentration in skilled employment. In overseas employment, women are concentrated in lower-paid employment. A 1996 survey of overseas Filipinos reports that 82.8 percent of service workers but only 39.8 percent of professional and technical workers were women (NSCB 1999: 115).10 In fact, twothirds of Filipina migrants are domestic workers (Parreñas 2001). Thus, despite their higher rate of labor migration, women are not considered the “breadwinners” in the woman-worker-dependent, export-oriented nation of the Philippines. The wage gap and their concentration in lower-paid work stunt women’s ability to reach parity in earning potential with men. However, one could speculate that the massive departure of the female labor force and expanded participation in the domestic labor market would reduce the supply and consequently increase the demand for and bargaining power of those employable women left in the Philippines. Along with the increase in women’s labor-market participation in the local economy from 34 percent in 1970 to 45 percent in 1996 (L. Cheng 1999), women’s labor migration should facilitate greater access for women into more rewarding employment. Unfortunately, the high unemployment rate and unstable labor market impede this process. For instance, the outflow of nurses to other countries has not resulted in a greater demand for their skills in the domestic labor market. A third of the nurses left in the country are still underemployed or unemployed. Moreover, the instability of the labor market and the greater priority placed by the government on the payment of foreign debts over the provision of welfare services has meant that the departure of nurses has resulted not only in unemployment but in an increase in the ratio of nurses per 10,000 persons from 8.8 in 1965 to 2.4 in 1984 (ibid.). Teachers face a similar plight. Recognizing the declining educational system in the Philippines, the government has recently called for initiatives to lure back the many teachers who have sought the higher wages of domestic work in other countries (Agence France Presse 2001). At present, the shortage of teachers is estimated to be 29,000 (IBON 2000a). But this shortage has not created better working condi-



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tions for the teachers who have chosen to remain in the Philippines. Average class sizes have increased, reaching a ratio of one teacher to sixty-five students in poorer districts in urban areas. While the workload of teachers has increased, their salaries have not kept up with the rising cost of living in the Philippines. In 1999 former President Joseph Estrada specifically excluded teachers, the only government sector dominated by women, from receiving salary increases automatically granted to government employees. Only after heavy protests did the government give in to pressure to give those mostly women professionals the 10 percent raise they were due (IBON 2000a). As illustrated by the case of nurses and teachers, the mass exodus of workingage women has not benefited those women workers left in the Philippines. First, Filipino women still face a highly segregated labor market. The greatest concentrations of employed women can be found in sales, service, manufacturing, and clerical industries, where hiring on a contractual basis is on the rise. Without job security, women become a more expendable labor force than are men. This expendability makes their labor more lucrative than that of men for foreign companies in export-processing zones, where most workers earn less than the average minimum daily wage in surrounding communities (IBON 2000c). Export-processing zones prefer the labor of women, and they can be found in the lowest-paying occupations of assembly, post-assembly, and finishing work (Chant and McIlwaine 1995). This means that women’s higher rate of labor-market participation in these zones does not necessarily signify their greater contribution to the economic growth of the Philippines but instead indicates the higher profits that foreign companies can extract from their labor. Second, women do not have the same employment opportunities as men because they must attain a higher degree of training than men to attain positions at the same level. While men in administrative, executive, and managerial positions outnumber women at a ratio of two to one, only 58 percent of men as compared with 69 percent of women in those areas had attained a college degree. Finally, women continue to suffer from a severe wage gap, for they earn disproportionately less than men in all sectors of the labor market. For every peso a man earns, a woman earns 36 centavos in agriculture, 35 centavos in sales work, 41 centavos in production, and 46 centavos in professional and technical occupations (NCRFW 1995a: 172, passim).11 In light of the grim outlook for the advancement of women in the domestic labor market, it is no surprise that the rate of women’s migration has steadily increased in the last five years. In an earlier study I conducted on migrant Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, I found that women turn to migration as a covert strategy for relieving themselves of patriarchal constraints in the labor market and family in the Philippines. One of these constraints is the “dou-

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ble day.” As Filipina feminist scholar Carolyn Israel-Sobritchea observes: “Despite the growth of female labor force participation, there has not been a commensurate decrease in their child care and household responsibilities” (1990: 35). Independent migration of women is often a process of escaping gender constraints in the Philippines, whether they are the double day, domestic violence, a segmented labor market, the wage gap, or the greater expectation of filial piety among daughters. These are just a few of the causes of migration described to me by women whom I met in Rome and Los Angeles. Thus, labor migration—either internal or international—should be considered in itself to be a process that allows women to negotiate more egalitarian relations in the family. As Chant and McIlwaine describe with regard to export-manufacturing workers, many of whom have relocated from other parts of the Philippines to seek employment in export-processing zones: “[Manufacturing employment] modifies certain aspects of their household roles, especially in respect of entitling them to delegate childcare, to exert greater control over household expenditure and to play a larger role in determining their children’s futures” (1995: 170). Without doubt, the same can be said of women migrants, whose earnings increase the purchasing power of their families in the Philippines. Given that migrants usually leave other family members behind upon migration, one might imagine that the migration of women has initiated dramatic changes in the division of household labor. In a study of transnational migrant families of Filipino migrant women in Singapore, Maruja Asis, Shirlena Huang, and Brenda Yeoh (2004) observed that women’s migration has unavoidably facilitated the entry of men into the world of “reproductive work.” Yet they also note that men rarely become full-time caregivers of children. This suggests that while women’s migration may indeed force men to do housework, they do not do so to the extent that their labor frees women, including migrant mothers, of this responsibility. In an indication that women’s migration has resulted in a reconstitution of household practices, “housebands” has become an increasingly common term used to refer to the spouses of women employed overseas who have been left behind with their children in the Philippines (Lan 2006). Yet my study of transnational migrant family life in the Philippines shows that the husbands of migrant women still participate in the labor force. Of sixty-nine young adult children of migrant workers whom I interviewed in the Philippines, only two reported growing up with a “jobless” father. Among my sixty-nine interviewees, only in the rarest of circumstances did fathers increase their childrearing responsibilities upon the migration of their wives. Usually it was the complete absence of extended female kin that forced fathers to do so. Moreover, women’s migration does not necessarily result in the economic dependence of men, who actually participate in the labor market in far greater



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numbers than do women—82.4 percent compared with 48.9 percent of women in 1997 (NSCB 1999: 27). Men’s continual participation in the labor market, coupled with their higher wages and positions in the domestic labor force, contributes to the retention of the ideology of separate spheres and consequently makes it more difficult for migrant women to eliminate the ideology of women’s domesticity from their construction as wives and daughters. As the Philippine economy has to rely first and foremost on the labor-market participation of women in export-manufacturing and migrant domestic work to generate sufficient foreign currency, the nation promotes the movement of women away from the private sphere, often in the extreme form of their complete removal via the formation of split and transnational households. Yet the economy keeps women inside the home by promoting the restriction of their employment to economically devalued jobs that are considered mere extensions of their work in the private domain. As a consequence, the ideology of women’s domesticity is not completely eliminated in the state’s implementation of an export-oriented economy that has come to increasingly depend on the feminization of labor. Filipino women therefore continue to face dim prospects for mobility, for they still suffer from a severe wage gap, face a sexsegregated labor market, and remain without much opportunity for promotion.

Women, the Family, and the Nation How do we make sense of the contradictory state discourses of migrant women as economic heroes and yet bad mothers? How can we resolve the seemingly opposed constructions that simultaneously push women outside the home and pull them back inside? On the surface, the push for women to work outside the home seems at odds with the state discourse on the ideology of women’s domesticity. However, these contradictory constructs of women actually mutually reinforce each other to secure sources of foreign currency for the Philippines. Despite the push for women to work outside the home, it is in the interest of the state to keep the ideology of women’s domesticity intact because it supplies the Philippines with a labor pool to fill the demand for women’s low-wage labor by more developed nations in the global economy. This occurs in many ways. First, the jobs in demand for Filipino women to fill—domestic work and export-manufacturing work—retain the assumption of women’s natural aptitude for caring and nurturing. Second, the ideology of women’s domesticity—because it justifies the wage gap and sex segregation in the labor market—ensures the low wages of women. In so doing, it secures foreign currency for the Philippines by driving women out of the local economy to seek the higher wages of domestic work in more developed nations. At the same time, low wages for women attract foreign companies in search of locales that can offer the lowest over-

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head costs in the global economy. The low wages of Filipino women are in fact the mainstay of the attractiveness of the Philippine labor force in the global economy. Because the ideology of women’s domesticity secures the Philippines its two largest sources of foreign currency, I argue that the Family Code not only establishes a gendered moral order but also a gendered moral economy of the state. The concept of a “moral economy” originated from E. P. Thompson’s discussion of the eighteenthcentury English food riots. Described as a system of “dialectical asymmetrical reciprocity,” the moral economy of the displaced peasants was premised on the notion that in times of difficulty the ruling class should feel a moral obligation to ease the economic difficulties of the subordinate class (E. P. Thompson 1991: 344). The concept of moral economy is one also used by anthropologist James Scott (1976) to refer to the values underlying the ethics of subsistence for peasants vis-à-vis landowners. According to Scott, underlying the resistance of peasants is a moral acceptance of unequal class relations; subordinated groups can view unequal exchanges as collaborative on the premise that these exchanges guarantee them crucial resources for survival. Thus the logic and values of the moral economy do not subvert underlying relations of economic inequities, however not necessarily because of an unwitting passive acceptance by subordinated classes. Aihwa Ong adds to Scott’s formulation the proactive involvement of the state in the implementation of the moral economy. As Ong states: Following Scott, one can say that there is a moral economy of the state, in which a nationalist ideology embeds notions of state-citizens relations within a moral-economy ethos. I differ from Scott in that I believe that the dominant party, in this case the state, must continually produce the cultural values to engender and sustain adherence to a moral-economy ideology. (1999: 70)

Ong builds from Scott to establish that the maintenance of a moral economy depends on the inculcation through various state apparatuses of cultural values that adhere to the ideology of the moral economy and engender the maximization of worker productivity. I would further add that the moral economy of the state is a gendered system, one in which a gendered moral order is needed to maximize the production of workers. The Philippines depends on the feminization of export-processing manufacturing and labor migration. The need for women workers is based on the ideology of women’s domesticity, and this ideology is not solely generated by traditional cultural views but is also fueled and dictated by the foreign influences of more developed nations in search of docile workers in factories and maternal figures to care for the children and elderly in their homes. The foreign influences imposed by more developed nations are difficult to avoid in an export-oriented economy, as clients



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must adhere to the moral order of their patrons, that is, more developed nations in the global economy. This moral order is not exclusive to the economic system of global capitalism but also includes the unequal gender system that has continually reproduced the ideology of separate spheres. Thus, in the Philippines, it is in the vested interest of the state to retain the ideology of women’s domesticity as it ensures the maximum production of the nation. The state accordingly asserts this ideology through the Family Code and its construction of women’s maternity as a central cultural value that represents the “Filipino family.”

The “Stalled Revolution” and the Unequal Gender Division of Labor What are the social consequences of viewing migrant women as bad mothers? I found that the negative perception of migrant mothers is not confined to the law. The sentiments of children reflect this view. Between January and July 2000, I interviewed thirty young adult children who grew up in the Philippines without their migrant mothers. These interviews were part of a larger study that included interviews with young adult children of migrant men (26) and two migrant parents (13). I found that children of migrant mothers hold to conventional definitions of mothering and consequently feel “abandoned” because of their mothers’ migration. This feeling is expressed regardless of the economic provisions of migrant mothers and the work of extended kin. Children whose mothers not only send a monthly remittance but also call once a week still claim they have been “abandoned.” Those whose aunts help them with their homework almost every night allege that they have received inadequate guardianship. This tells us that children do not accept the redefinition of mothering engendered by the formation of transnational households. Notably, the discourse of abandonment did not emerge in the narratives of family life presented by the children of migrant fathers, while it was quite prominent in the narratives of most children of migrant mothers. The negative views of children suggest that public discourse on migrant mothers influences transnational family life. Further, the dominant discourse frees men of the responsibility to care for their children. At the same time, it creates pressure for migrant mothers to continue to take responsibility for nurturing their children from a distance. According to children, fathers do not perform much caring work in the family. Generally, fathers do not increase the extent of their household responsibilities regardless of greater economic contributions of migrant women to the family. This tells us that motheraway transnational families face a “stalled revolution” similar to the one identified by Arlie Hochschild (1989) in the 1980s among dual income earning couples in the United States: men do not respond to the increase in women’s labor-market participation by increasing their share of household responsibilities. Likewise, men in the Philippines still expect migrant mothers to nurture their children, even from a dis-

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tance. Men not only forego the physical caring responsibilities that migrant mothers surely cannot perform due to their geographical distance, but they also pass this work on to other women in the family (daughters, domestic workers, or extended kin). None of my interviewees had relied on their father for their primary care as infants. Instead, other women cared for them. I found that migrant mothers try to fulfill the expectations of their children; they not only reconstitute mothering by providing acts of care from afar, but they also often do so by overcompensating for their physical absence and performing a transnational version of what Sharon Hays identifies as “intensive mothering,” meaning expending a “tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in raising their children” (1996: x). These mothers attempt to maintain intimacy and struggle to nurture their children from a distance, assuming responsibility for ensuring both the economic and emotional security of their children. From the descriptions of children, most mothers could be described as “super moms.” I was often struck by the close involvement that transnational mothers maintain with their children. In sharp contrast to migrant fathers, who reduce their relationship with children to monthly remittances, mothers personalize their ties. To achieve some semblance of intimacy, they make regular communication part of the weekly routine of transnational family life. The mother of nineteen-year-old Cheryl Gonzaga, who has worked outside the country for at least fourteen years, never fails to call her three children at 3:00 p.m. every Sunday afternoon. Although she contributes a larger share than does her husband to the household income, she still maintains greater involvement with her children than he does. Cheryl’s father runs their family business—a fish pond located on a faraway island—and returns only once a month to see his children. The caring work of Cheryl’s mother does not go unnoticed among her children. Elaborating on this, Cheryl says: Sometimes she calls three times a week. Especially if one of us is sick [she and her two brothers], then she will call one day, then she will call again a day later. Sometimes she is busy. So she will only call on Sunday at 3 p.m. That is why we are all home on Sundays. This is when she checks up on us. She asks us if we are happy with our food. She is kind of strict. When it comes to our food and our health, she is strict. So it has been a couple of years since we stopped using MSG. We don’t use that any more because it is supposed to be bad for our health. . . . With MSG, I get a headache. According to my mother, MSG causes it. She would know, because she is a nutritionist.

In addition to providing health advice, Cheryl’s mother also plans the children’s menu for the week. She talks to her children about their school, teachers, and activities outside the classroom. She even gives them advice on their school projects.



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Cheryl’s mother without question continues to perform her role as mother and tries to achieve some intimacy through separation. Migrant mothers also achieve intimacy in other ways. Many rely on cellular phones to send international text messages to their children on a daily basis. Some children even told me that they wake up to biblical messages from their migrant mothers every morning. They receive doses of “my daily bread” as they called them. Text messaging is one system mothers use to make sure that their children are ready for school in the mornings. Many like Cheryl Gonzaga’s mother set up a routine of calling at particular times during the week. Other mothers send a balikbayan12 box every two months or so. The boxes may include clothes, goods, and toiletries such as soaps and lotion that they purchase for their children. Finally, many resort to dropping a letter in the post for their children at set times of the month, for some children told me that they know when they can anticipate a letter from their mother. These different forms of set routines enable transnational families to achieve a semblance of intimacy. Set routines form expectations and with these expectations come established standards of care for mothers to gain intimacy in the family. Acts of nurturing across great distances not only reinforce conventional gender norms, but also heighten the traditional gender expectations of children. Based on the children’s stories, migrant mothers seem to overact their performance of gender as if to compensate for their physical absence from the family. The family of Benjamin Ledesma serves as a good example. According to Benjamin, his mother acts as a super mom both at home and abroad. From afar, she calls on the telephone frequently and is always ready to give advice to her children. When she is physically at home, she performs mothering even more intensively. She “brings life to the home” by cleaning, serving breakfast in bed, preparing afternoon snacks without fail, and sitting by her children’s side as they complete their homework every single day that she spends in the Philippines. As mothers like those of Benjamin nurture so intensively, children easily develop the unrealistic view that mothers have a natural inclination to always shower them with acts of love. Thus children like Benjamin carry the unrealistic expectation that mothers should perpetually be available to meet their domestic and emotional needs. In addition to the efforts of mothers to maintain constant communication and provide emotional support from afar, children also identified the love of their mothers based on their mother’s projection of emotions. Specifically, mothers must abide by “feeling rules” that follow the social order of gender in the family. An expression coined by Arlie Hochschild, “feeling rules” refers to emotions guided by social and ideological conventions (2003: 97–100). In this case, mothers are required to use emotions to counter the threat posed by the distance of time and space against their fulfillment of conventional notions of mothering. The children I interviewed took note of when their mothers expressed grief and sorrow or described their hard-

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ships; children used these emotional displays as a way to measure their mother’s remorse over her decision to impose geographical distance on their family. An example is the case of Rudy Montoya, the nineteen-year-old son of a domestic worker in Hong Kong. The exchange went as follows: How would you describe your relationship to your mother? Very close. Because we want to see each other. Even on the phone, she would say that she really wanted to see me. She misses me. She would say that I must be so much bigger now and that she wanted to see how I looked like. I can just tell in the way she talks to me, the way she says it on the phone. She gets very emotional.

Rudy is no exception. Regardless of the division of labor in the transnational family—that is, whether fathers do housework or not or whether extended kin lend a hand or not—most children I interviewed feel secure in their mother’s love based on their mother’s projection of grief. As a consequence, mothers must demonstrate to their children that they suffer while they provide for them economically. The mother of Floridith Sanchez elicits sympathy from her daughter when describing domestic work in Taiwan as continued hardship. As Floridith tells me: “My mom told me that she still works even when she is sick. How does that make you feel? I cry. You cry? Out of pity.” Mothers continually remind their children that they struggle a great deal at work. Children often view this as an incentive to reciprocate for their struggles. States another daughter of a domestic worker, Theresa Bascara: “My inspiration is my mother, because she is the one suffering over there. So the least I can do is do well in school.” The image of the martyr mother, one that resonated throughout many of my interviews, shows that children find comfort in their mother’s grief over not being able to nurture them directly. This was not true for the children of migrant fathers. For them, emotional security does not mandate an image of a suffering dad. Instead, the view of their father as the “ultimate breadwinner” is enough to give them the security of their father’s love. Because they hold onto conventional gender views of the family, children of migrant mothers incur more emotional difficulties from transnational family life than do the children of migrant fathers as they simultaneously impose stringent care expectations on migrant mothers. Mothers cannot provide only material security in order to demonstrate some semblance of family affection. Migrant mothers must nurture the children, care for them, and guide them from a distance, and often they must grieve when doing so. Yet identifying affection this way fortifies the gender boundary contested by the institutional rearrangement forced by women’s migration, because the picture of the “martyr mom” or the grieving mother projects the image that not to be close to children naturally hurts mothers.



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Conclusion As an export-oriented nation in the global economy, the Philippine government has come to rely on the work of women to secure foreign capital. In so doing, the state spurs the formation of female-headed transnational households and encourages the reconstitution of gender relations. The complete absence of mothers might be expected to facilitate the reconstitution of traditional gender relations in the family. Yet ideological discourses that maintain women’s proper place is still in the home prevent such a shift. The law—specifically the Constitution and the Family Code— reinforces the old ideology and in so doing maintains paternal order amid the growing rate of female emigration and other social changes engendered by modernization and global capitalism. The hope of achieving gender egalitarianism from the complete absence of mothers in numerous households is thwarted by the ideological discourse enunciated from above, an ideology fueled by the media, as shown by the headlines that call for the return of migrant mothers, as well as transmitted through state apparatuses such as the law. However, this paternal order implements a gendered moral economy that actually maximizes women’s productivity via the retention of the ideology of women’s domesticity. Clearly, the gender asymmetry in the state’s ideological and economic construction of the family results in the vilification of migrant women—the economic heroes of the nation—for failing to fulfill their proper duties for the nation. However, it is important to point out that the Philippine economy also suffers in this process. As women compose the majority of workers in the two industries that generate the most foreign currency for the Philippines, the low-wage labor of Filipino women allows foreign companies and employers to maximize production and minimize costs. Thus it can be said that the bottom-level position occupied by Filipino women in the global labor market reflects the subordinate position of the Philippines in the global economy. Without doubt, the ideology of women’s domesticity works to the disadvantage of the Philippines as a nation, because the low pay of Filipino women signifies the low pay of the Philippines in the global economy.

Notes This chapter has benefited from the comments shared by Myra Marx Feree, Kathy Ferguson, Monique Mironesco, and two anonymous reviewers. 1. I base this claim on a survey of articles that appeared in Philippine dailies from the years 1995 to 1998. I obtained the newspaper articles from the library of the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency, which catalogues all media reports on migrant Filipino workers. 2. These headlines appeared in the Philippine Star and the Inquirer. 3. The state constructs the services of women to the nation to include their maternal

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function. One constitutional provision states: “The State shall protect working women by providing safe and healthful working conditions, taking into account their maternal functions, and such facilities and opportunities that will enhance their welfare and enable them to realize their full potential in the service of the nation” (Article 13, Section 14). This validates the classification of individuals on the basis of the biological differences between the sexes. 4. In the Constitution and the Family Code, “the sanctity of the family” stands on the inviolability of marriage and the conjugal union of a man and [maternal] woman. As the first provision of the Family Code establishes: “Marriage . . . between a man and a woman . . . is the foundation of the family and an inviolable social institution whose nature, consequences and incidents are governed by law and not subject to stipulation” (Article 1). Marriage is absolute once recognized by the church or state. 5. Following the definition of a modern nuclear family, love and not property obligations bind marital ties. For the sake of love, fidelity is imposed as a legal obligation. 6. Most families require at least two incomes, because more than 70 percent of families live below the poverty line (Ramirez and Deza 1997: 12). 7. While feminists in the Philippines still see limits in the advancements of women in the Family Code—particularly the fact that divorce is still considered illegal (Center for Women’s Resources 1989)—they also recognize the gains that women have achieved. For instance, the new law abolished the double standard in the Civil Code that distinguished the grounds of legal separation as adultery for women and concubinage for men, and instituted sexual infidelity to be a valid ground for legal separation for both men and women (Article 65). The recognition of domestic violence as grounds for legal separation has also been a victory for feminists in the Philippines. 8. Personal conversation with Dina Fuentesfina of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, August 25, 2001. 9. This is also the case in receiving nations, where men and women are concentrated in the informal service sector. From Hong Kong, for instance, men sent an average remittance of 28,025 pesos compared with 20,370 pesos for women in 1996 (NSCB 1999: 116). 10. Men also enter receiving countries, for instance the United States and Canada, with a greater proportion of professionals (National Statistics Office, 1999). 11. In the Philippines, women seem to have made tremendous strides in higher-level employment because 10.29 percent of employed women compared with 3.45 percent of men hold professional jobs (L. Cheng 1999: 221). Yet these figures are misleading, as women are concentrated in bottom-level professions, such as teaching and nursing. 12. Balikbayan means return migrant. Remittance agencies that cater to Filipinos also offer cargo services in the diasporic community. On average, packages take one month to reach the Philippines by sea and one week by air.

C h a p t e r 11

Headloads The Technologizing of Work and the Gendering of Labor

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lynn Holleran, Technical Director for VSS Asphalt, describes very accurately what the operations of a road repair crew in India look like:

To see a crew patching potholes is an education in labor intensity. One hot and steamy Saturday afternoon, I was being driven to Indian Oil Company’s research and development center outside New Delhi. We stopped at an intersection where a crew was patching. The process was fascinating as there seemed to be very little, if any, mechanization. Some women were improving aggregate with hammers, and an ancient bitumen kettle was bubbling over an open fire. Groups of women with shovels of aggregate jostled to get to the potholes, then bitumen was poured over the stones to create a sort of penetration seal. They applied road dust to complete the pothole. Someone told me later that such a patch lasts till the next rain. (Holleran 2002)

To those from the global north, the lack of equipment on many Indian construction sites seems extraordinary. Why would an industry be organized in this fashion, and why would the people who are doing this arduous physical work be protesting the increasing use of machines? Especially disconcerting to the unaccustomed eye is the sight of women performing heavy manual labor, dressed in colorful saris, barefoot or with flimsy shoes, often while men seem to stand around and wait for the women to deliver the materials to them. This seems not only anachronistic, but also contrary to white western understandings of a traditional division of labor by gender. It is not surprising that development experts would surmise that Indian building techniques are backward (the Taj Mahal notwithstanding) and applaud the advent of modern construction equipment that will make labor-intensive jobs scarce. Yet the processes of domination that shape the gendering of work often do not allow women workers to benefit from mechanization. Their experiences suggest that technology is not a solution to their poverty unless technological changes are grounded in a larger context of sustainable development and political empowerment.

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Manual construction workers in India number between 20 to 30 million (Varghese 2000; Singh 2001; Swarup 2003), and about a third to half of them are women (Bhatt 2003; Wells 2004). Since 1979, construction workers, most of whom are not covered by formal legislation because they are not considered permanent workers, have been organizing to improve their conditions through voicing their needs and getting legislation passed. Since construction workers are constantly employed by different contractors, organizers rejected the traditional model of collective bargaining. Instead they lobbied for the formation of tripartite welfare boards of government, employers, and worker delegates, based on the model from the Port Trust Act and the Dock Workers Act of 1948. Construction workers are part of a broader movement to empower both unorganized workers and slum-dwellers, challenging the neoliberal idea that the state has no accountability for the welfare of such people. While international development agencies rely on western models of economic growth to relieve the persistent poverty of three to four hundred million people in India, critics of development practices are organizing around “an alternative vision of sustainable, humane development with equal right to life and resources” (National Alliance People’s Movement 2004). Workers’ associations are also contending with the erosion of employment due to mechanization, which has the greatest effect on manual laborers, especially women. Accelerating the mechanization of construction was a strong part of India’s liberalization policies in the 1990s, which followed from the logic of older modernization policies of dam construction and the green revolution in agriculture, despite criticism of these policies (A. Gupta 1998; Shiva 1991). The paradigm of liberalization is the most recent phase in international development policies: this approach includes the practices of privatization, increased global movements of capital investment, and deregulation, with the state intervening mainly to facilitate market transactions. Supporters of liberalization argue that governments are inefficient and corrupt arbiters of the economy, while the unregulated market increases healthy competition, fostering better conditions for the international investment that leads to economic growth. Further, they would argue, economic growth is good for all, even if in the short run there are inevitable problems. Critics castigate the neoliberal paradigm as development for the rich, pointing out that many of the policies implemented in the third world increase the unequal distribution of wealth and benefit first world countries (J. Ferguson 1994, 1999; Escobar 1995), reinforce prior existing hierarchies (McCartney 2004), and wreak environmental havoc (Hirway 1998). In India, the state has been playing a large role in making investments conducive to business, while social protection is shrinking (Breman 1996, 2000). The case of mechanization in construction is an interesting aspect of the liberalization and development debates because most would argue that some degree of



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mechanization is needed in India, regardless of the nature of the policies it follows. But the controversy over state policies towards mechanization reflects a range of positions regarding the role of the state in the politics of development. This chapter examines the development discourses and the political economy of globalization as they interface with women construction workers in India and with the movement of construction workers to organize the informal sector. The main actors in this story are international corporations, government agencies, unions, women’s groups, and environmental NGOs. Unions and NGOs have pushed through legislation to try to regulate construction work, challenging the ideology of the free market. Some organizations are experimenting with skill training as a way for women to continue to work in construction, while others are protesting the extent of mechanization and lack of thought given to appropriate technology and sustainable development. I write about the situation of women construction workers in India to contribute to analyses of patriarchy within globalization studies, and as part of a project to place the struggles of U.S. women construction workers into an international context. Having worked as an electrician for more than a decade, I am still involved in the movement for women in nontraditional trades and continue to analyze systems of work stratification. Women in the global north have recently turned to construction work because it often pays better than female-dominated jobs do, especially in the unionized sectors. But women in the United States and Europe have not managed to substantially increase their numbers in the years since 1980, when they began to enter union apprenticeships (Eisenberg 2004). The study of women construction workers in India sheds light on the gendering of work and on the tension between processes of domination and resistance in the structuring of work hierarchies. Transnational feminist theorists caution against making overly easy comparisons across cultures (C. Kaplan 1994; Desai 2002). Mohanty (1991) urges theorists to look deeply into local contexts, especially when western researchers examine nonwestern countries. This study focuses on the conditions of women laborers in India, and on the activism of women’s and labor organizations there. Political and intellectual analyses of women’s labor and organizing often flow primarily from “the west” to “the rest,” taking western gender and labor practices as the implicit paradigm for feminist activism. Since U.S. and European women have sought to advance their economic interests by entering skilled trades and learning to operate mechanized equipment, it would seem to follow that women in other parts of the world should also pursue job training and participate in mechanization. Yet the economic and activist trajectories of women construction workers in India throw doubt on relying solely on this approach. If, instead, we take understandings and activities of women’s lives in India as our model, a more complex picture emerges; allowing these accounts to flow back into global feminist agendas provides a more nuanced understanding of specific local contexts within which women struggle.

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There are three parts to my study here. Part one discusses the gendering of work within the Indian construction industry and the current crisis facing women laborers due to mechanization. Part two analyzes the organizational strategies for training women to do skilled work and problematizes this direction. Part three examines the way workers’ organizations, NGOs, and women’s organizations are mobilizing to improve their position, with a particular focus on the demands for state action.

Gender and Technology in the Indian Construction Industry The interplay of class, caste, and gender in India ensures that most poor women— like poor women nearly everywhere—do waged work in addition to reproductive labor. As India is still largely rural, most women do agricultural work, especially planting and picking, but many do extra work in the off season or have left the villages to find work in urban centers (Kapadia 1995). Commonly, poor women work as beedi-rollers (special cigarette rollers), vendors, domestic workers, brickworkers, and headloaders in construction (Gulati 1981; C. Ghosh 1984; Kalpagam 1994). Historical sources show that women have done construction work for centuries (Ramaswary 1999; Jaina 1976; Qaisar 1988; Sen 1984). Among their common tasks, women carry the mortar and bricks to masons, who are almost universally men. To watch them do this work is to see women balance between nine to twenty large bricks on top of their heads, or to see them hoist a basketful of wet cement onto the small rag crown they often wear, after which they move quickly across the building sites, often up staircases or across ramps. Women laborers’ jobs include filling deep baskets with gravel or stones to convey across stretches of road for street-widening projects. In residential sites, women help men lift large stones onto the women’s heads to transport them to where facings are being constructed for landscaping and architectural features. Women do a myriad of other tasks: moving earth, wood, or other building materials; mixing concrete and wetting down concrete walls; and building platforms for the masons. The ubiquity of the sight of women workers, embedded within the structures of caste and class, can have the effect of making these burden-bearing bodies invisible, or as one Indian scholar commented, “The biological eye may see women doing this work every day, but the conceptual eye does not” (Monisha DasGupta, personal communication, 2002). That the women who do the transporting of material are actually construction workers is not taken that seriously in many circles in India, and their needs are overlooked or even suppressed. Women are not clearly visible in the statistical records either. The blurring of women’s occupation of space in the workplace contributes to the undermining of women’s concerns. Vinita Shah (1996) explains why reliable data are so scarce, based on her qualitative study of construction in Mumbai. Payments to workers are



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often made through a family work unit, and the male head is the one who is paid and documented on payroll records. This is not just patriarchal custom: it is patriarchy serving capitalism. Contractors do not want to report the numbers of women actually employed because this might make them legally liable to provide certain amenities, such as childcare centers (crèches).1 Vaid (1999) recounts that none of the approximately 800 women construction workers at a site he surveyed were on the contractors’ payroll. Compounding this, the employment figures released by the authorities are based on the reports from contractors, but only a few of the large contractors file reports, while smaller contractors are not counted. The industry structure is integral to understanding women’s work in construction. How contractors organize their labor force, their system of recruitment, and the practices of debt obligation and family pay reveal the relationships of gender and caste to the hierarchical structuring of work. The caste system provides the historical basis for the designation of job duties in construction, integrating men and women into the work force under certain classifications that are only slowly changing (Giriji et al. 1989; S. Dasgupta 1995). Indebtedness and coercion have long been used by employers to recruit workers. A chief factor in the grip recruiters still have on workers remains the advance payments that obligate workers. Labor recruiters (jamadars) command caste loyalty that operates as a system of trust as well as restraint (Johri and Pandey 1972). Sexual exploitation of women by recruiters is well documented (S. Dasgupta 1995), as is sexual harassment not only by recruiters but also by foremen (Priya 2000). Many workers are recruited in family units. A majority is lower caste (nonBrahman), dalits (scheduled caste) and adivasis (tribal peoples), landless or land poor, and has low literacy levels. They often are recruited in villages and migrate for work wherever they can find it. Sometimes the men alone will migrate for work, but commonly families travel together. Several women I spoke with in Delhi brought some of their children with them, but left others with parents in the village and sent money home. If the sites are close enough, women and men also commute from villages or the outskirts of cities and towns to construction sites and may travel long distances every day to do so (S. Dasgupta 1995). Not all women work as part of family units. Young single women, women who are divorced or separated, or women whose spouses have deserted them, as well as widows, also work as construction laborers. According to many of the women I spoke with, construction pays better than agricultural work, is less isolating, and has less social stigma than domestic work. An alternative means of finding work, especially in cities, is the labor market. Women and men assemble either at a construction site or at commonly known pick-up points, and maistrys (masons who act as foremen) or contractors choose their workforce and negotiate rates. In Chennai and Delhi, workers told me that they can get a better rate at the labor market than through a labor recruiter, partly

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because they do not have to give a cut to the recruiter, but also because of the informal consensus of the group to keep their wages high. This informality can be an advantage for some workers, but it can also raise other problems, such as intensifying competition from “outsiders,” such as migrant or tribal workers. Construction accounts for an increasing amount of women’s employment, at the same time that this employment has become increasingly irregular. Mitra and Mukhopadhyay studied the persistence of women’s employment in the construction sector by examining employment in major cities throughout India for several decades preceding 1981. They found that women increased their participation in construction, and the growth rate of women construction workers was 6.33 percent as opposed to 5.34 percent for men. They noted that because women were primarily doing manual work, they were subject to greater variation in their work opportunities and seemed to “operate in the capacity of a reserve army within the construction workforce, being drawn upon in situations of excess demand and retrenched as demand slackened off” (1989: 528). Pais (2002) studied the nature of the temporary workforce in India with a view to testing the theory that liberalization increased the processes of casualization and feminization of the workforce. His study found that construction accounts for more of women’s and men’s employment since 1983; women’s share of employment in construction increased from 3.9 percent of their total employment to 5 percent in 1993, and men’s increased from 5.1 percent to 7 percent. Both men and women also showed an increase in casual status, but for women the increase in contingency labor characterized nearly all their employment. In 1983, 58 percent of male construction workers were listed as casuals, while in 1993, 66 percent were casual. The percentage of women working as casual construction workers rose from 88 percent in 1983 to 95 percent in 1993. Pais’s findings regarding the increased casualization of the Indian economy in the last few decades are consistent with those of other economists who have traced this trend as a consequence of the movement towards liberalization even before 1991 (Dutta 2002). Pais’s findings are revealing because they show that construction work is a growing source of employment for women, while at the same time women’s employment within the industry is becoming more that of temporary worker. In other words, although women have long been casual workers, they are having an even more difficult time finding work, and when they do, it is often for a shorter period of time.

Unemployment and Mechanization In an interview with Valliammal, in Chennai in March 2004, she lamented the hardships brought about by mechanization:



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Q: Other than machines, are there any other reasons for this unemployment? Valliammal: Machines are the only reason. Contractors prefer hiring a machine to hiring ten chithals (women helpers) though he has to spend Rs.500–600 more. Because they finish the job in one day and they can look for their new job the next day. For everything machines have come. Ready mix, foundation machine, ceiling machine . . . How do we survive? Instead of four chithal, they employ one chithal and one periyahl (male helper). With machine they employ one mason in the place of ten chithals. Machine does everything. Mason does finishing touches. Because of these we are all sitting at home. Having worked fifteen years in this, how can we go for some other work? Who will give us work? Machines have come even in agriculture. If we go back to agriculture, they call us only for planting and not for harvesting. Because there are machines for harvesting; they simply tell us go home. One month’s harvesting is done in a week’s time by the new machines. Agricultural laborers are also sitting at home idle. Tell me, where do we go for our survival?

Construction equipment sales are big business. Since 1991, as part of its deregulation processes, the Indian government has provided strong incentives for the import of foreign technology and for the formation of joint ventures in which foreign companies can have a majority share. In construction this means bidding for contracts and manufacturing. For example, Caterpillar, which is competing for control of the excavating end of construction, builds one of their trucks at their majority-owned factory in Bangalore, and backhoes in majority-owned plant in Chennai, and views India as a base for company growth throughout Asia (Jagannathan 2001a). According to Narayan (1999), the total market for new construction equipment and services in India was US$1.4 billion in 1998, and was predicted to grow by 20 percent annually. The lucrative market for construction equipment suppliers is dominated by the United States (38 percent), Germany (27 percent), and the United Kingdom (12 percent), with 23 percent going to Japan and other countries. India also represents a large market for used equipment. The government of India’s interest in rapid development of infrastructure permits duty-free imports of equipment and relief from customs duties for imports of special equipment for such projects. Build, Own, and Operate (BOO) or Build, Operate, and Transfer (BOT) are two programs widely used in the developing world that receive support from international finance institutions while national governments absorb most of the costs and risks (Pahlman 1996). For Indian companies to take part in high-dollar infrastructure projects, foreign participation is necessary (Varghese 2000). These contracts reward contractors who can finish jobs quickly, putting more pressure on subcontractors to buy machinery rather than hire workers. Mechanization of infrastructure projects promotes mechanization of other types of construction, including housing.

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Contractors large and small are interested in avoiding labor problems (Varghese 2000). Even cheap labor is seen as an impediment in terms of union demands and consistency of work. Contractors are interested in speeding up the project schedule so that they can go on to the next job. So the discourse and the practices of development policies for infrastructure penetrate into the discourse and practices of small projects throughout India. Ready-mix machines and concrete trucks have been more frequently used in small projects since 2000, galvanized by a campaign by the Chennai-based German manufacturer of the machines, Schwing Stetter (Jagannathan 2001b). Is the criticism of construction mechanization Luddite? In many western contexts, opposition to mechanization appears to be a quaint throwback to a bygone era. Yet some activists in India problematize mechanization by placing labor-intensive work within a larger political, economic, and environmental context. Kirtee Shah presents the case for the concept of sustainable construction in India, based on the philosophy of Habitat International Coalition, a housing organization, of which he is president. Shah’s vision of sustainable construction calls for a holistic view of energy, tools, materials, safety, the environment, together with the social aspects of construction, including the use of labor-intensive methods in some areas. He observes that the view of many Indian contractors is that the . . . environment or labor safety and welfare is a luxury of the more affluent, more advanced, and more profitable. For the undeveloped, survival and growth, not sustainability, are the main issues. The prime concern is the price they pay, not others. And issues like ecological balance and saving the globe for future generations are for the intellectuals, philosophers and thinkers; not for a pragmatic material manufacturer or the worldly-wise contractor or estate developer. (K. Shah 1992: 2)

G. Shankar, an architect based in Kerala, is associated with the Habitat Technology Group and is also interested in promoting appropriate technology and “green architecture.” His projects include building low-cost residences, using locally available materials, and mixing labor-intensive methods with prefabrication of door and window frames, for which he trains women as well as men (interview with G. Shankar, Kerala 2002, habitatgroup.org). The central issue for women laborers is not the technology per se but the larger political context: who gets to decide about the organization of labor and for what purposes is employment regulated? And what alternative employment will be available? Workers make the case that mechanization is eliminating their livelihood, and therefore it needs to be more closely regulated. Interviews with laborers conducted in Delhi in March of 2002 and in Tamil Nadu in 2002, 2003, and 20042 reflected the problems men, but especially women, were having finding work. For example, three



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women who left Madhya Pradesh to do construction work in Delhi and who have worked fairly consistently for over a decade as laborers emphasized the lack of work despite the amount of construction taking place. Lower-caste men who do not have the connections to move up into skilled work are also having a harder time. In Delhi, one of the leaders of the workers’ association, Nirman Mazdoor, showed us the cranes, excavators, and other construction machinery that were being used to build the metro, thus eliminating the need to employ hundreds of people. While workers want more safety, better conditions, and different options for their children, they are also concerned about the way people are rapidly becoming unemployed. Valliammal’s explanation above sums up the view of most workers: mechanization is eliminating manual work in agriculture and construction, and alternative employment is scarce. Increased dependence on construction work for survival, and increased casualization because of the way labor is automated, raise deep questions about the vision of economic growth in India. Economic growth by itself does not necessarily mean job development, and indiscriminant adoption of mechanization can lead to intense suffering for the poor. As two notable economic scholars observe: . . . employment growth requires labor absorption both inside and outside agriculture. The present pattern of economic liberalization in India is guilty of commission as well as errors of omission. Its error of omission is agriculture, where little attention has been paid, especially to irrigation. Its error of commission is in industry where employment growth will be dampened because of cuts in public investment, unthinking import liberalization and non-selective use of foreign technology. (Bhaduri and Nayyar 1996: 12)

Employment growth for the poor is often envisioned in development discourse as a question of job training, so that is the subject to which I now turn.

Skill Training for Women in Construction: What About Getting Hired? Emphasis on job training is a pivotal part of international development and poverty program discourse. But policies influencing the market to change are often excluded from this discourse or are weakly implemented (Price 2002, 2004; Clarke et al. 2004; Eisenberg 2004), as this interview with Ranganayki makes clear: Ranganayki: I went for mason training twice for forty-five days. During the training, I got paid Rs.50/- a day, that was the daily wage at that time. I went for training seven or eight years ago through the union. Though I was given mason training, nobody takes us as masons. Union said they would give us work, but they couldn’t . . . 

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Padma: When she has the energy to carry bricks and climb, why can’t she do the simple job of building blocks—arranging bricks, and cementing them? The Foreman (sarcastic): Yes, that is a hard work, whereas mason’s job needs brain work. They can only carry bricks and sand, they can’t do mason’s job. It has to come on its own. One can’t be taught that job. Nobody taught or trained me. I learnt on my own.

While neoclassical economists claim that a free market does not support discrimination, others disagree. “Real markets are permeated by power relations of various kinds; they are embedded in social processes which may, for example, involve class exploitation or gender subordination; and they are saturated by divergent institutions, ideologies, ethical and cultural values” (White 1993 in McCartney 2004). White’s commentary on the permeation of the market by power relations indicates the problems of relying on training and good will to change the practices regarding the hiring of subordinated groups. Wells (2003) argues that despite the differences between the conditions of work for women in construction in various countries, “there is an almost universal skepticism of the ability of women to undertake skilled construction work and almost everywhere there are numerous barriers to their entry.” She reviews studies of women laborers in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Nepal, finding that there are substantial numbers of women doing helper work similar to that of India, organized often along family lines, with women working alongside their husbands and brothers. Yet, Wells argues, in the instances where women have gotten training, as in Sri Lanka, women had trouble finding work after training because those in charge thought that they would not be capable of doing the work. A comparison with the problems faced by women in the west is striking. As Eisenberg suggests, women workers’ individual successes, “no matter how numerous—will not bring an end to occupational segregation: too many barriers have been embedded into the culture and organization of any industry with such a long history of exclusion. External pressure by government or developers is required” (2004: 191). Cynthia Cockburn (1986) and others have explored the social construction of masculinity and the relationship between skill, technology, and gender that underlies patriarchal attitudes, which seem to have similar effects across cultures. Work by feminist scholars indicates that state pressure is critical to promoting the interests of women workers (Price 2004) regardless of national context. The embrace of skill training for women as a remedy for job displacement in India therefore needs to be examined closely. Unions, NGOs, international agencies including the International Labor Organization, and government agencies in India are all running skill-training programs for laborers, including women, as a response to the unemployment crisis



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and the recognition that mechanization will displace workers. For women, there are two main types of programs: those that train women and place them in projects that are already funded, and those that train them without job placement. Both types of training are undertaken in the hope that women will ultimately be able to find their own work, although some organizations emphasize entrepreneurship and niche employment. Yet conversations and interviews with women workers, activists, and advocates indicate that the resistance to women becoming skilled workers is still strong. Wells summarized the observations of Theo van der Loop, who studied Indian construction sites in the 1980s. He found that there was a “widespread view that women were not able to do skilled construction work,” because it is too dangerous, women were not interested, and because men viewed women as a threat to their “dominant status” (quoted in Wells 2003: 36). Employers and many male coworkers are unwilling to see women as skilled workers. Geetha Ramakrishnan articulated this point clearly. “We in the union have trained women to be masons, and they have learned their skill. But on the jobsite, then the social thing comes” (interview with Ramakrishnan, Madurai, 2002). Women in Vinita Shah’s study (1996) told her that male workers made it very difficult for women to learn and perform skilled work. For the majority of women construction laborers who have to earn a certain amount of money to support their families, it is difficult to take the risk of trying to make a living as a skilled worker, especially when the training that they get is not enough, or when they face disapproval from their family. Rampiari, one of the elected women union leaders I met with in Delhi, said that she received only fifteen to twenty days of training to be a painter, which was not sufficient for her to know how to function on the job. She also had training as a mason, but had problems with getting the right training and getting childcare. When asked if her husband, also a mason, would help train her, she answered, “If I ask too many times, then he’ll say— what’s wrong with you that you can’t learn this—how many times do I have to explain?” She went on to say, “It is like this—if you are climbing on a tree, then I cannot climb the same tree; husband and wife cannot compete” (interview with Rampiari, Delhi, 2002). Attending a conference on skill training for women workers held by the SelfEmployed Women’s Association (SEWA) in October 2003, I learned that contractors and training school coordinators in India are including discourse about training women in their programs.3 SEWA brought the Construction Industry Development Council together with representatives from universities and training programs around the country to address the inclusion of women in skill upgrading in response to globalization.4 Presentations by participants subscribed to the agenda of gender inclusion, although most of the programs seemed to have few women trainees other than those programs dedicated to women.

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SEWA itself trains women and places them on jobs reconstructing and retrofitting houses affected by the earthquake in Gujarat in the 1990s. SEWA’s model is inspired by that of the Jeevapoorna Women Mason’s Society (JEEWOMS) in Trichur, Kerala, where Thresiamma Mathew runs a training program funded by international foundations to build latrines, rainwater collection tanks, and houses. Mathew underlines the importance of women’s self-esteem and skills for interacting with society (Menon 2002). Likewise, other participants emphasized the importance of gaining community acceptance and family support for women learning construction skills. Researcher Jeemol Unni warned that skill training itself is not enough. There has to be a systematic effort to deal with the social prejudice against skill training of women and occupational segregation in the sector. . . . Besides providing a viable training mechanism, developing a system of financing these technical institutions and the workers who are willing to attend them without loss of incomes to them, it also involves getting the local communities to participate in fighting the social prejudice against women skilled workers. (2003: 122)

Wells (2003, 2004) points out that the state has an important function in providing structures for this sort of fight against social prejudice to happen. Citing Vinita Shah’s work, she notes that Kerala provides a model. Women contractors and chief engineers are noticeably more numerous in Kerala, where 30 percent of places in civil engineering courses are reserved for women.5 What language, programs, and mandates could the Indian federal and state governments deploy to make sure that women and scheduled caste workers are trained, employed, and accepted in skilled jobs? And to what extent does the state need to consider transitional methods of introducing mechanization to stem the problem of unemployment? This second question is one raised by labor organizations, which also have a role to play in eradicating patriarchy and elevating women. The next section discusses the role of labor and women’s associations in organizing workers and making demands on the state.

Construction Unions, State Legislation, and Women’s Organizations In an interview with Dr. Shanmuga Velayutham, Professor of Social Work at Loyola College, Chennai, she expressed sentiments that reflect the aspirations and disappointment of activists and union supporters about the political potential of the 1996 Act and the welfare boards to change conditions for workers: Dr. Shanmuga Velayutham: You see! This board [variam] announces only welfare schemes. The main thing is the Manual Labor Act. As per the act they have two,



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three dimensions to perform. But they only carry out the welfare provisions. The Act says that the working conditions should be improved, should be regulated. Contractors should be registered; they should use only registered workers. The board is not doing anything about these things. But what they do is pay some money if a worker dies, some money for marriage, some money for education. What they should pay attention to is improving the working conditions. Minimum wages should be ensured. They have to do these things. Unless they do these things conditions of construction workers will not improve. Registered contractors should use only registered workers. If I am in construction business, I can employ any one. Absolutely no law to regulate these things in the industry; unless they regulate these things conditions of construction workers will not improve. Interviewer: Do you think it is possible? Dr. Velayutham: Yes. Very much possible; it is in the Act. Government refuses to implement; the welfare board refuses to implement. Now what the board does is just the charity work whereas implementing the Act is the more important one. (Interview with Dr. Velayutham, Chennai, 2004)

And from a conversation with Nirmala, we learn about the hope and frustrations of union activists: Nirmala: I have been in union for the last eight years. Someone in our area told us about Geetha Amma. They said she has doing lots of good to poor construction workers. Later Selvi’s mother and I came here and met Geetha Amma. She enquired about our status; she said that she would do something for our welfare. Later we joined the union. For my adopted son’s wedding, Geetha Amma got Rs.2,000/- from the welfare board. I have taken part in the patha yathra [the footmarch that is part of Indian protest tradition]. I also have taken part in many meetings and demonstrations. I used to come here [to the union office] three, four times a month for meetings. Last three months I was not coming here, because of no work, no money for even bus fare. All our struggles are mainly for housing, pension, and medical facilities. Our union has been fighting for these demands for a very long time; I am also part of this struggle for the last eight years. There were fasting and memorandums given to government. But nothing happened. The government has not done anything for us. So far our struggles were in vain. We ask for pension, we ask for one-third of what we earn (Rs.100/- a day) as pension. We are sick and unable to work because of working of all these years, that’s why we ask for pension. (Interview with Nirmala, chithal and union member, Chennai, 2003)

This section briefly touches on the history of workers’ struggles to bring about passage and implementation of pertinent legislation and on the emergence of wom-

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en’s activism. It is worthwhile to note that despite the unions’ inclusion of women, women construction workers are also organizing separately around their own issues, especially in Tamil Nadu, where organizing has been going on for decades. In 1979, the construction industry was in crisis in Tamil Nadu, triggered by a shortage of cement. Several activists helped form a construction union, which became TMKTS, the Tamil Nadu State Construction Workers Union. Around the same time Pennurimai Iyakkam (PI), an action group for women, also formed (Mageli 1997). Geetha Ramakrishnan, a political activist, helped found both organizations, along with Subhramanian and others. TMKTS was successful in getting a Manual Trades Act passed in the state in 1982 and helped convene a national conference on construction workers in 1985. TMKTS worked with the National Campaign Committee for Central Legislation on Construction Labor (NCC-CL) and with SEWA to launch the fight for legislation in the Indian Parliament. Meanwhile, Subash and Nirmala Bhatnagar and others formed a construction workers’ cooperative in Delhi, out of which emerged a workers’ association, Nirman Mazdoor Panchayat Sangam (NMPS), which then established branches in several states (J. John 1997). Once a weakened version of the National Construction Act was finally passed in 1996,6 the NCC-CL and NMPS shifted their focus to implementing the Act state by state, as India is based on a federalist system. Kerala and Tamil Nadu are the first states with a functioning welfare board,7 and they both are experiencing difficulties.8 According to Subhramanian, president of TMKTS, the funding and the selecting of representatives of the welfare board remain pivotal areas. The Act calls for social security and other payments to workers to be funded by contractor contributions, known as a cess, which is based on a percentage of any construction costing over 10 lakhs ($100,000), but this cess is often not collected. Representatives to the tripartite board, even workers’ representatives, are appointed by the government rather than elected by the workers (interview with Subhramanian, Chennai, 2002). The Federal Legislative Act calls for the fixing of hours, wages for overtime, safety conditions, and so forth, but as Dr. Velayutham stated above, there does not seem to be much enforcement from the government or the board. Leaders of the NMPS have initiated national campaigns with other informal sector workers to consolidate the organization of unprotected workers, and NMPS has many projects for worker welfare in its different branches.9 G. Ramakrishnan formed an NMPS branch in Chennai in the 1990s, after a number of conflicts within TMKTS, including differences over how to unite workers around differences of caste, religion, and sex, as well as how to craft legislation to represent women’s interests (G. Ramakrishnan 1996).10 The Chennai branch of NMPS works closely with the Joint Action Committee of Unorganized Workers, the Tamil Nadu Manual Workers’ Association, and the Women’s Struggle Association; all share office space. A core of worker activists support each other’s events. This is the collection of orga-



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nizations that I observed most closely. Their activities focused on organizing and registering workers, educating workers about their rights and the political system, and raising awareness about the women workers’ cause among the general public. Women were part of all of the events, and there was special focus on literacy, sexual harassment, and fighting violence against women. Political activities permeated cultural events and religious celebrations. Women are particularly committed to getting the welfare board provisions enforced since many of them are the sole providers for themselves and their families. Many of the women involved are widows or have had husbands who are alcoholics or have left them. Many of them have done construction work for ten to forty years, and their work has dried up due to mechanization. Some are doing side work, like domestic labor, or crafts, like sewing palm leaves, but they are determined to try to get their pension from the welfare board. A training group to teach masonry to women was held several times, but, as we saw earlier, women are generally not being hired to do skilled labor. NMPS and its associated groups have been engaged in organizing many actions over the last years. The union tries to provide carfare for those who live on the outskirts of town to come to union meetings, street corner meetings, or gatherings for holidays, such as Ayutha Puja (the day of showing respect for tools), where women workers are among the speakers. The union has coordinated major actions, such as a several-months-long padha yatra (an Indian protest footmarch) in 2002, in which women took the lead, that involved marching from one end of the state to the other to protest the lack of payments by the welfare board and the mechanization that has eliminated manual jobs. Women were a large part of a contingent that went on a starvation fast for the same reasons. In October 2002 about thirty-seven workers, including twenty women from several groups including the NMPS, were arrested for protesting against mechanization and making demands of the welfare board by holding a sit-in in front of the Tamil Nadu State Guest House. After they had been imprisoned for fifteen days, a representative of the welfare board finally came to accept their demands, and they were released (interview with Selvi, Tamil Nadu, 2003). These actions promote solidarity, are reported in the press, and raise the profile of workers’ demands (see Sridhar 2002). Women construction workers testified at a public hearing on the impact of globalization in 2002 in three cities in Tamil Nadu, together with beedi workers, quarry workers, agricultural and domestic workers, tea plantation workers, sweepers, childcare workers, spinners and weavers, and jewelry cutters. These workers have either lost work due to mechanization or are drastically underpaid. Women laborers made demands that the government restrict the use of construction machinery to projects more than 5,000 square feet, and that the welfare board consider taking a role in implementing such a restriction. A contingent of

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women workers from Chennai reiterated their demands at the World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004. Women workers joined in the large march of construction workers through the city of Chennai on March 26, 2004. Several leaders I spoke to explained the importance of separate organizations for women. One of them argued that without such organizations, women would not get involved with the union. Another pointed out that although the union has good intentions, without pressure from the women, their issues will not be pushed forward. Certainly it is clear that in Chennai, women workers’ issues are clearly visible within the labor movement, and they are fighting for their issues in the public eye.

Conclusions Globalization and accompanying neoliberal economic reforms affect construction workers adversely in two main ways: first, mechanization without job growth for the poor causes unemployment, and second, the retreat of the state from intervention in the workplace reduces workers’ power. The Indian state and international agencies are facilitating mechanization in many sectors through myriad financial instruments and incentives, including programs to import and produce construction equipment. Millions of workers are employed in construction, but when concreting and excavating become mechanized, many jobs disappear. As a result, construction work is increasingly becoming scarce or temporary, and the lowest-caste workers and women are the most severely affected. Yet the state has had little involvement in creating alternative employment. Breaking down patriarchal beliefs and supporting women’s training in skilled construction work is one response to the decrease in manual work, but it takes a concerted campaign to change discriminatory hiring practices and attitudes. This study challenges the notion that education and training by themselves will lead to more equality in the workplace. As a transitional tactic, women’s organizations and labor groups are demanding that small projects under a certain square footage be restricted from machines to avert massive unemployment. Liberalization calls for a retreat of state intervention, except to facilitate commerce. The strategies of construction workers’ unions and women’s organizations to transform the unregulated nature of the informal sector and protest the adverse effects of globalization on their lives is an example of a call for state intervention in the market on behalf of the poor. While the Construction Workers’ Legislative Act of 1996 and the welfare boards are still weakly implemented, they provide institutional structures for workers’ concerns, and women have been active in trying to make the institutions accountable to their needs. This study documents the activities of women workers organizing around their own concerns, making the issues of gender visible, as well as promoting women’s participation and leadership.



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This study is in dialogue with other critical examinations of development and liberalization. Not only is the question of employment important to raise when discussing the character of economic growth that India envisions, but so are the issues of self-sufficiency, appropriate technology, and sustainable green development. Coalitions transnationally between unions, women’s groups, and environmental activists and builders could be useful for further questioning and intervening in the liberalization paradigm.

Notes This chapter was made possible in part by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as by grants from the Humanities Center and the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine. The ideas herein owe much to conversations at the University of Hawai‘i, Women’s Studies Department, in particular with S. Charusheela and Monisha DasGupta, and to the fellows in the postdoctoral program, especially Nandita Sharma. A section of the essay was presented at the Gender and Development Conference at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok in May 2004, and my thanks go to the participants and conveners of that conference. Above all, thanks go to the activists, workers, and union representatives in India, who were generous with their time and ideas. This study is also the foundation for a film, Transnational Tradeswomen, which looks at issues of women construction workers in several Asian countries. See hardhatvideo.com. 1. Employers are obligated to provide maternity benefits under the Maternity Benefit Act of 1961, separate toilet facilities for women, and a crèche for children, none of which they usually offer (Wells 2003). The organization Mobile Crèche has been active since the 1960s in raising money and organizing efforts to provide childcare and schools for women construction workers in various large construction sites in India, as well as in targeted slum neighborhoods. Nevertheless, it is the contractor’s responsibility to provide crèches for children when there are over a certain number of women with children on a job, but this law is not enforced (V. Shah 1996; personal communication, Devita Singh, 2002). The problem of child labor is also a major question, which I have not addressed directly here, but certainly having proper childcare and education are elements towards providing children some protection. In addition, the need for universal free public education is of major importance. 2. The interviews I cite in 2004 were conducted by my collaborator, R. Sivakumar, in Chennai. He shot interviews based on questions for my film project in the spring of 2004; I conducted all the interviews in 2002 and 2003. 3. Perhaps this is partly the effect of Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD) influence. In the 1990s, international development agencies, under pressure from feminists and other progressives, shifted from urging awardees simply to

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include women in economic development plans (WID), to proactively analyzing how aspects of development are gendered (GAD). For a critical discussion of WID and GAD, see Rai (2002). 4. Women participating in SEWA training projects were present, and many of the presentations were in Gujarati so that they could follow along. One of the most interesting sessions was a question and answer session with the audience. 5. The 74th amendment, which reserves 30 percent of the seats of local panchayats (councils) for women, and the legislative reservations for Dalits are other examples of state-mandated directives towards eroding patriarchal power. 6. Since the Legislative Act passed in 1996, many groups have formed unions, including the Communist Party (CPI) and the Communist Party Marxist (CPM), with varying degrees of success. 7. Delhi and Pondicherry started their boards after 2002. 8. The study conducted by the International Labor Organization (Krishnamurty and Nair 2003) found that few workers had received benefits in Tamil Nadu, where only 18 percent of construction workers had registered. In comparison the welfare boards in Kerala, a neighboring state, had 65 percent of workers register. Kerala’s board began in 1991 and so had several additional years to organize, and Kerala also has a social democratic government that works collaboratively with unions. Registration in Tamil Nadu is conducted only through the unions, and the unions charge a fee on top of the registration and renewal fee. In Kerala, by contrast, the welfare boards launched their own publicity, and members registered as individuals. The contractors’ yearly contributions to the welfare boards in Kerala are larger than in Tamil Nadu, despite the greater amount of construction occurring in Tamil Nadu, but the cess was set at 0.3 percent as opposed to Kerala’s 1.0 percent of construction contracts. A large outlay of Tamil Nadu’s money goes to an insurance company, while in Kerala, the boards are self-insured. Perhaps most disturbing was the fact that only 200 members out of 91,924 who were registered in Chennai received any benefits by 2001, and there were many delays in paying those who did receive funds. In an interview with the head of NMPS, Subash Bhatnagar, he noted that in Delhi the state rules require construction workers to obtain certificates from their employers that they have worked as construction labor for at least ninety days in order to get registered; this is a problem for many workers who are often hired for a shorter period of time. http://www. humanscapeindia.net/humanscape/new/jan03/thebricklayers.htm. 9. For example in Delhi, NMPS started a union school for slum children. 10. For example, the Tamil Nadu Act made it illegal for women to work in construction after 7 p.m. Women laborers objected that this would discriminate against them, especially in the concrete gangs, which have to work nonstop until the job is done; such work provides much of the women’s employment. “The real issue for these women was the need for proper overtime wages” (G. Ramakrishnan 1996: 173).

Ch a pter 12

Gender and Modernity in a Chinese Economic Zone Nancy E. Riley

D

espite long hours of often monotonous labor in difficult conditions, women working in the Dalian Economic Zone (DEZ) in Northeast China refer to the zone and their lives there as “paradise.” They speak glowingly of their lives in Dalian, ready to point out how lucky they are. This chapter examines this stance in light of the lives of these women and in the context of the place and role of the urban, both physically and discursively, in China today. Women in contemporary China operate and strategize within many systems of inequality; I argue that two of the most central to the lives of women in Dalian are gender inequality and the rural/urban divide, a “spatially defined status hierarchy” (Cheng and Seldon 1994: 645) that favors urbanites and disadvantages rural peasants. In this system, urban space is a signifier of modernity, and as such it plays a crucial role in how women in Dalian see the city and imagine their role in it. Thus, to understand the characterization of such a space as paradise, we need to examine both what the city provides and the role of modernity in China today, and how discourses of the urban and of gender influence the lives of women workers. Rural migrant women in Dalian are using normative structures, particularly the roles and expectations of mothers, to find a place and to construct themselves as modern, successful, women.1

Gender’s Continuing Presence Gender has always been a major way that Chinese society and the lives of individuals are organized. The new government established in 1949 attempted to address gender inequalities through land and marriage reform, but it focused particularly on getting women into the waged labor force; drawing on theory developed by Marx and Engels, Maoist officials believed that increased involvement in paid labor would allow women more access to public sources of power. Since then, Chinese women have had one of the highest labor-market participation rates in the world. But the post-1949 reforms did not dismantle gender inequality. While the pro-

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portion of women in the labor force is close to that of men, women remain in lowerpaying and lower-status jobs, have little power in the political realm, and face discrimination in hiring and promotion. Many believed that the economic reforms of the 1980s would bring women more opportunities, such as the freedom to develop small businesses. While that has happened for some women, the changes have also meant a decline in the state’s role in the economy, including less government oversight of protection against gender discrimination; private businesses have more freedom to hire and fire at will, and women are more likely to be last hired and first let go. In rural areas, reform has meant the dismantling of communes, and some women have found new opportunities and have used those to develop small agricultural or other businesses. But the changes have also meant that households are once again the central organizing institution in rural areas; women thus work (and are paid) as members of their households, with labor and decisions taking place within the constraints and hierarchies of those households. For women, economic reform has not meant liberation from the expectations and norms of the past. Most women work full time in the labor force, but they continue to be responsible for housework and childcare. One of the biggest changes from the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) rhetoric, which downplayed any differences between women and men, is the new emphasis on gender differences and the unique position, perspective, and needs of women (Yang 1999). In recent years, even as women are nearly always workers, it is not these roles that define womanhood. Rather, in the new consumerist society, women’s bodies are the objects of the male gaze, and women are major targets of and participants in the new consumer economy. At the same time, women continue to be seen and assessed through their performance as wives and mothers (Fong 2004).

The City and the Rural/Urban Divide While gender has been a central defining feature of Chinese society before and after the economic reforms, the divide between urban and rural has become what some see as “the most important social distinction in modern China” (Potter and Potter 1990: 297). China is similar to other societies across time and space in the salience of divisions between the rural and urban, and a key issue to understanding the lives of Dalian workers is the development and meaning of the urban/ rural divide and its involvement in the construction of a gendered modernity in contemporary China. Cities have long been recognized as places for the new and “in any society, the city is the locus of the modern. In the discourse of the early twentieth century, the ‘modern’ city was always set against the ‘backward’ countryside” (Esherick 2000: 1). The attraction of the city may be especially strong for people liv-



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ing in villages. Ashis Nandy, writing on Indian urban spaces, describes the journey from the village to the city, from the seemingly familiar, uterine, even if routinely oppressive narrow fantasy life of the village to what looked like the liberating anonymity and non-traditional vocational choices of the colonial city. As the city became the epicentre of new forms of adventure in ideas and creativity, it also offered to open up the opportunities of defying a conventional, pre-formatted life and experiment with new cultural experiences and with refashioned extended selves. (2001: 72)

The city, then, may promise a sharp contrast with the shape of daily village life. Indeed, Fei Xiaotong (1992) writes about village China in ways nearly opposite to Nandy’s description of the city, describing the way that rural life is rooted “in the soil,” creating characteristic routines and expectations; rural people, Fei argues, are enmeshed in the customary practices of local life and are interdependent with family and other villagers to such an extent that it is difficult to see life beyond the village. The city is, in contrast, “identified with history, with progress, becoming” (Nandy 2001). Because most foreign presence in China over the last several centuries was especially tied to cities, cities not only represent a Chinese modernity, but also cosmopolitan centers that span the foreign and the Chinese. In China, this urban/rural contrast has been underscored since 1949 by the state, and its policies and restrictions on who can live where have shaped urban and rural spaces and the lives of people who live there. Between the early 1950s and the late 1990s, through the establishment of a nationally organized household registration system, rural residents were restricted from moving from their village without explicit government permission, permission that was rarely granted. Under this system, the population was divided into two groups—peasants and nonpeasants— and each person was assigned a hukou (residency permit). With membership in either category came certain rights, responsibilities, and restrictions. The hukou system did not permit any movement without permission from the local authorities, but movement was especially restricted for the rural population, who were kept on the land. Through these restrictions the government hoped to prevent the kind of mass migration, especially from rural to urban areas, which might interfere with the goals of the central government, including economic development, central planning, the establishment and maintenance of social order, and the organization of production and urban services (Solinger 1999: 37). While other goals were also important, the larger reason for this urban/rural division was the determination of the country’s leaders to industrialize China. Using the hukou system to divide the country’s tasks, urbanites would work in nonagricultural areas to industrialize the

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country, while rural peasants were to provide the nation’s food supply. However, this was not a simple division of tasks, but a hierarchical system that favored urbanites; the state presumed that the household registration system and its connected restrictions would guarantee peasant-supplied food to urban workers, protect urban jobs from peasant outsiders, and lead to a modernized, industrial China. The state’s control over all means of production and all distribution made such central control possible and allowed the government to structure a system that would redistribute goods and services from the bottom of the hierarchy—the rural areas—to the top—the cities—and thus ensure a constant supply of food and other necessities for those who were at the center of the state’s plan for modernizing. With no private sources for most items, all goods and services—including food, job assignment, permission to marry, and the procurement of luxury items such as bicycles—were available only through an individual’s hukou-based work unit (danwei). The outcome was that “over more than three decades, the hukou system structured the differential opportunities afforded urban and rural people” (Cheng and Selden 1994: 645). Status—peasant or nonpeasant—was inherited, with children assigned to their mother’s classification. What developed, therefore, was a class system based on residency, a system in which rural peasants were at a distinct disadvantage. In addition, one of the most important routes to success—education—was effectively unavailable to rural residents. Rural schools were often were located at great distances for most students. They were notoriously poor, often lacking in basic facilities such as books or other materials, and many teachers in rural schools were less well trained than those in urban schools. With local control and funding of schools, and with priority placed on urban services, rural schools did not provide an avenue out of the bottom of the hierarchy. In essence, the peasants were locked in place.

The Divide since Economic Reform With economic reform in the early 1980s, much of this system in both urban and rural areas underwent enormous change. The rural commune system changed to a household responsibility system, which meant that households earned income and bought goods and services on their own, without the oversight of the local authorities. With more goods and services available all across China, people were less tied to the household registration system. By the mid-1990s, nearly all food was bought and sold in local markets; it was possible, if expensive, to purchase private housing; and services were also available outside of government authorities. Under the reforms, migration exploded, with increasing numbers of peasants moving to the cities to look for better jobs and opportunities. But, as Solinger argues, and as I will discuss below, while things changed, much remained the same. A



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closer look reveals that these migrants remained confined within the rubric of the state’s persisting imperative: to ally urban growth and productivity with cost-saving and, as a “socialist” state, to provide for the native city dweller while keeping the new rural migrants as docile, disposable trespassers and drudges. “Statism and urban bias, though more masked than before, retained their wonted power to inform the relation between the Chinese migrant and the state” (Solinger 1999: 45).

The Attraction of the Urban It is against this background of gender inequalities and the urban/rural divide with its restrictions on movement that women in Dalian evaluate their own situation and residency. Most of the women working in the DEZ come from much poorer rural areas. While the lives of rural peasants have undergone transformations that make new things possible—everything from owning a television to running a small store to increased family control over farming—peasants continue to be barred in essential ways from the resources available in urban areas. Peasant women face particular constraints. In addition to the reorganization of rural farming back into a system structured by families (thus resurrecting the gender and age inequalities that have always been prevalent in peasant families), China’s rural areas have become “feminized,” as males migrate to the cities and leave much of the farming responsibilities to women, the elderly, and others without the means to migrate (E. Judd 1994). While rural men may feel confined, whatever class or status constraints they face, women face the additional constraint of gender inequities. Thus, urban areas have appeals for women that are similar to those for men, but gender adds another layer to this urban/rural divide. When I asked women about why the city was so attractive to them, several talked about the ways in which rural residence had restricted their own goals and lives. They pointed to the many differences between rural and urban life. Some of these differences were about convenience—the convenience of running water, central heating, and better electrical service. “Look at all these tall buildings!” one woman exclaimed when I asked what she liked about the city. For her and others, those buildings signaled not only the visual attraction of modern urban areas but also all their conveniences. Other times women talked about the better opportunities available to them in the city. The city offered jobs that were unavailable in rural areas, jobs that had a higher status than rural—usually farming—jobs, with regular pay, and cleaner conditions (see also Ching Kwan Lee 1998 on migrants in southern China). While most women talked about missing their families, the city also offered opportunities to get away from their more restricted rural lives and family arrangements and gave them greater freedom to make decisions on their own. The opportunities around marriage are also impor-

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tant; several women discussed their improved prospects for marrying a man of a higher status in the city. One pointed to the ways that marriage in rural areas is particularly hard for girls because they have to move to their husband’s house after marrying; she linked her own goals (in the city) to avoiding such a life. She argued, “. . . it is really hard for girls in rural areas. I mean girls really have it hard . . . girls have to be at home and always working, and then they marry, but they move to their husband’s house and everything. It’s terrible!” Negotiation around gender norms and expectations seems to underlie many of the intentions of women in both Dalian and other urban areas of China. As I will discuss in more detail below, urban China, with its very different structures, constraints, and opportunities, offers what some women perceive as a totally different cultural world. Urban spaces allow different gender performances (Butler 1990), and that difference from rural life is attractive to many migrant women in Dalian.

Urban Constraints While the city offers many new possibilities, however, it also presents difficulties and constraints, particularly to women who have migrated from rural areas. Most of the women working in Dalian factories do not have the money to take advantage of the bright lights. They work long hours, and their pay is not enough to provide much beyond basic expenses and the remittances that most send back to their families in the village. So although they can see the bright lights, and enjoy walking around the shopping areas during their time off from work, they are usually not able to actually participate in much of what the city seems to offer. The lives of these workers—as is true for most migrants throughout China—are consumed by daily work and struggles to make ends meet. While many see their factory work as better than the farm work they would be doing at home in the village, it is nevertheless monotonous and uninteresting. From an analysis of a series of letters written by women migrants in southern China, Anita Chan concludes, [W]orkers become consumed by the most primary concerns—a subsistence income, food, and health. They concentrate on the physical need to survive and the mental strength to tough it out. In the factories, the culture of survival inhabits a milieu that is very constricted. The young people have traveled long distances to get to these factories, but once inside, their physical world shrinks . . . their days are divided between shop floor and the dormitory. When there is no work, they have no use for their free time because they have no money to go anywhere. (2002: 182)

Most miss their families and friends at home; they are lonely and lacking the support that was automatically forthcoming in their rural worlds.



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The Continuing Role of the Hukou System In order to understand the responses of migrant women in Dalian to these urban opportunities and constraints, we have to return to the meanings of urban and the ways these meanings have been shaped by recent events and related state actions. Because of the unique division and restrictions imposed by the government, Chinese migrants in urban areas face particularly difficult conditions. Since the economic reforms and the development of private markets, the government is no longer interested in, nor does it have the same ability to, control movement into the city as it did for over thirty years. Food, housing, services, and jobs, once controlled by the state, are now for sale by private individuals and businesses. The relaxation of rules on movement, the availability of goods and services on the market, and the continuing (and growing) inequalities between rural and urban areas have all been factors in the massive migration that is currently underway in China today. It is difficult to find accurate statistics on this migration because most of it is undocumented. But some of the best estimates suggest that somewhere between 30 to 100 million rural residents are now living in cities in China (Riley 2004). Most migration is from rural to urban areas, and from western areas to eastern areas, that is, from the poorer to the wealthier areas in China. Migrants have taken up jobs as construction workers, nannies, and factory workers.2 But these relaxed policies and increasing opportunities in urban areas do not afford all urban residents the same lives. The hukou system remains in effect; when rural residents move to urban areas, they retain their rural hukou, which means that rural migrants do not have the same access to urban goods and services as do those with official urban hukou. Thus, while the government has allowed and sometimes encouraged movement since the 1990s, it has also not taken any responsibility for those who have come to the city. The result is that now, peasants—as migrants—can contribute to city needs, but, consistent with the policy in earlier decades, the current government owes them nothing once they arrive in the cities (Solinger 1999). If they want services, such as education or health, or if they are in need of housing, their lack of urban status puts them at a serious disadvantage. Without an urban hukou, they are blocked from jobs in some of the industries with the highest salaries and most security, such as state industry, education, or government administration; migrants with rural hukou usually take jobs in the service industry (such as store clerks, domestic work, or childcare), construction work, or in the informal sector. Migrants do work in industry, and in some areas (particularly the economic zones), it is migrants who predominate in industry. But these industries are ones that are less supervised by authorities and often provide none of the benefits—such as maternity leave or guaranteed income—that accrue through state industry work. Migrants without urban hukou are sometimes hired by state enter-

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prises but only as temporary workers and without benefits; they sometimes fill in gaps in labor but are let go when demand wanes (Davin 1999: 99). Without easy access to jobs and without official sanction, migrants’ lives are especially hard in China. They may be living in the city, but they are not regular citizens there. This new migration does not reflect any major change in the underlying structure and organization of the society, but rather has “made floaters [the term for these ruralto-urban migrants] out of farmers” (Solinger 1999: 45). The two-tiered system of rural and urban remains firmly in place. In spite of these difficulties, the migrant women in Dalian—like other rural ­migrants—continue to see their urban residence and experience as positive. Contributing in a major way to that attitude, I assert, are the gross inequalities between urban and rural. While migrants yearn for better lives within the city, they nonetheless see their current lives as a step forward from their lives in the village. Their position and perspective reflect the larger structures (community, national, global) that influence both individual lives and the construction—both physical and ­discursive—of urban China and the way that women are specifically configured within those constructions.

Chinese Economic Zones amidst Growing Rural/Urban Inequality The historical moment and place are important pieces of this social landscape. The jobs at which the migrant women in Dalian work have resulted from recent national and international changes, especially economic globalization. Many of the factories in the DEZ are foreign-owned. In fact, the DEZ was first created in 1984 with the explicit purpose of jump-starting Chinese economic development through tax breaks and infrastructure support. Japanese-owned firms make up the largest proportion of foreign firms in the zone, but there are also significant numbers owned by corporations from Korea, the United States, Germany, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and others. As is true in economic zones in other countries, one goal has been to take advantage of recent worldwide trends to relocate industry from industrial countries to less industrialized areas of the world. China’s leaders also hoped that setting up these zones3 would make possible an easier transition of technology to China and would, at the same time, be an avenue for the employment of underemployed rural residents (Wu 1999). In developing the economic zones, the state tried to walk a fine line between the capitalist principles that underlie much of the functions, organization, and processes of the zones, and the general socialist principles still at the center of China’s development. Even though the zones were given a certain autonomy, unlike zones in other countries, the Chinese economic zones were controlled centrally by a socialist government. Nevertheless, their relative autonomy has allowed the country to experi-



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ment with new economic policies and systems. The zones were seen by many as a way to move slowly toward an opening of the economy, and their separation from the rest of the country, both geographically and economically, was meant to permit the government to control how foreign investment influenced China (Wu 1999). Zones are seen by many across China as sites of foreign firms, consumer goods, fashions, and business deals. Because these phenomena are linked to visions of China’s future, the zones also generate “exciting visions of newness, opportunity and progress” (Crane 1996: 160). While zones are seen as politically safe, they are still exciting places where socialism and capitalism, Chinese and foreign, and even rural and urban entities mix and produce new forms and in this way are seen as harbingers of China’s future. A significant part of China thus becomes, symbolically, as well as empirically, a newly industrializing economy highly integrated into world markets through a dynamic export-oriented manufacturing sector, brimming with growth and success, where entrepreneurial social forces are liberated by the recalibration of state power, where ideology is subsumed by pragmatism, and where modern vestiges of Confucian culture—thrift, hard work and education—are economic advantages. The description of an “East Asian model,” and its aura of positive accomplishment, now make sense for China. (Crane 1996: 164)

In its economic zones, some argue, we can perhaps see a Chinese-flavored modernity and globalization project. Rural peasants are one of the main targets for labor recruitment into these economic zones. Indeed, even though some women find urban jobs through word of mouth, labor recruiters continue to be active in rural areas, reflecting another way that rural women are “pulled” into the zone. But also important are the “push” factors, the ways that the difficulties faced in rural areas encourage women and their families to consider migration and urban work. The economic reforms that began in the early 1980s brought not only economic opportunities but also growing inequalities in income and wages throughout the country. The disparity between rural and urban, and between western and eastern China, is notable and increasing. Between 1988 and 1995, the Gini coefficient (which measures inequality) rose markedly, from 25 to 34 percent (Knight and Song 2001). This disparity reflects the differential resources given by the central government, which has privileged the eastern, metropolitan areas all along, as well as the ways the state continues to put a larger share of the resources for infrastructure, developing industry, and other investments into those areas. Peasants therefore look to the urban areas for better lives or simply for employment. At the same time, services have been declining in rural areas. Health care,

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which is no longer covered by the local government, has declined in both quality and availability. Reports suggest that the disparity between rural and urban health care is large and growing (Beach 2001). The health consequences of this inequality are becoming increasingly apparent. Immunization programs, for example, no longer have the wide coverage they once had, especially in rural areas (Riley 2004). Life expectancy, which has always been lower in rural areas, is now even more differentiated: in 1982 the life expectancy for urban residents was 70.9 years and 67.0 for rural; by 1996 that gap had increased, with life expectancy rising to 74.3 years in cities and but only to 68.8 in rural areas (Attane 2002). A similar gap between rural and urban areas exists in education, with many arguing that the education system in China is now two-tiered. There is a high and growing rate of illiteracy and semiliteracy in many rural areas, as school fees have increased to compensate for the lack of state funding and as the opportunity costs of schooling increase as well. In many poor areas, parents remove their children from school or do not send them at all because they need the children’s labor on the family farm or in the family business. Parents do not always see schooling as necessary, an attitude that is underscored by the failure of rural schools to provide a way out of the rural area. Rural schools, whose quality and even numbers cannot begin to compare with urban schools, are not able to provide students with the background they need to compete in the national examinations that are the gateway to upper-level education.

Chinese Modernity For peasant females, who often have even less access than males to resources such as schooling, work, or family power, urban areas provide an escape from the constraints of village life and seem to offer opportunities that are difficult to find in rural areas. Women’s desires and choices are clearly related not only to material differences between rural and urban areas and between women and men but also to huge discursive and ideological divisions between rural and urban, and to the role of gender in producing and maintaining these divisions. Women’s migration from rural areas and their interpretation of their new urban life involve issues of modernity, consumerism, and ways that the Chinese government’s program of economic modernity has shaped those. As Rofel argues, modernity persists as a powerful narrative because nation-states organize the bodypolitic around it. . . . Modernity leads government leaders, development agents, intellectual elites, subaltern workers and peasants, and women—those who represent political power as well those who are the objects of its operations—to act in the name of the desire it engenders. (Rofel 1999a: 13, 17–18)



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In any society, modernity is a contradictory and confusing process. It is, as Marshall Berman has described it, an environment that promises adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are . . . it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. (1982: 15)

These contradictions and ambiguities may be especially strong in places like China, which have a reluctant connection to the west. China strives hard to be modern but at the same time wants to achieve its own brand of modernity (Rowe and Kuan 2002). The media play a central role in this imaginary. Through radio, newspapers, magazines, and especially television, images of urban life—and its contrast to the “backward” world of rural villages—is easily and widely available. Fashion, housing, kinds of jobs, street scenes, and much more flood rural worlds with images of something very different from village life. And this media glamorization of the urban occurs alongside the many ways that rural life and inhabitants are devalued and viewed as second class. Gender plays a role here, of course, both in the process of modernity itself and in the spaces that the imagination of modernity opens or closes. The paths the state and other institutions follow reflect ideologies and intentions regarding what aspects of life will be supported or discouraged and the roles that women and men will play in them; in addition, these roles have different, gendered meanings. In the new economy, economic risk-taking reflects this kind of gendering; becoming a capitalist or an entrepreneur is “a sign of daring, the site of risk, glory, individual achievement, and masculine strength” (Rofel 1999a: 55). While the market economy offers new possibilities and opportunities to anyone, women’s already subordinate position means that these opportunities are more often provided to men than women. In effect, the discrimination against women in the new industries—and the state’s silence with regard to this discrimination—becomes part of the new market economy. Women—those in Dalian and elsewhere, rural and urban women—act and perform within these constructions, borrowing, resisting, acquiescing, reconstructing them. Urban areas offer rural women new imaginative landscapes. Gregory Guldin (2001), in his study of changing peasant culture, found that villagers often perceived more prosperous, urban areas as offering wenhua shenghuo, or a more cultured life; this new life is reflected and symbolized by the different housing, goods, and economic opportunities available in urban areas. In these same

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places, the women who returned to the village from urban areas saw themselves as having been exposed to and influenced by this new cultured life. Others around them also saw them as changed, both physically—they had a greater variety of clothes, many of a new style, and they were more likely to wear makeup—and in other ways. Villagers said that these women seemed more daring about trying new things, their thinking was more open, and even their demeanor and speech patterns were different. Writing about rural women in Thailand, Mary Beth Mills asserts that geographic mobility is tied to “fantasies of identity” (citing Moore 1994: 66), “ideas about the kind of person one would like to be and the sort of person one would like to be seen to be by others” (Mills 1999: 13). Consumerism plays a central role in China’s path to modernity, and its effects can be seen across China. “The general culture of consumption—an acute commodity desire linked to social status—has saturated all sectors of Chinese society, regardless of what specific changes in actual consumption patterns have taken place” (Schein 2001: 225–226). In this culture, in which affluence “is coded as modernity” (ibid.: 225), to be successful is to be someone able to buy the things that indicate success—whether clothes, housing, or education. Consumption is a much larger part of urban than rural life, and urban wages—which are higher, more regular, and earned individually (rather than by families farming together on family land)—are seen as a key component to success in a consumer society. Indeed, the markers of success are nearly all urban and about consumption. Part of individuals’ imaginary modernity, then, is likely to involve remaking themselves through consumption. Mayfair Yang (1999) argues that contemporary urban China, with its emphasis on consumerism, on the buying and selling of goods and people, has put new constraints on women. Whereas it was once true that gender was “erased” and women’s position, desires, and needs were subsumed under a model built on men’s lives, there is now an overcompensation for that erasure and a subsequent emphasis on the differences between women and men. Through the market, women find ways to assert themselves as feminine and different from men. Makeup, fashion, and products specifically for women are all part of the new economy. In addition, women’s bodies and faces adorn billboards and advertisements and are used to sell products of all kinds. No longer is the ideal woman the “iron maiden” of the Cultural Revolution years; the new model is the svelte, sexy, fashionable—and clearly urban—woman. In this era, success is equated with modern, and modern is necessarily urban. Yet new elements of modernity, mobility, and consumerism are not separate from old social institutions. Norms, expectations, and behaviors contain both old and new, often creating tensions, rifts, and unattainable desires. Old structures can be broken, or they can be reinforced or recreated within the new. In China today, women continue to be judged—by others as well as themselves—by



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gender norms that have long existed in China. In spite of their involvement in the labor force, and in spite of the ways that their bodies and other characteristics are being used in the new market economy, their achievements as good wives and mothers remain central to their own assessment of their success (Fong 2004). Marriage and motherhood are parts of nearly all women’s lives, even as these institutions have changed in significant ways in recent years. These elements of the social backdrop are crucial pieces in understanding Dalian women’s pathways, obstacles, and assessments of their own lives and the world around them. By many standards these women have achieved success. While many of them do not yet have a permanent urban hukou, they nevertheless have made it into the city, and most of them have landed a steady job. Their prospects for further success are good, if not by the standards of long-term urban residents, then certainly by the standards of rural peasants. One woman in the DEZ, a vegetable seller originally from the Harbin area, described how her relatives and former neighbors see her as successful now because she lives in this economic zone: “I am considered successful because I live in [the economic zone]; it is really developed and modern . . . coming here is better, there are more opportunities for people here.” But women’s relationship to the consumer urban culture has an interesting twist. In interviews, the women discussed how they rarely bought goods for themselves. Among all the women I talked with, most of their purchases related to basic household needs for their family members—food, clothing, and school supplies were the things most often mentioned. Part of the explanation is that these families have little disposable income. And perhaps these women have avoided the pull of the consumer culture. However, we have to also consider the myriad ways that consumerism, visions of modernity, and newfound access to urban privileges do not displace old norms and values about gender but have been interwoven with them. When women in Dalian are asked to describe a successful woman, they describe someone who—through her hard work—is able to provide opportunities for her children. In effect, and effectively, they are using old norms and expectations for women in new ways, reconstructing themselves as modern women not in how they dress or even the goods they acquire for themselves. Rather, they see themselves as successful modern women because they are able to be good mothers. In this era in China, being good mothers means providing their children with access to all that is modern (read: urban). Indeed, it is when they talk about their children that women are most articulate about the meaning of the urban to them. While they describe and admire the bright lights and tall buildings of the DEZ, it is the schools, the job opportunities, and how these can influence their children’s future that seems most compelling. When I asked one woman about the differences between urban and rural areas, she answered, “Everything is different in the city. The school, especially. If I want

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to have a child, then my child can go to an urban school. The schools in cities are much much better than rural ones. Well, everything is different, it’s better in the city.” And while we might take this emphasis as another instance where women relinquish their own goals for those of others, we should also recognize the ways that these achievements and provision of opportunities allow the migrant women to see themselves as successful. By combining normative structures with new ideologies and opportunities, women have carved out paths and ways of seeing that construct themselves as successful, modern women. Interestingly, though, as much as these women see their own roles as mothers as paramount in their self-construction as modern women, they also see gender as operating differently in the next generation. Many of them talked about the importance of their daughters finding a different route, especially through education, to success. One woman told me, “I tell [my daughter] she has to make more of an effort than men, because she is a woman, and that she should really work hard, that she can do it, but men are given advantages. . . . I want her to get a really good job.” Mothers regularly talked about the opportunities their daughters now have because of their mothers’ efforts to open urban opportunities to them. Thus, even as they are, in some ways, reinscribing old gender roles in their emphasis of their role as mothers and wives, these migrant women are looking beyond that when they talk about their daughters. These women’s individual desires and imaginations are deeply shaped by the political, economic, and social world beyond their own lives. While they are not dupes falling for some useless new ideology, but are using new and old to construct their own lives, we also have to take into account the power of the discursive and material environment in which these women and other Chinese construct their lives. As Weston argues, The same idealism that makes performance theory so appealing, with its promise of personal/political empowerment, cannot explain what motivates a given presentation, why a person assembles one type of montage rather than another, how the content and significance of gendered presentations shift over time, or what a given presentation means to the women who engage in gendering. (1993: 13)

James Ferguson (1999) also writes about the importance of recognizing that any performance takes place on a stage and that we need to think about the stage: How is it set? By whom and why? Who are the players? This aspect of social life calls for attention to the larger social, economic, political, and discursive landscape that enables, constrains, and influences all individual performances. For rural women who migrate to Dalian, the constraints, both in their home village and in the economic zone, are very big indeed.



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Conclusion Women’s enthusiasm for the Dalian Economic Zone, their association with it as paradise, is a function of many different elements operating in Chinese society today. Rural women are pushed from their village because of the constraints found in rural China and the fact that villagers must contend with fewer resources and second-class status. Women in particular must struggle with fewer ways to make a successful life for themselves. In contrast, urban areas offer rural women opportunities for work, marriage, and the possibility of becoming a modern woman. Indeed, nearly all the women I interviewed mentioned the importance of modernity and equated modern with urban. From their viewpoint, to be modern is to be urban. For women, in particular, these new spaces offer the possibility of new gender expectations and norms, of new and different ways to perform gender, than were available in rural areas.4 Yet old normative structures and expectations have not simply disappeared in the midst of these modern settings and possibilities. Rather, they are reinscribed in the ways that private industry hires, promotes, pays, and fires women and men differently; they are part of the ways that the state has constructed its version of economic development; and they are reinscribed, used, and recreated by women in their efforts to be modern successful urban women. From the outside, these mixtures and pathways suggest both the hopefulness of Dalian women migrants and the constraints that remain. Their expectations and desires—for the modern life found in the city, for the possibility of constructing oneself anew—suggest their faith in and relationship to other elements of contemporary society. Solinger’s argument that rural peasants move to the city and continue to believe that they can find a better life there certainly holds true for the women I interviewed in Dalian. These migrants believe that by working hard and watching for and seizing opportunities, they have a chance for success. Migrants’ determination, their belief that a better life can be found in the city, and their involvement in consumerism reflect a faith in the powerful systems in place in contemporary China and a belief that individual motivation can work to overcome the difficulties they may face because of the system. These attitudes suggest that not only are women’s lives shaped and influenced by the larger social and discursive structures around them, but that even their imaginations are likewise bounded. Indeed, that is the power of consumerism and modernity. But it is not a picture of boundless possibility. Women remain bound to their families and to their responsibilities within their families. Women are both constrained by these responsibilities and expectations and find opportunity within them. It is this reconstruction of the world around them that influences women’s view of Dalian as paradise. Their perspective is better understood when we appreciate the ways that these migrant women, who are now living and working in a modern urban area, have come much

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closer to their version of success. As migrant workers in an urban area, and as women, they may be still marginalized. Yet they are also closer to the center; indeed, they have gone several steps in that direction simply by their having made it to (and in) the city. Rather than resist normative values and expectations, rural women have recreated these same norms amidst the urban, and in that way Dalian has provided women the tools and backdrop to success.

Notes 1. This chapter is part of a larger project that relies on nearly two years of fieldwork done in Dalian, China, during the late 1990s. The bulk of formal interviews on which this study is based occurred during a ten-month period in 1997. In addition, I spent several other two-to-three-month periods, and a few shorter periods of time, doing further interviews, follow-up interviews, observation, and unstructured interviews during the course of the years 1994 to 2000. I examined the larger social context, through conversations, but also through examination of media and documents. I also conducted formal semistructured interviews with thirty-eight women; in some cases these interviews lasted an hour or two, but more often I had repeated interviews with women; some women spoke to me for over eight hours in total. It is these in-depth interviews on which I rely most heavily. I found respondents through several means. In some cases I went to the head of a factory (often after an introduction by some other person) and asked him if I could recruit respondents through the factory itself. In many cases, the managers not only agreed, but allowed workers to “take a break” (paid) to talk to me. I was rarely allowed onto the factory floor but interviewed in small rooms loaned to us for our interviews. I also met respondents through friends, through interviewees, and on my own, through the conduct of my daily life. Outside the factory I interviewed women in public places in the Economic Zone, in my own apartment, or in theirs. Some of these interviews were the second, third, or fourth interviews with women whose first interview had taken place within the factory. Women easily agreed to be interviewed, often suggesting that we get together again. They were nearly always quite forthcoming, ready to answer any question I asked and to volunteer different kinds of information on their own. I conducted all the interviews by myself, in Chinese, without any supervision. The Fulian (the Women’s Federation, my formal sponsor) occasionally helped me find respondents in the early stages, but did not intervene in the interviews in any way. 2. One government official estimated that in the mid-1990s, 40 percent of the construction workers in Beijing were migrants (Guang 2001). 3. The differences between the DEZ and other Chinese economic zones are mostly ones related to scale, at least for the purposes of the present work. Those in the south (especially in the Pearl River Delta) are much larger, attracting more foreign and Chinese businesses and more migrant workers.



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4. While some have pointed to the negative side—the relative lack of long-established bonds within neighborhoods in the newly created Dalian Economic Zone—this same lack of deep bonds between neighbors may be seen positively by those who are looking to establish themselves as new people without the constraints that neighbors or family might impose.

pa rt v

Trafficking

C h a p t e r 13

Female Sex Slavery or Just Women’s Work? Prostitution and Female Subjectivity within Anti-trafficking Discourses

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long with increasing globalization in other arenas, the trafficking in persons has become a global business in recent years. Human trafficking is conducted for a variety of purposes, including domestic and childcare work, sweatshop and migrant labor, child labor, “mail-order bride businesses,” and so on. A significant percentage of human trafficking is for the purpose of prostitution and other forms of commercial sex work,1 especially in parts of South and Southeast Asia, although statistics on the number of persons trafficked for sex or any other form of labor vary tremendously.2 Some persons are trafficked within the terms of the U.N. definition quoted below, and some of them migrate “voluntarily.”3 Most nations are implicated in some measure, whether as countries of origin, destination, or transit for trafficked persons. The uneven growth of the global economy has brought increased wealth to the “first world” without commensurate gains to the “third world,” resulting in the effective displacement and impoverishment of large proportions of the population in several developing nations. As traditional modes of production have been displaced in these regions, out-migration has increased, especially by women seeking economic opportunities elsewhere because there are few, if any, at home (Jeffrey 2002: 78). Restrictive immigration policies of destination countries, which are experiencing economic growth as well as labor shortages but which prevent migrants from crossing borders legally, have accelerated human trafficking. Other factors that facilitate human trafficking for sex in particular include the growth of international organized crime, the relatively huge profits to be made by traffickers, the rise of sex tourism, government corruption and complicity, and inadequate and ineffective legal mechanisms. All of these factors have operated synergistically with continuing sex discrimination to compel many women into sex work as the only or best economic opportunity available to them.

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Despite efforts by entities at the international, national, and local levels to stem this flow of the sale of human beings for their sexual value, their efforts have not met with much success. In part, sharp ideological differences among the various actors in the anti-trafficking community have impeded collective and collaborative efforts. While most anti-trafficking advocates agree that sex trafficking, which by definition involves the use of force, coercion, deception, or other prohibited means, is illegitimate and should be criminalized, the discourses on sex trafficking are riven with conflicts concerning such basic matters as the definition of trafficking, the numbers of persons who are actually being trafficked for sex, the validity of consent by the trafficked person, and the most appropriate policy and practical responses, including measures for the prevention of human trafficking and the rescue and rehabilitation of victims. There is also the issue of whether sex trafficking is better combated by decriminalizing or even legalizing sex work or by strengthening measures to prohibit and criminalize such activity. Problematic assumptions regarding women’s subjectivity are embedded in these discourses and apparent in the strategies deployed by different groups in the anti-sex-trafficking community. My use of the term “discourse” to talk about trafficking here is thus deliberate, signifying that the issue is not only a material one, involving bodies crossing borders, but also a symbolic one, involving contestations over public understandings of what trafficking is and the moral harms underlying the commercial sex work with which it is connected.4 In what follows, I will describe how international human rights is held out as the appropriate paradigm for empowering trafficked women and commercial sex work by otherwise ideologically opposed members of the anti-sex-trafficking community and discuss why this reliance can be problematic, especially with respect to the Asia-Pacific region.5 Since Thailand historically has been the center for sex trafficking and the commercial sex industry in the Asia-Pacific region,6 and receives a significant part of the attention given to sex trafficking in the Asia-Pacific region, I will focus on the responses of the anti-sex-trafficking community to the morality and appropriate legal status of commercial sex work in Thailand and of Thai women.7

Background on Sex Trafficking Several international law documents in recent years support the suppression of human trafficking, most prominently the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons. 8 After years of negotiations, a drafting committee of NGOs and United Nations’ delegates compromised on the following definition of trafficked persons, which became part of the U.N.’s Protocol. In this definition, trafficked persons are victims of



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[t]he recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force, or other forms of coercion, or abduction, or fraud, or deception, or the abuse of power, or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control of another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others, or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs. (United Nations 2000: Article 3 [a])

This definition itself provides a couple of significant indications of how human trafficking is viewed by the actors who have been most influential in framing the discourse on sex trafficking. First, the definition specifically differentiates prostitution and sexual exploitation from other forms of trafficking, which some critics have argued inappropriately gives priority to what constitutes only one of a number of purposes for which persons are trafficked. Second, the definition makes consent (either to be trafficked or to the underlying labor) irrelevant to a charge of trafficking. In other words, it is no defense for a potential trafficker to say that the trafficked person consented. Critics argue that this erasure of consent effectively eliminates the agency of the person migrating, who may or may not regard him- or herself as a victim. Migrants who do not fall within this definition of trafficking are sometimes defined as smuggled, that is, as persons who migrate across borders illegally, but “voluntarily” in the sense of deliberately seeking better opportunities than those available in their home countries. Third, despite vigorous lobbying from some quarters to link prostitution to trafficking, as the United Nation’s predecessor 1949 Trafficking Convention had done, the Protocol remains neutral on the issue of the relationship between trafficking and prostitution. The experiences of Thai prostitutes working inside and outside of Thailand, as well as those of women of other nationalities working as prostitutes in Thailand, are documented in a number of studies9 that detail the conditions under which many women from Thailand and Burma, some still teenagers, are encouraged, coerced, or even sold by their families or teachers into the burgeoning commercial sex industry in Thailand. The women in the commercial sex industry have often incurred debt as the result of a loan to family members or as a result of the travel expenses associated with migrating illegally across national borders—whether as a victim of trafficking or otherwise—and having been provided with employment. The amount of the debt is often the equivalent of tens of thousands of U.S. dollars (a vast sum of money for most people in developing countries, especially given the meager “payment” that most women receive for servicing clients, which is often the equivalent of only a few U.S. dollars), and thus it may take several years to repay. Sometimes it

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is virtually impossible to pay off, depending on the conditions that are imposed by the trafficker and/or pimp (Caouette and Saito 1999: 48, 51). Some women forced into sex work are virtually imprisoned, made to work in impoverished conditions, physically abused, underpaid, and deprived of basic rights to liberty, freedom to leave the brothels, or access to needed medical treatment. Many have been arrested for violating laws against prostitution (a double standard since the “clients” and pimps are not arrested), especially upon trying to escape from their confinement. Often they are returned to the brothels by law enforcement personnel or subjected to prolonged detention (where they are frequently sexually and otherwise physically abused) or both. In addition to these violations of their liberty, many of these women are even deprived of the conditions necessary to protect themselves from HIV. The risk of HIV transmission has encouraged sex-trade procurers to seek younger and younger women, especially from the hill tribe regions, to ensure their “cleanliness” from AIDS (UNIFEM 2003; CATW 2003: 18–20; Caouette and Saito 1999: 640; Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Project 1995: 205–229). In sum, the working conditions and socioeconomic status of many women working in the commercial sex industry in Thailand, especially those who have been trafficked, is quite grim indeed. In Thailand, for example, growing poverty in the north, coupled with women’s responsibility to provide for their families, has led more and more rural women to seek work as prostitutes, mostly in Bangkok, over the past couple of decades. Sex work has “provided one of the few better paid opportunities for peasant women whose other choice would be work in the poisonous and exploitative factories,” or demeaning domestic service work, for it is possible to earn twenty-five times more than in other occupations open to migrant women (Jeffrey 2002: 78). The sheer variety of circumstances under which sex trafficking takes place— these can range widely “from freely chosen remunerative employment to debt bondage and virtual slavery” (L. Lim 1998: 3)—makes the development and implementation of effective anti-trafficking measures a daunting task. In addition, many countries have not passed legislation specifically targeting human trafficking. Where such laws do exist, the penalties are often relatively minor compared to those for other criminal activities, such as trafficking in guns or drugs. In addition to international and national legal measures to combat trafficking, other international governmental and nongovernmental organizations and many national and local organizations are also engaged in anti-trafficking activities. Despite their common goal to eliminate the sex trafficking industry (or at least to diminish its harms) and assist victims, the actors within the anti-trafficking community have sharply divided on a number of issues. As Radhika Coomaraswamy, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, noted in her third report, sex trafficking “is an extremely divisive issue within the



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women’s movement and among states . . . , preventing a concerted international effort to bring about necessary and important changes with regard to international standards” (Coomaraswamy 1997). Even though this report was written prior to the adoption (or even the drafting) of the 2000 U.N. Trafficking Protocol,10 which some have claimed succeeded in forging an international consensus on the definition of trafficking (Raymond 2001: 4; Leuchtag 2003), conflicts among anti-trafficking groups have continued unabated.

Contemporary Moral Discourse about Trafficking and Prostitution Among the points of disagreement and dissension dividing the various groups involved in anti-sex-trafficking efforts, by far the most pronounced and seemingly intractable is the issue of whether commercial sex work is, or should be considered to be, inherently violative of women’s human rights and dignity, or whether it is a legitimate form of work for women. From this issue follow others, including that of women’s self-identity and moral agency to consent to sex work or even to being trafficked. Although there is a wide spectrum of perspectives about the relationship of sex trafficking and commercial sex work, as well as the moral legitimacy of the latter, by far the two most prominent positions held by anti-trafficking groups are those that I characterize as “Abolitionists” and “Reformists.” I will illustrate these two rival positions by using the views of two of the largest, most prominent, and most influential anti-trafficking NGOs that take opposing views on this issue, the Coalition Against the Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW). Moral Views of Abolitionists In general, Abolitionists, as their name suggests, favor the eradication of commercial sex work, which they believe is the most effective way to combat sex trafficking and the exploitation of trafficked persons. CATW expressly opposes the use of the term “sex work” as concealing “that prostitution is an extreme form of gender discrimination that relegates one group of human beings to sex for the use and profit of another group of human beings” (Raymond 2003: 1). In this view, using the term “sex work” dignifies only the industry, not the prostitutes working in it, and thereby legitimizes men’s “right to purchase sex through the bodies of women and children” (CATW 1997: 1) without doing anything to empower the women working in it (Raymond 2003: 1). From this perspective, prostitution is inherently violative of women’s bodily integrity and freedom from violation, regardless of “consent” or “choice,” and is intrinsically violent and exploitative of women (Jeffreys 1997: 6; Barry 1995: 23; Raymond 2001: 6, 9). For Abolitionists, what passes for “consent” is generally only com-

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pliance by women who agree to prostitution as a survival strategy; this is not given freely as in western understandings of consent (Miles 2003: 32). Sheila Jeffreys makes the claim that the distinction between “forced” trafficking and “free prostitution” is especially inapposite with regard to the Asian sex industry, since many women are sold into prostitution “willingly” to help their families or are repatriated to their country of origin, such as from Thailand back to Burma, only to find their way back because they see no reasonable future in their home country (1997: 332). Not only is prostitution immoral in the view of Abolitionists, it also is inherently violative of women’s human rights and so should not be distinguished legally from trafficking (CATW 1997: 2). A CATW statement asserts: “Prostitution is itself violence against women” (2003: 2). Not surprisingly, then, Abolitionists deny that there is a “human right to prostitute” (Jeffreys 1997: 319, 322). Some Abolitionists take the even more radical position that sex work as well as sex trafficking are forms of slavery (CATW in Bindman 1997: 9; European Women’s Lobby 2003: 2). Based on these beliefs, some Abolitionist-oriented anti-trafficking organizations engage in “rescue missions” (an apt term, since these rescue groups tend to be Christian NGOs), which are undertaken by groups (often with U.S. government funding) to “save” trafficked women and girls from brothels and other sex establishments providing sexual services in Asian countries. They then assist the “rescued” girls and women in “rehabilitation” and “restoration,” which may include reuniting them with their families (even the families that sold them to traffickers to begin with) or repatriating them to their home countries if they have been trafficked across state borders. Not surprisingly, most Abolitionists argue that prostitution should remain illegal, although most oppose penalizing the prostitutes working in the commercial sex industry. Moral Views of Reformists In contrast to Abolitionists, who reject the expression “sex work,” Reformists favor the decriminalization, if not the legalization, of the commercial sex industry. Many Reformists, including the GAATW, propose that prostitution should be defined as “sex work” in order to bring prostitutes within the purview of labor and human rights laws. They argue that sex work should be fully recognized by law as a legitimate form of work, and that sex workers should be given the same rights and protections that are afforded to other workers, especially with reference to HIV/ AIDS. Viewing prostitutes as sex workers puts the issue of trafficking in women “in the perspective of labour and labour migration, of traditional female roles—i.e. providing domestic and sexual services—a gendered labour market and the worldwide feminisation of labour migration” (Wijers and van Doorninck 2002: 5). GAATW’s “Asia Pacific Statement on Prostitution,” which included the participation of sex workers in its drafting, condemns “all state laws on prostitution



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in the Asia-Pacific region” as contributing to women’s powerlessness because they fail to respect the human dignity and agency of women in the sex industry, and fail “to recognise the rights of all women to work under safe and humane conditions” (Asia Pacific Consultation 1997: 1). On this view, the bad conditions of prostitution are less akin to slavery than to the abuses confronted by other workers in low-status jobs. Prostitution differs mainly because of the extent of the violence, exploitation, and abuse and because sex workers lack legal protections, which in part is a consequence of the illegal status of prostitution in most parts of the world (Wijers and van Doorninck 2002: 3). Whereas Abolitionists campaign for the prohibition of prostitution as well as sex trafficking, most Reformists distinguish sharply between these two types of activities. Contrary to CATW, for example, which conflates trafficking and prostitution and strives to outlaw both, GAATW emphasizes that trafficking is not the same as prostitution (GAATW 2003). GAATW criticizes most laws dealing with trafficking and prostitution for failing to distinguish between “abusive and coercive situations and situations where no deceit, abuse, or violence is involved,” as well as for failing to recognize victims as subjects whose perspectives and interests should be the primary consideration (Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997: 181). GAATW thus opposes regulations that deny the ability of persons to enter into prostitution “even with the consent of that person,” not only for refusing to acknowledge the agency and free will of the women who have chosen to engage in sex work, but also for making trafficking for purposes other than prostitution invisible and ignored (R. Kapur 2003: 9). In contrast, and somewhat inconsistently, other Reformists have become suspicious of the distinction between “victims of trafficking and/or forced prostitution” and “voluntary prostitution” after observing how it has been interpreted in such a way as to deny sex workers’ rights on the theory that only “‘innocent girls’ need protecting, [while] ‘bad women’ who chose prostitution deserve all they get” (Doezema 2000: 14). According to sex-work scholar and activist Jo Doezema’s analysis of the discourses of trafficking and prostitution, “the real concern for the public and policymakers is not with protecting women in the sex industry, but with preventing ‘innocent’ women from becoming prostitutes” (18). Reformists oppose such moralistic approaches, which they claim divide women into those who are good or “innocent”—that is, nonprostitutes—who are deserving of protection, and those who are bad or “guilty”—that is, prostitutes—who can be abused with impunity as it is their own fault (Wijers and van Doorninck 2002: 2). Organizations like GAATW thus attempt to de-link the human rights issues of women in the sex industry from what Doezema characterizes as the “myth” of the trafficking of innocent women and girls by stressing that the majority of trafficked women are, or know they will become, sex workers (Wijers and Lap-Chew 1997:

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99). Reformist discourse reacts against Abolitionist assumptions that all women who are trafficked or engaged in sex work are innocent victims, and that women’s moral dignity and virtue can be equated with their sexual activity. Unlike Abolitionists, most Reformists hold a liberal view that prostitution is not an inherently evil or immoral practice. Against the Abolitionist position that “women who sell sexual services lack human dignity, bodily integrity, and physical and mental well-being simply because of what they do for a living,” Reformists argue that such arguments are “simplistic, patronizing, and degrading” to commercial sex workers since they assume that women are necessarily “dehumanized and either physically or mentally unwell” (Jordan 2002: 4). From this perspective, the emphasis of some Abolitionists on prostitution as itself a violation of human rights detracts attention from the abuses of worker rights that prostitutes experience. Labor rights, Reformists point out, are also specified as human rights in international law documents and should be interpreted to include sex workers within their purview. In response to the Abolitionist position that there is “no human right to prostitute,” Jordan asks: “Are CSWs [commercial sex workers] less than human (justifying recognition of fewer rights) or can rights be selectively recognized, based upon the perceived morality of the work involved? . . . The answer must be an emphatic ‘no’ if the universality principle and the inalienability of fundamental rights have any meaning” (2000: 36). According to Reformists, then, human rights include the rights of women to be sex workers as well as not to be trafficked. Given their view that commercial sex work is legitimate when women have freely consented to engage in it, Reformists oppose laws criminalizing or abolishing prostitution. Reformist advocates consider Abolitionist efforts to eradicate the sex trade to be doomed to failure, and likely only to worsen the status of participating women by forcing their work underground, where it cannot be effectively regulated. They contend that outlawing or criminalizing prostitution further isolates sex workers, makes them “even more vulnerable to marginalization, exploitation, and abuse” (L. Lim 1998: 214), and makes it more difficult for them to claim and defend their rights (Mellon 1999: 310–311). Prohibiting or criminalizing commercial sex work also discriminates against sex workers’ access to mechanisms to address exploitation by, for example, denying them the right to form and join workers’ unions and professional associations, to have labor rights, sick pay, accident compensation, and the protections of health and safety regulations. In the Reformist view, decriminalization would make it possible to better protect women in the sex trade by destigmatizing their profession and the women who work in it. Indeed, law professor Sylvia Law argues, “[D]ecriminalization of sexual services is a necessary first step toward creating more effective remedies against abuse, protecting vulnerable women and



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building a more humane society” (2000: 524). Some Reformists argue further for the legalization of prostitution, although support for this policy is mixed.11 Finally, it should be mentioned that some Reformists also oppose initiatives to eliminate trafficking in women and children, not because they approve of trafficking, but because they perceive that such initiatives, which generally are motivated by immigration and crime control objectives rather than human rights concerns, inevitably undermine the rights of sex workers more than they help trafficked persons. In fact, Ratna Kapur argues, “[T]he political and legal agenda that is currently being pursued in relation to cross-border movements is diametrically opposed to women’s rights” (2003: 6). According to this view, “[A]n uncritical focus on ‘trafficking in women and children’ infantilizes women by defining them as a part of a vulnerable group with children and ultimately undermines the notion of women’s rights as human rights” (Saunders 2000: 3–4). Reformists thus generally oppose the rescue missions referred to earlier, accusing such activities of steamrolling women’s human rights and treating all sex workers as victims when, in fact, some of those working in the commercial sex industry do not wish to be “rescued” and, if repatriated to their homes, will return to sex work as soon as they are able (Montlake 2003: 1–2).12 In sum, then, although most anti-sex-trafficking groups taking a Reformist stance are, like Abolitionists, opposed to trafficking where it involves force, coercion, and other violations of women’s rights, they believe that individual consent to engage in sex work is both possible and sufficient to legitimate women’s participation in the sex trade. Thus, they starkly disagree with Abolitionists insofar as Reformists favor treating sex work as a legitimate form of work, promote the labor and employment rights of women as sex workers, and lobby for the decriminalization (or legalization) of sex work.

Analysis of Anti-sex-trafficking Discourse Curiously, despite some significant differences between the Abolitionist and Reformist perspectives on trafficking, their strategies for empowering trafficked women and commercial sex workers emanate from the same paradigm of individual human rights. In some respects the Abolitionist approach remains within a traditional Christian understanding of prostitution as sinful or immoral and of prostitutes as innocent victims (their only alternative being culpable criminals). Saunders and Soderlund observe that contemporary anti-trafficking discourse carries problematic historical baggage, including prior assumptions about women’s victimization, that hearken back to “nineteenth-century western conceits about women’s purity and innate sexual innocence” (2003: 16). They point out that the Abolitionist reliance on such views have produced and legitimized “trafficking in women and girls” as a global concern and universal framework for un-

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derstanding prostitution (19). This approach is overly simplistic in some cases and outright misguided in others. Treating women as innocent victims (or, alternatively, as culpable whores) has a long and venerable history in the Christian tradition. From the early days of Christian theology, sex has been viewed as embodying sin. Prostitutes were viewed as sinners, but also as necessary to preserve the patriarchal family. By permitting male lust from escalating out of control, they protect the “‘good’ women of the family from the demands of male sin” (Brock 2000: 246). As feminist theologian Rita Brock notes: “The dominant American culture is shaped by the legacy of Christian religious dualism, which projects blame for prostitution on females” (2000: 248). It reinforces the ideology that women are either saints or sinners, Madonnas or whores, an ideology that has roots in the very beginnings of Christian theology (Brock and Thistlethwaite 1996: 129, 130). Reformists point out that by following the view underlying the 1949 Trafficking Convention that all sex workers are victims or slaves, Abolitionists perpetuate this outdated view of women by denying them moral agency, especially the right to sell their sexual labor (Doezema 2000: 26). Making consent irrelevant in situations of potential sex trafficking “risks portraying women as perennial victims of false consciousness, incapable of making autonomous choices regarding their means of migration and employment” (Chuang 1998: 84–85). As Jordan observes, “[I]t conjures up a world of ignorant, misguided, or perhaps base women and girls who have to be saved from themselves” (2000: 18). Similarly, Ratna Kapur notes that “conflating trafficking with migration results in reinforcing the gender bias that women and girls need constant male or state protection from harm, and therefore must not be allowed to exercise their right to movement or right to earn a living in the manner they choose” (2003: 9). Treating women as innocent victims has been used over the centuries both to assist women out of their oppression and to further cement them as oppressed, because an identity as victim leaves no space for acting as an independent or autonomous moral agent. In addition, as Kamala Kempadoo has recognized, focusing on women as the victims of patriarchal and androcentric ideologies and practices only, or the “privileging of gender as the primary factor shaping social relations, dismisses the great variety of historical and socioeconomic conditions, as well as cultural histories, that produce sexual relations and desire” (2001: 38). These conditions include the fact that “sex work is an integral part of the global economy and is deeply embedded in, and cannot easily be disassembled from, many women’s everyday lives, strategies, and identities” (Kempadoo 2001: 44). For some third world/nonwestern women in particular, “migration for the sex industry is a way of expanding life choices and livelihood strategies” (Doezema 2000: 26). This perspective on migrant sex workers as active agents is supported by a



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study of fifty-five Thai women who were trafficked into Japan for sex work (which I refer to here as the “Thai Trafficking Study”) (Caouette and Saito 1999) as well as by an ILO survey of sex workers in Asia. Both of these studies indicate that many sex workers entered the sex trade for pragmatic reasons with a general sense of awareness of the choices they were making (L. Lim 1998: 3). For example, 74 percent of the women interviewed in the Thai Trafficking Study already had been sex workers in Thailand before going to Japan, and they knew they were being trafficked for sex work (Caouette and Saito 1999: 29–30, 34, 49). Some sex workers, even those who were originally trafficked without their full consent, have determined that sex work is the best means they have to make a living (Watanabe 1998: 120–122; Caouette and Saito 1999: 83; Jordan 2000: 36). Given this contextualization, the Abolitionist approach is shortsighted in failing to take into account the lack of economic alternatives, which compel many women into commercial sex work, whether through the channels of trafficking or otherwise. A more nuanced analysis is clearly needed, since, as Julia Davidson points out, “Questions about power and prostitution cannot be reduced to simple arguments about male violence against women, but require us instead to think about prostitutes as active subjects who are under differing types and degrees of compulsion to prostitute, either independently or for one or more third-party beneficiaries” (1998: 114; S. Law 2000: 541). In addition, a number of sex workers have expressed their view that their occupation has not harmed their dignity or self-respect. For example, a study of Thai sex workers in Japan found that although the women “may not have thought of themselves as rebels against male power and social control, . . . they did not view themselves as sexual slaves, either” (Watanabe 1998: 122). In fact, some women have told researchers that their labor as sex workers enabled them to be independent from men and marriage. One of these women stated that the “‘sale of sexual access’ was not the same as the ‘sale of self’” (Watanabe 1998: 120, 123). These anecdotes suggest that many migrant sex workers are active subjects who exercise at least some choice regarding their occupations, and that they are not merely the dupes of unscrupulous traffickers, as Abolitionist discourse suggests. Nevertheless, Reformist framings, in which women tend to be cast as completely free agents of their own lives and, like men, simply engaged as equal bargaining agents in forming contractual relationships with their “employers” and “clients,” are also problematic. Although sex work does share some of the characteristics of other forms of low-status, low-wage labor, it differs in other important respects. For example, prostitution is shaped by and reinforces male domination over women. The gendered division of labor within the sex industry replicates that in the outside society, in which the activities that men perform (for example, as traffickers, pimps, and clients) are almost always valued more highly than those that women

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perform. Further, the stigma and vulnerability attached to prostitution and sex work remain greater than the stigma and vulnerability attached to most other forms of low-wage, low-status labor. In addition, as Abolitionists have observed, “the violence that prostituted women endure is more acute and much more frequent than that experienced by other women” (Raymond 1998: 2). It is not the case, as Bindman suggests, for example, that “social discrimination against sex workers can be fully addressed under existing human rights standards and most issues relating to working conditions in the sex industry could be subject to existing ILO standards” (1997: 14). Thus, the contention that “defenders of prostitution as ‘sex work’ have no institutional critique of the sex industry” (Miles 2003: 28) appears to be well founded. Sex work also differs, at least for some who engage in it, from other forms of labor, in being closer to the heart of one’s personal identity. As Sylvia Law argues, “Even if commercial sex is legal, many women regard it as inconsistent with their deepest sense of self and inconsistent with moral and religious principles” (2000: 590). A number of women in the Thai Trafficking Study told researchers that their experiences as sex workers left them with mixed feelings, which included shame, guilt, embarrassment, stigma, loss of dignity, despair, and deep hurt (Caouette and Saito 1999: 72, 80–82, 85). Similarly, an ILO survey of sex workers in Asia found that “prostitution is one of the most alienating forms of labour,” that “over 50 percent of the women surveyed in Philippine massage parlours said they carried out their work ‘with a heavy heart,’ and 20 percent said they were ‘conscience stricken’ because they still considered sex with customers a sin” (L. Lim 1998: 3). In another study of Thai sex workers in Japan conducted in the mid-1990s, all of the women interviewed indicated that they considered sex work immoral and felt that society viewed sex work as immoral (Watanabe 1998: 120). Reformist discourse thus ignores the point that sex may be more of “an essential attribute that defines individual integrity and uniqueness” than other forms of work (S. Law 2000: 538, 590). In addition, most women engage in sex work under some type of limiting constraints, even if it is not at the level of “virtual slavery” found in some instances of sex trafficking (Davidson 1998: 4). Most of the women in the Thai Trafficking Study, for instance, told researchers that they did not want to become sex workers, but did so in order to help their families financially. Approximately one-half of them chose other occupations after their debt was paid off and they had an opportunity to leave commercial sex work (Caouette and Saito 1999: 27, 29–30, 59). As Julia Davidson argues, even where some prostitutes claim to enjoy their work, “the entry of most women into prostitution is conditioned by and predicated upon a particular set of social relations rather than being a specific expression of their individual selves” (1998: 4–5). In other words, “consent” by women to engage in commercial sex work



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under conditions of patriarchy and economic constraint cannot be considered to be genuinely voluntary or freely chosen (Davidson 1998: 203). Thus, commercial sex workers are not simply the same in all relevant respects as other low-wage and low-status workers, nor are trafficked sex workers situated similarly to nontrafficked sex workers, since the vulnerabilities of trafficked women are frequently far greater. In their zeal to counter Abolitionist framings of sex workers as only “innocent victims,” Reformist strategies portraying them as “just ordinary workers” fail to take sufficient account of the significant ways in which trafficking and the commercial sex industry are harmful to women. One of the most important problems in the anti-trafficking discourse is that neither Reformists nor Abolitionists take adequate account of the complexity and multidimensionality of trafficked women’s self-identity. Whereas Abolitionists “typecast” trafficked women as “innocent victims” and contend that “most women who end up being trafficked don’t wake up one morning and decide they’d like to ‘migrate for sex work’” (Miles 2003: 27), Reformists portray most trafficked women as voluntary agents, many of whom in fact have “chosen” to work in the commercial sex industry, even if under a set of limited options. Despite their obvious differences, then, Abolitionist and Reformist discourses are similar in reflecting simplistic assumptions that the identity of trafficked women is monolithic and homogeneous, rather than multiple and pluralistic. It is evident, at least in this respect, that neither group has listened carefully to the range of trafficked commercial sex workers’ voices. As Ratna Kapur points out, “the legal interventions in the lives of the ‘transnational subaltern subject’ are being articulated primarily from the perspective of the host country and within the overarching concern for the security of the nation” in ways that exclude the voices of the trafficked women themselves (2003: 6). Thus rather than viewing a trafficked woman simplistically as either an innocent victim or a voluntary worker, she should be seen, as Kapur recommends, “as a complex subject who is affected by global processes, and seeking safe passage across borders” (2003: 11). And, in fact, many of the trafficked women interviewed in studies have expressed their identity in terms of being “migrants” rather than either “sex workers” or “prostitutes” (D’Andrea 2002: 4; Agustin 2002: 5; Caouette and Saito 1999: 30; Watanabe 1998: 123; Kempadoo 2003: 145). This is contrary to Raymond’s contention that trafficking “is allowed to flourish in part because academics and others are propping up the sex industry by romanticizing prostitution and trafficking as voluntary ‘migration for sex work’” (Miles 2003: 27). Related to their failure to take the complexity of migrant commercial sex workers’ lives and self-identities into account, the two dominant voices in the anti-trafficking discourse are also similar in their reliance on the efficacy of individual human rights as the predominant strategy for empowering trafficked

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women. According to Abolitionists, commercial sex work is inherently demeaning, degrading, and humiliating to women and in violation of their human rights to equal dignity and respect. From the Reformists’ perspective, commercial sex work involves essentially autonomous individuals bearing an inherent capacity to consent to prostitution, which gives them moral integrity and dignity regardless of their gender or the work in which they engage. The human rights that trafficked women and other sex workers are lacking, according to this approach, are simply their social and economic rights as workers. Thus, despite their differences with respect to which human rights are most salient, both Reformist and Abolitionist strategies for assisting victims of trafficking and sex work assume that international human rights are the (only) appropriate strategy for empowering women. This assumption is pervasive in the recent antitrafficking movement, as Saunders and Soderlund note: “The emergence of the human rights discourse as the preeminent global moral framework is another significant factor in the production of new trafficking narratives” (2003: 19). Yet there are sound reasons for interrogating such reliance on international human rights in the context of sex trafficking and commercial sex work.

Individual Human Rights in the Context of Sex Trafficking and Commercial Sex Work The problems with relying on individual human rights as the primary strategy for empowering women who have been trafficked or are otherwise engaged in commercial sex work include: the possibilities of cultural inappropriateness; the lack of “fit” with the gendered self-understandings of the trafficked women and commercial sex workers; and the limitations of rights discourse for addressing the full complexity of trafficking. One problem with relying on individual human rights in the context of sex trafficking in Thailand is its foreignness to traditional Thai culture and society. As Brock observes, the rhetoric of human rights “presupposes the rational, individual moral agent described in enlightenment philosophy (the rational, male, individual), which itself has roots in an earlier religious understanding of the autonomous soul” (2000: 250–251). These western conceptions of the person and that person’s relation to sexuality, self-identity, and moral personhood are significantly different from those in many nonwestern cultures, including Thai culture. A strategy for women’s empowerment based in international human rights may not be effective for women who have not been acculturated to think of themselves as rights bearers, which is the case for many women around the world, especially in Asian countries (Nussbaum 2000: 113). As Sally Merry discovered when working with victims of domestic violence in Hawai‘i, for example, “the adoption of a rights



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consciousness requires experiences with the legal system that reinforces this subjectivity” (2003: 344). The ground for gaining experiences necessary for developing rights consciousness is lacking for many women who are trafficked or otherwise engaged in commercial sex work, especially in Asia, where traditionally informal mechanisms of social control, such as notions of duty and obligation, filial piety, shame and guilt, and so on, have functioned in lieu of laws and individual rights. Buddhist women in Asia generally are socialized to be relational, socially embedded, and family-oriented rather than independent, autonomous, self-determining individuals. Thai philosopher Suwanna Satha-Anand observes that “in most cases, women have still not evolved as an individual [sic]; they are embedded within social webs, mostly defined by their parents and male relatives, including their husbands” (1999; Brock and Thistlethwaite 1996: 193–194). Popular Thai Buddhism has emphasized that women put the needs of others ahead of those of themselves, particularly with regard to their roles as caregivers. It is likely that this emphasis facilitates the tacit acceptance of daughters as sex workers. The studies of, and interviews with, trafficked women and sex workers in Thailand indicate that these women understand their personal identity fundamentally in terms of their relationships, mostly with family, rather than as autonomous, independent individuals upon which the international human rights system is premised. This is suggested, for example, in the way many women working in the commercial sex industry explain their presence as the result of wanting to make money to help support their families rather than because of independent, self-interested motivations. Since developing a rights consciousness requires a shift from seeing oneself “defined by family, kin, and work relationships” to seeing oneself as “a more autonomous self protected by the law,” a shift that requires institutions to take rights seriously when they are claimed by individuals (Merry 2003: 345, 381), it is unlikely that trafficked women and commercial sex workers will develop such a rights consciousness in Thailand until the laws relating to trafficking and sex work are actually implemented and enforced. In addition, the history and tradition of the rule of law and individual rights are not part of the Thai cultural heritage. Instead, informal methods of social control and dispute resolution have been more prominent. Consistent with Buddhist principles promoting peace, harmony, and equanimity, larger forces in Thai society and culture value harmony of social relationships, avoidance of confrontations, and resolution of disputes by informal means such as tolerance and community or moral pressure rather than individual rights and rule-oriented systems involving individual rights. Thus, an adequate account of sex trafficking will require reorienting the assumptions in anti-trafficking discourse that trafficked women or women engaged in sex work are, simply, either innocent victims or voluntary workers. Instead, it

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must understand their lives within the context of the networks of relationships through which their identities have been shaped and by virtue of which they have come to be in their present surroundings. It seems myopic at the least to focus on these women only as individuals outside of the social relationships that have contributed to their having become, at least for the time being, involved as migrant sex workers. Approaches to addressing sex trafficking should focus more on the other actors within the webs of relationships that support and perpetrate trafficking, including family members who facilitate the practice; the traffickers and others, often community members, who promote trafficking; the pimps; the hotel, bar, brothel, massage parlor and karaoke bar owners and managers who participate in the process; and particularly the “clients” and customers. Until the past few years, little if any attention was paid to the demand side of trafficking. Another important limitation of the individualistic emphasis of human rights is its tendency to overlook the ways in which human trafficking is a product, at least in part, of globalization and global economic forces rather than simply an activity involving individual migrants. Addressing sex trafficking as an issue of individual rights only erases the complicity of the “host nations” in producing trafficked persons and other illegal migrants through restrictive immigration policies in circumstances where there is a demand for cheap wage labor. As long as economic globalization continues, migration, whether legal or illegal, is certain to continue. Kempadoo recognizes that “colonialisms, recolonializations, and cultural imperialisms, as well as specific local cultural histories and traditions that shape the sexual agency of women are important for any account of global manifestations of sex work” (2001: 28). Richard Poulin thus suggests, “[A]ny political economic analysis of prostitution and trafficking in women and children must take into account structural discrimination, uneven development, and the hierarchical relationships between imperialist and dependent countries and between men and women” (2003: 39). Yet another problem with relying on international human rights as the exclusive or primary strategy for empowering trafficked women and others exploited in the commercial sex industry is that human rights can be enforced only by the state, not by other entities within civil society, even if the appeal for protection is made to international bodies. In Thailand, in particular, relying exclusively on a legal framework of international human rights to address sex trafficking is inadequate since the Thai government has a vested interest in seeing the sex trade flourish, not wither away. Since 1982, Thailand has earned more foreign currency from tourism than any other economic activity, and a significant percentage of this has been earned through sex tourism (United Nations 1999; L. Lim 1998: 11; Jeffrey 2002: 78). Scholars have estimated that the sex industry earns five billion dollars annually in Thailand (Kempadoo 2003: 144). Consequently, the tremendous profitability of the



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commercial sex industry as a development strategy has created an incentive for the Thai government to allow the sex trade—and by implication, sex trafficking—to continue, even as it formally “makes efforts” to comply with international standards (Poulin 2003: 38). Even though the Thai government has both signed onto international obligations under anti-trafficking conventions and enacted national laws regulating prostitution and sex trafficking,13 it is not surprising that it has failed to implement these laws. The case of Thailand illustrates how addressing the issue of sex trafficking at the level of individual human rights only deflects attention from the local, national, regional, and global levels where the causes and conditions associated with trafficking are situated. One final problem is not so much the fact of relying on international human rights discourse as it is the particular aspects of human rights that are emphasized. Both the Abolitionists and the Reformists have emphasized providing women who have already been trafficked with human rights. Ratna Kapur points out that antitrafficking initiatives “rarely focus on providing women who move with human rights—the tools that are critical to fighting abuse, violence, and harm they may experience in the course of movement (2003: 9, emphasis added). Thus, rather than simply focusing on “victims,” anti-trafficking strategies might consider putting more attention on according rights to migrant women so as to prevent them from becoming victims in the first place. Despite these limitations, however, there are a number of reasons why the anti-trafficking community cannot afford to abandon a human rights framework. One reason is that human rights discourse is virtually ubiquitous, both in the anti-trafficking community and beyond. As Alison Brysk has noted, “Despite frequent violations in practice, international consensus has implanted human rights as a nearly universal vocabulary of debate, aspiration, and civic challenges to state legitimacy” (2002: 4). In this respect, international human rights discourse has a kind of power and legitimacy that other strategies and approaches to addressing trafficking lack (Nussbaum 2000: 100). In addition, alternative approaches that overlook individual rights have been deficient. As scholars have noted, treating human trafficking primarily as an issue of immigration and crime control ignores the personhood of the sex workers who are involved in the industry and fails to accord them respect as moral agents, to which they are unquestionably entitled. Using a human rights framework, at least as one of a number of potentially useful strategies, avoids this omission. Monolithic analyses that focus exclusively or primarily on only one of the aspects of human trafficking while ignoring the others are insufficient, since human trafficking is neither exclusively an issue of individual moral agency nor of global forces but implicates both, independently as well as interactively. Consequently, an adequate analysis and responsive strategy to sex trafficking must address the multiplicity and com-

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plexity of both the persons involved in sex work as well as the phenomena altogether, rather than applying only simplistic or one-dimensional solutions, including human rights. For such reasons, instead of simply urging the replacement or jettisoning of international human rights, anti-sex-trafficking discourse needs to expand to include other frameworks of analysis and response. Both the Abolitionist and the Reformist positions, while containing relevant insights into sex work, are flawed in ways that mirror one another. A nuanced human rights perspective is needed, one informed by the complexity of sex workers’ own perspectives, enhanced with fuller acknowledgment of the relational self-understanding inhabited by the women themselves, and grounded in greater attention to the particular setting within which reforms are sought.

Notes 1. Commercial sex work includes exotic dancing, erotic telephone talking, pornographic movie acting, stripping, massage, hostessing, and escorting, in addition to streetwalking and brothel prostitution. The terms “prostitution” and “sex work” have political implications; I am combining them in the expression “commercial sex work” more for linguistic efficiency than for ideological opposition to the term “prostitution.” Also, the expression “commercial sex work” is broader and more encompassing of activities that do not fit neatly under the term “prostitution.” 2. For example, frequently repeated U.S. government statistics estimate that between three-quarters of a million to four million persons are trafficked per year globally (U.S. Department of State 2003; Miko 2002: 1). As Kempadoo notes: “To any conscientious social scientist, such discrepancies should be cause for extreme suspicion of the reliability of the research, yet when it comes to sex work and prostitution, few eyebrows are raised and the figures are easily bandied about without question” (2003: 144). The difficulty of obtaining accurate numbers of trafficked persons stems from several causes: first, trafficking is a clandestine and illegal activity, not readily disclosed by anyone associated with it; second, the lines between “trafficking,” most often defined to include force, coercion, and/ or some kind of deception, and other types of illegal migration such as “smuggling,” are amorphous and shifting; third, the issue evokes highly charged emotional responses, creating what Saunders and Soderlund call a latter-day “moral panic” (2003: 18). 3. I use “voluntarily” in quotes to acknowledge that, although these women may not have been directly forced, coerced, or deceived into trafficking or sex work, economic deprivation, lack of alternative employment at comparable rates of remuneration, and other forms of structural violence may make their consent less than truly free. 4. I am borrowing from the explanation of the term “discourse” in Saunders and Soderlund’s essay on the connections between nineteenth century and contemporary discourses on sex trafficking (2003: 22).



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5. Since there are distinctive issues with respect to the trafficking of children for sex, such as the capacity for informed consent and the ability to make rational choices, I focus on anti-trafficking discourses relating to adults. Similarly, since vastly greater numbers of persons trafficked for sex are female than male, I focus on anti-trafficking discourses relating to women. 6. The sex trade in Thailand originated in the colonial period, but began to take its modern form with the influx of U.S. GIs coming to Thailand for “R&R” (rest and recovery) from the Vietnam War. The number of women working as prostitutes grew from approximately 20,000 to 170,000 during the 1960s (Jeffrey 2002: 37). The commercial sex industry in Thailand has continued to thrive. When the World Bank advised the Thai government in 1980 to develop its tourism industry, the government took advantage of the existing infrastructure of brothels, bars, massage parlors, and other sex establishments to entice foreign “tourists,” many of whom come to Thailand for the sex industry alone (Van Esterik 2000: 178; Hill 1991: 133–144; Khin Thitsa 1980: 12–13). 7. In addition to working in the commercial sex industry in Thailand, thousands of Thai women are trafficked or migrate overseas (U.S. Department of State 2003), and many non-Thai women are trafficked or migrate into Thailand from other countries (United States 2002b; Sui 2001; Protection Project citing Johnson and Kola 2000). 8. The purposes of the Protocol are to prevent and combat trafficking in persons, especially women and children, to protect and assist victims of trafficking, and to promote cooperation among States Parties in order to meet these objectives (United Nations 2000: Article 2). It replaced the 1949 Trafficking Convention, about which there was a virtual consensus regarding its inadequacy in either eliminating trafficking or prostitution or in protecting women’s rights (see Chuang 1998: 84–85). However, the Protocol is an addendum to the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (United Nations 2002) and thus focuses more on crime control than on protection of women’s human rights. 9. For further documentation of sex tourism in Thailand and sex trafficking of Thai women, see CATW 2000a and 2000b; GAATW 2003; Skrobanek, Boonpakdi, and Janthakeero 1997; Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Project 1995: 205–229; Skrobanek 1992. 10. The requisite forty countries needed for ratification were obtained by September 2003, so it entered into force on December 25, 2003 (Agalawatta 2003). 11. Advocates claim legalization would make it possible for sex workers to sue if their rights were violated, including the right to reject a customer, something they do not currently have the right to do. Legalization would presumably also make sex workers taxpayers, and thus entitled to the social security, pension, and other benefits that governments provide to workers. They would also likely receive better health care. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum shares this view, contending that, whereas many of the perceived evils of prostitution will not be remedied through criminalization, some of the harms that prostitutes experience, such as physical abuse, risk of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and even stigma (to some extent) could be alleviated through legalization (2000:

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278). In contrast, other Reformists oppose legalization. They contend that legalization disempowers women by enabling the state to coerce behavior from those who are already exploited by others. Legalized systems of prostitution often include special taxes, licenses, registration, health checks, limits on the areas where prostitutes may work, and other measures that restrict the freedom of prostitutes and sex workers (Klinger 2003: 5; Brock 2000: 254). Other critics of legalization point out that the majority of women in sex work live in developing countries, where governments have neither the resources nor the political will to provide the benefits that legalization advocates claim would accrue for sex workers in developed nations. Legalization in this context would then result only in further disadvantaging sex workers through, for example, taxation, mandatory health screenings, and certification requirements, without the commensurate benefits. 12. Indeed, Ben Svasti, the coordinator of TRACFORD, a joint task force formed with U.S. support to attack sex trafficking in northern Thailand, admits, “It’s hard to figure out who are the victims” and that he has heard “of the same migrant sex workers being rescued from brothels two or three times.” The conditions of these women’s lives at “home” may be far worse than their lives abroad as sex workers, as in Myanmar, where the systematic rape of ethnic Shan women by Burmese soldiers has been documented. In such circumstances, “being put in the hands of traffickers may be the lesser evil” (Montlake 2003: 2). 13. The U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons report in 2003 ranked Thailand as a “Tier Two” country. This signifies that in the State Department’s estimation, the Thai government does not fully comply with the Act’s minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking, but is making “significant efforts” to bring itself into compliance.

C h a p t e r 14

“Do No Harm” The Asian Female Migrant and Feminist Debates in the Global Anti-trafficking Movement

Nancie Caraway The migrant female must be conceived of as a more self-assured, assertive, and resourceful woman who has a dream and a mission. She might be escaping something, a failed marriage or joblessness, but she is moving on and ahead.

W

illiam Greider’s aptly titled 1997 book, One World—which examines the then-emergent formations of market capitalism—resonates with insights that bare the inner gears of what legions of neoliberal economists and other scholars have come to call globalization. Greider’s great subject, allowing a poetic term of art, is human gravitas, or, in the development-savvy philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s language, human thriving (Nussbaum and Sen 1993). Greider’s insights reveal globalization as a world-historical phenomenon that orders human beings in a differential system of rewards and exclusions—whether they are ready or not: The deepest meaning of the global industrial revolution is that people no longer have free choice in the matter of identity. Ready or not, they are already of the world. As producers or consumers, as workers or merchants or investors, they are now bound to distant others through the complex strands of commerce and finance reorganizing the globe as a unified marketplace. (1993: 333, emphasis added)

This benign-sounding “unified marketplace” connecting “distant others” has spawned what is widely recognized as a human rights crisis in Asia. The practice of human trafficking—the recruitment or transfer, through abduction, fraud, coercion, or violence, of human beings for the purpose of exploitation (prostitution, sexual exploitation, forced labor or services), according to the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons (2000)—has been called the downside of globalization.

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This essay will offer a perspective on the panoply of responses to the conditions described above by Greider from one who has related to the issue in both academic and activist modes. Engaging all the forces unleashed (to use Marx’s term) by modern economic life reveals categories, events, and experiences that overflow old meanings. The new kinds of inflictions visited on human beings coalesce in multifaceted configurations: political movements, new victim paradigms, symbols, institutions, real life issues of human pain, and dislocation—all calling forth benevolent actors. The phenomenon of twenty-first-century global migration is central to these overlapping forces and is at the highest point in world history. Enormous migrations of people are propelled by the dynamics of contemporary globalization. These migrations are producing policy and human rights crises throughout the world, a matter of great interest and concern to feminist inquiry because of the disproportionate feminization of global migration. Unfortunately the complete extent of this migratory crisis cannot be fully appreciated because the overall phenomenon is obscured by a small part of it: human trafficking. The dominant anti-trafficking regimes offer a powerful and distorting lens through which to see how the world and people’s lives are being reshaped by migration.

Migration, Mobility Upheaval, and Gender The following statement from the Asian Migrant Centre (AMC) in Hong Kong articulates why migration concerns should be at the center of trafficking issues. It must be emphasized that migration is the general phenomenon, and trafficking is only a mode of migration. Overemphasizing trafficking and taking it out of context (in relation to migration) is strategically counterproductive in the fight for human rights because: (a) trafficking puts migration in a crime control, crime prevention context, rather than talking about migrants’ human rights first and then talking about trafficking in the context of human rights and (b) trafficking is being used by governments as a vehicle to develop more restrictive approaches to migration in general. (Asian Migrant Centre: 2000)

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) places the number of migrants crossing the globe today at 175 million—an exponential increase since 2000 in levels of cross-border movements of people (United Nations Population Fund 2001). The global mobility upheaval in general, according to Rosenau, includes everyone “from the tourist to the terrorist, and the migrant and the jet-setter” and is so extensive that close to 5 percent of the people alive today are estimated to be living in a country other than the one into which they were born (2004: 156). Since mi-



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gration is the transnational flow with the strongest claim to state control, it is clear that states’ punitive and restrictive entry policies push migrants underground and provide a breeding ground for traffickers and smugglers. In Asia, Japan—with its homogenized culture and prejudice against gaijin (foreigners)—is the prime example of this impact on migrants (Human Rights Watch 2000; Dinan 2002). The Thai women flowing into the Japanese “entertainment” circuit find themselves trapped in operations run by Yakuza crime operatives since “regular migration” is not possible. Many personal and economic drivers stimulate migration: poverty, wars, lack of employment in home countries, desire to escape debasing familial or tribal mores (this last often applying to female migrants). When we think of vulnerable migrants, it is easy to assume that harsh or negative circumstances underlay their movement. Yet studies charting recent surges in global migration—despite the difficulty of obtaining legal entry documents—point to more benign and material reasons for migrating as well. For instance, many Thai women (some of educated, middle-class status) report candidly to researchers their motivation in coming to Japan is to “buy consumer goods” and to emulate the materialistic consuming habits of citizens of affluent societies (Ahn and Chantavanich 2004: 127–130). The gender dimensions of global migratory flows are notable—and the growing magnitude and pace of female overseas work is accelerating (D’Cunha 2005: 21). Women today constitute fully half or more of the migrant workforce in Asia; women migrants from several Asian nations outnumber male migrants by a vast number—84 percent of Sri Lankan migrants to the Middle East are women; onehalf the migrants leaving India, Korea, and Malaysia for work overseas are women; 70 percent in the Philippines and 76 percent of Indonesian migrants are women (Kaye 2003: 11, 21). The heaviest concentration of women is at the lower end of the job hierarchy, in domestic work and the sex sector, where they suffer gross human rights violations. Gender biases reflect female-dominant migration processes and assumptions about the proper roles for women. According to a UNIFEM briefing paper on women migrant workers in the Asian region, 97 percent of overseas Filipina workers in 2000 were service workers—nurses, domestic workers, entertainers, and caregivers; 94 percent of Indonesian overseas women migrant workers are employed as domestics in West, East and Southeast Asian countries (D’Cunha 2005: 21). These “carers,” in Saskia Sassen’s term (1999) concentrated as they are in the hidden, informal economy of private households, are the most vulnerable and least powerful “people out of place” (Brysk and Shafir 2004) traversing the globe today. Developing countries around the world actively promote female out-migration as a politically expedient development strategy to deal with regional economic ills and growing political and social unrest. In the Philippines (the world’s largest outmigrant nation) and Indonesia, for example, female migrants are celebrated as “na-

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tional heroes” (Diamond 2002). These Asian states have become assiduous marketers of their own citizens, while offering scant oversight or labor protections in destination/employment countries. Government-mandated, highly profitable “migration management” agencies proliferate—in the Philippines there are over 1,000 “legal” recruiting agencies; in Singapore more than 400 agencies operate only for domestic workers (Centre for Feminist Legal Research 2004: 12). These agencies, largely in the hands of a well-organized private sector with strong political links, often require migrants to live in dangerous training camps and charge exorbitant placement fees that indebt migrant workers even before they begin work abroad (Kaye 2003: 21). Women contribute significantly to their home country’s cash-poor economies, with overseas migrant remittances comprising a significant component of the GDP. Remittances can narrow the trade gap, increase foreign currency reserves, facilitate debt servicing, reduce poverty, and support sustainable development. According to an IOM study, the US$100 billion remitted annually by migrant workers is a larger sum than all overseas development aid and is second only to the value of global petroleum exports in international commodity trade (D’Cunha 2005: 63). Sex-disaggregated data are not widely available, but it is estimated that in the Philippines women contribute about one-third of the official US$6 billion remitted annually. This is substantial, considering women’s concentration in the informal sector in lower-paid jobs than men. Nepalese women working abroad sent home 7.6 million rupees in 1997, 11 percent of the total 69 million rupees remitted (ibid.: 22). These revenues would be higher for both countries if remittances sent home by undocumented flows of women were considered. Possibly the most serious effect of this female-driven migration phenomenon is the psychological stress (imposed on the migrant parent) and social disruption experienced by families left in the home countries. The transfer of female labor from less developed to more developed states initiates a transnational “chain of care” that enhances the quality of care for families in the receiving countries while diminishing care and attention to the migrants’ children in the sending states. Aid workers and migrant advocates urge departing female migrants not to leave their girl children in the care of husbands or male relatives, given the tendency toward neglect, alcoholism, and the high incidence of fathers raping daughters when their wives are away (Waldman 2005). Writing about how this exodus reconfigures family life back home in Sri Lanka, a 2005 front-page story in the New York Times details the social ravages felt by families. A photograph shows thirty-five-year-old Lalitha (one of that nation’s one million overseas migrants) with her two young sons, who ask her, “Who will teach me when you go?” (Waldman 2005: 6). Comparative migration scholar Kristen Maher has put forth a compelling set of policy actions to mitigate the worst effects of globalized social reproduction of female migrants. Among them would be to provide civil labor law protection to the



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sphere of paid household employment; reform and relax immigration policies; encourage active diplomatic presence and protections in both sending and receiving states; and promote woman-friendly policies and cultural practices in sending states (2004: 147–149). Some of Maher’s principled recommendations, while compelling, stand very little chance of transforming the current global scenario of migrant female vulnerability. Despite the well-publicized organizations and advocacy groups formed to support female domestics in venues such as Singapore and Hong Kong, it is unlikely that monitors and human rights protections in the private realm of paid household labor stand much of a chance of penetrating that domain outside all but the most advanced countries with long traditions of labor protections (Scandinavia, Western Europe, the United States [OSHA regulations, for instance]). Maher’s second policy recommendation, relaxed immigration policies, is an equally worthy goal but unlikely to have a ghost of a chance, given advanced states’ increasingly articulated claims of sovereignty and national security. Diplomatic oversight and advocacy in both origin and destination nations are already in place in many parts of Southeast Asia, for instance, and local western embassies routinely fund and encourage local female-based reform efforts. The promotion of woman-friendly policies and cultural practices is surely the major—albeit utopian—global ethos of transnational feminist collectivities and presents the most challenging but strategic goal.

Critique: Frameworks and Exploitation I am not providing here a comprehensive brief on “the problem with existing trafficking frameworks”; thorough assessments of the sector having been offered by seasoned, front-line aid professionals (Friedman 2002; Ginzberg and Marshall: unpublished manuscript; Gallagher: unpublished manuscript). Instead, in the following sections, I wish to consider several of the most vexing methodological and political problematics that confound reformers: centering, migration processes, victim hierarchies, and ambiguous applications of the definition of a “trafficking victim.” Centering The extent of the human misery caused by trafficking in persons has been wildly inflated by many international aid organizations, researchers, governments, human rights workers, and concerned individuals. These actors and entities have been motivated to do so because of genuine altruistic concern for (imagined) numbers of victims, or for the proprietary interests of their organizations to construct worst-case scenarios, thus bumping up the numbers of “clients served.” At any rate, human trafficking has been catapulted to the top of current

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humanitarian, Evangelical Christian, and international policy agendas (Bumiller 2003; Colson and Morse 2004). Statistics on those affected are highly unreliable since the practice of trafficking is secretive and underground, methodologies are not harmonized, and aid workers in the field (whose funding interests influence higher numbers of victims) often rely on anecdotal evidence and “guesstimates.”1 A 1999 CIA report cited the number of trafficked persons globally at over one million, and those in the United States at 50,000 (Richard 1999). The U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report has each year revised the numbers downward: at the time of this writing the Report lists 600,000–800,000 people trafficked globally and 14,500–17,500 in the United States (2004: 23). In a recent, sharply argued book that is critical of the U.S.-driven, global anti-trafficking framework, Kamala Kempadoo speaks about the explosion of the trafficking issue into the public consciousness. “Today it is cast by political leaders, alongside terrorism and drug trafficking, as one of the three ‘evils’ that haunt the globe, and it has become the subject for much academic research, policy work, and action in a wide variety of disciplines and fields” (Kempadoo, Sanghera, and Pattanaik 2005: vii). For example, the essays in this volume derive from a Rockefeller-funded grant on gender and globalization, with human trafficking being one of the important topics. The number of workshops, forums, publications, web sites, task forces, and national and international legal instruments devoted to the issue of human trafficking is astounding. The London Anti-Trafficking Programme reports in a recent directory of organizations worldwide that there are over 900 organizations—NGOs on human rights, women’s rights, antiviolence, sex-worker rights, and health care, as well as governmental agencies, international agencies, and academic institutions—involved with the issue of trafficking (Kempadoo, Sanghera, and Pattanaik 2005: xxi). Sensationalized media coverage of “sex slaves” borders on the pornographic. The New York Times Magazine ran a lengthy cover story in January 2004, “Sex Slaves on Main Street,” illustrated with a suggestive photograph of an adolescent girl dressed in standard Catholic school girl uniform: short pleated skirt, white blouse, knee socks, sitting on a bed as if waiting for someone (Landesman 2004). Nicolas Kristof’s columns in the New York Times utilize equally hortatory and sexualized language regarding “sexual slavery” (Kristof 2004, 2005a, 2005b).2 The commitment by participants at the 2004 “Cross-Border Movements and Human Rights” seminar in New Delhi, India, to center the Asian female migrant subject as the “principal protagonist” of human rights discourse is exemplary of feminist social justice positioning today. This positioning stands in contrast to conventional international discourse on the topic of human trafficking, which is usually relegated to a subset of more statist and capital-centric standpoints: law and order regimes; anti-migrant campaigns; religious ideological crusades to “save” pathetic,



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third world girls/women. To actually privilege the harm done to female migrant women (by states, corporations, wage labor, religions, and so forth) on their own terms is an ethical advance. The caveat “Do No Harm” has become the watchword of observers who apply critical thinking to the subject of trafficking—such as the participants at New Delhi—and using this criterion offers clear evidence to many that governments and some NGOs are the main problem with anti-trafficking efforts. On the eve of the New Delhi meeting, for instance, Jyoti Sanghera, trafficking advisor to the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, and an organizer of the New Delhi seminar, exhorted advocates to produce a “Do No Harm Handbook.” Her entreaty was motivated by the case of a faith-based U.S. NGO, International Justice Mission, and a Thai organization, TRAFCOR, who (with police and journalists in tow) executed a “rescue” mission at a Chiang Mai, Thailand, brothel, arresting adult female prostitutes who reported they did not want to be “rescued,” publicly exposed, or have their livelihoods threatened (Stop-Traffic list-serv). Sanghera’s proposed handbook would examine the “harm done (even if inadvertently) and the rights violations that may occur in a bid to do good. The actors here may be the state as well as anti-trafficking groups”(personal communication). A Christian Science Monitor press report of the same event quoted observers and sex workers themselves who reported they were in the brothel voluntarily (Montlake 2003). The complexity of whether women involved in the commercial sex sector can truly “consent” is a hotly debated consideration among stakeholders.3 Global Flows, Confusions, and Victim Priorities The work of international relations scholar James Rosenau highlights the central irony of globalization: While it spreads human rights norms, global responsibility, and political and communications technologies that empower potential victims, globalization simultaneously promotes competing norms, nationalist backlash, and access to the same technologies for potential violators. (2004: 249)

This ambiguous effect of globalization as “doing more than one good thing or bad thing at the same time” applies equally as well to the practice of human trafficking. One migrant rights activist characterized traffickers as effective “travel agents” for low-skilled migrants who have little opportunity to migrate legally, given the punitive immigration policies of developed nations such as Japan, the United States, Australia, Singapore, among others. While it is the case that within the confines of a post-9/11 political and legal environment, opportunities for regular/legal migration are shrinking and thus the need for traffickers for the poor has grown, horrific key informant case studies of numerous victims point to a much darker reality.4

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New theoretical and humanitarian discourses center new types of global subjects. The editor of a recent volume on globalization and human rights, Alison Brysk, notes, “. . . the world’s greatest unmet need is the rights of non-citizens, whether in the home, ethnic minorities or diasporas, refugees across borders, or workers in denationalized sweatshops” (2002: 250). The benefits to civil society to be derived from economic liberalization are uneven at best and diminishing based on the “triangulation” between a given sector, state power and transnational forces. Addressing what she identifies as the serious “citizenship gap” (ibid.: 10–11) confronting the world’s undocumented migrants, Brysk suggests that the transnational advocacy efforts need to facilitate the “passport and polling booth,” which these populations have never had (Brysk and Shafir 2004: 214). Unitary “Trafficking” or Contextual Methodologies The authors of a probing study conducted for the Bangkok-based NGO Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW) identify the pitfalls of indexing the harms of human slavery under a single, ambiguous term. Assessing the demand factors of human trafficking in Asia, the researchers Anderson and Davidson subject the conceptualization of “trafficking” to a singular test—one that decenters the triumphalism of the framework’s statist advocates. Given the political, definitional and methodological problems [within anti-trafficking frameworks], it is worth asking whether the term “trafficking” actually adds anything to our understanding of the processes and practices that constitute or contribute to human rights’ violations in the contemporary world. Does the concept of “trafficking” help us to identify and combat human rights abuses that would otherwise go unrecognized? (2002: 11)

The entire framework, this suggests, would travel better and be more effective— theoretically and at the grassroots level of victim assistance policies—if it were integrated into (and used to strengthen) existing trade union, refugee, and human/civil rights discourses. Anderson and Davidson determine that bracketing out the “demand” aspect of trafficking offers limited understandings. Their analysis contextualizes the demand aspect of the trafficking cycle in the web of other social, economic, and cultural processes cited above (globalization, migration, labor practices, human rights, gender ideologies, and so on). Why is the practice of trafficking so hard to pin down empirically? Conceptually the term “trafficking” can be interpreted in contradictory ways. It may be viewed as a problem of organized crime, an aspect of exploited wage labor, an instance of unfair immigration policy, an alarming globalized human rights violation, or a feminist issue principally impacting vulnerable women and girls.



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Viewing the practice through any of these different prisms determines its meaning and proposed remedies. The media’s penchant for sensationalizing trafficking as “sexual slavery” often undercuts the goals of policymakers who wish to highlight more diverse, albeit less sexy, forms of exploitation. The phrase “human trafficking” has been used to address the entire variety of crimes and human rights abuses associated with the recruitment, movement, and sale of persons in a wide range of sectors (including child soldiering, begging, and camel jockeys, in addition to those more widely identified: sweatshops, agriculture, commercial sex sector, domestic service, and construction/labor venues) (U.S. Department of State 2005: 12; Al-Issawi 2005).5

Hierarchies and Selective Empowerment: Who is a Trafficking Victim? Who qualifies as a legitimate “trafficking victim”? Are the world’s vulnerable “people on the move” trafficking victims or economic migrants? What is at stake for the victim in the selection of frameworks? That query is an example of how a conceptual framework may suggest an approach or a remedy to the abuse. If one is a “trafficking victim,” access to legal, health, and immigration benefits are legislatively mandated (U.S. Department of State 2005: 239–247). If one is an “irregular migrant” or has been “smuggled,” one can face arrest, detention, and deportation. Discourses differ as well. For trafficking victims, those discourses focusing on rescue evoke physical and mental health counselors, psychological trauma, reintegration, and recovery. For other vulnerable migrants, not lucky enough to be afforded the special status of trafficked victim, a punitive discourse of law enforcement, criminality, and shame is employed. For reformers, however, classifying migrants who seek a better future and life as “economic migrants” allows issues of poverty, structural adjustment, the prerogatives of transnational corporations, labor protections, and extractive trade policies to become vital aspects of debate and political action. The artificial distinctions among migrants and the classifications that either empower or criminalize them (criteria determined by the U.S.-dominated anti-trafficking policies) are serious barriers to entitlements. This leads to the construction of troubling moral hierarchies and practical barriers between “deserving,” “less deserving,” and “undeserving” causes and victims. Moreover, these artificial distinctions between a trafficked migrant, a regular migrant, and an irregular migrant are counterproductive and depoliticizing. As the New Delhi seminar determined: “A documented migrant is an individual willing to exchange her ‘otherness’ for rights and legitimacy. An undocumented migrant is an unlawful perpetrator associated with crime or illegality and is to be

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detained and/or expelled” (Centre for Feminist Legal Research 2004: 17). The singular attention to “trafficking” deflects attention away from the larger context of migration in general and distorts the patterns of women’s movement, while ignoring other harms. This is how the trafficking definition is used in an exclusionary and selective manner: [Attention to trafficking only] enables governments to focus their attention on the protection on an increasingly limited few, who are deemed to be “trafficked victims.” States and other stakeholders seem prepared to assist “fallen” and “victim” women (not men nor transgendered persons) in prostitution who are prepared to leave the sex industry, and willing to press charges against traffickers. . . . In this way, the trafficking framework denies assistance to all [other] trafficked persons. (Ibid.: 17)

The GAATW study on trafficking demand is equally critical of the definitional aspects of the anti-trafficking framework, partly because of the privileging of certain migrants as more worthy than others, but also for the morass of ambiguous terms and methodological confusions which come into play. The following narrative sets out the parameters of a “classic” trafficking victim (generally theorized as “she”). She is seduced by a male broker who preys on poor, young girls in her village, promised a good job overseas as a waitress or office worker, and taken illegally across a border where the recruiter sells her to a criminal organization that confiscates her passport and uses physical force to compel her into prostitution. The virtue of the trafficking framework here—“more than the sum of its parts”—is that it criminalizes the entire process to which the victim has been subjected. It implicates each “man” (although many traffickers are female) who colludes (through deception, violence, or fraud) in her abuse. The trouble with this scenario is that many reported cases of trafficking experiences do not exactly match this classic case. A glance at Matthew Friedman’s “Second Generation Trafficking Paradigm” matrix reveals the many overlapping roles, actors, and actions involved in the offense. Given the many gray areas in practice and language of international anti-trafficking laws—and the gaps in applicability—the GAATW researchers conclude in frustration: . . . from the viewpoint of the individual who is subject to exploitative and slaverylike practices, it makes precious little difference whether her exploiter is in cahoots with the person who recruited her or not, or whether she entered the country through legal or illegal channels, or indeed whether she is being abused in a distant region or land, or in her own home town. The point, for her, is that she cannot quit, is denied basic freedoms, is not getting paid, is forced to live and work in bad condi-



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tions, has no control over her work pace, hours of work or job content, and/or is subjected to physical violence or threat. (Anderson and Davidson 2002: 11)

Furthermore, the boundary between smuggling (the illegal transport of individuals into another country) and trafficking (which requires confinement or violence after the legal or illegal transport) is equally cloudy. The Trafficking Protocol and most anti-trafficking legislation assume a clear distinction between these practices. Yet the authors of the GAATW report conclude, “What the precise pole on the continuum is at which tolerable forms of labor migration and transport end and trafficking will begin will vary” (ibid.: 8).

The Political Economy Challenge of “All Unfree Labor” The preceding insight about “tolerable” labor from the GAATW study evidences another contradictory aspect of the existing anti-trafficking paradigm. The statement “As the global economy has widened, it has intensified the gap between the rich and the poor both within and among countries” is a fairly uncontested truism of reflective globalization analysts. What are the implications, then, of differentiating, bracketing-out, privileging, and prioritizing the attendant human rights abuses brought about by the many “competing” types of human exploitation? In this interrogation, we revisit the question posed earlier: when is an exploited person a victim of trafficking and when is s/he an economic migrant? What are the analytical links that allow us to conclude (as have Andrew Hurrell and Ngaire Woods) that more and more citizens lack effective accountability for power relationships: “their lives depend on distant investment decisions, organizational resolutions, religious edicts. . . .” (Hurrell and Woods 2002: 1–7)? Or should we follow Rosenau, expert in making those kinds of class linkages so distasteful to neoliberal economists, who boldly states, “. . . then clearly the corporate executives and others who initiate and sustain these economic dynamics can be treated as actors who undermine human rights in huge ways” (2004: 158)? The commentaries above point out how emphasizing the relationship between trafficking and prostitution has exerted enormous influence—not only on research agendas—but also on states’ framing the issue through the lens of irregular migration and organized crime. This focus seriously deflects attention from legal systems of labor importation—and, more importantly, leaves unexamined and unregulated state and transnational corporate practices of contract labor in the formal economy. To acknowledge and care about the suffering of workers in other sectors (legal or illegal, market and nonmarket) need not entail a surrender of our commitment to and awareness of specific “human trafficking” abuses. I argue that rather than thinking of trafficking as a sacrosanct idea that trumps

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other forms of human despair, it be integrated into those broader matrixes that occupy “some twilight zone between market and nonmarket relations” (Anderson and Davidson 2002: 40). The morass of qualifiers and criteria for legitimizing one as exploited (that is, trafficked) and the problems of consistency neglect the single overarching abuse in question: all are unfree labor. At present, debate is dominated by actors concerned with border control, or with recovery, repatriation and reintegration of trafficked persons. There is far less input from those who are concerned with questions about the regulation of sectors in which trafficked persons (among others) are exploited or about the creation of realistic and sustainable livelihood alternatives for those who are currently subject to strong migratory pressures and so vulnerable to trafficking and other abuses. (Ibid.: 40–41, emphasis added)

Kevin Bales, award-winning researcher and author of the bestselling book, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, is relentless in exposing the culpability of market capitalist enterprises in the devastating forms of contemporary exploited labor. Bales’s work—whose tactics proudly include “naming and shaming” nations, the United Nations, the WTO, and the IMF—links the CEO in the boardroom directly to the laborer in the field. “Today economic links can tie the slave in the field or the brothel to the highest reaches of international corporations.” How these links join up, according to Bales, “is the central mystery of the new slavery” (1999: 235). Some have criticized the utility of Bales’s rhetorical popularization of the term “slavery” to describe trafficking, preferring instead the term, “slavery-like practices,” to encompass most forms of contemporary forced labor practices: debtbondage, indentureship, and hyperexploitative contractual arrangements (Kempadoo, Sanghera, and Pattanaik 2005: viii–iv). Bales’s final chapter, “What Can Be Done,” is an accessible, critical, and effective primer for students, scholars, researchers, and concerned citizens to understand and penetrate the “elaborate chains of contracts and control,” the “interlocking webs of contracts and subcontracts” routinely used by global businesses and sanctioned by international trade organizations. These “criminals,” Bales notes, are “respectable” businesspeople who have normalized exploitative migrant labor abuses—“allowing investors excellent returns without the investors’ knowledge that the profits come from labor camps, brothels, small-scale, isolated businesses that employ children” (1999: 236–238, 249). In terms of the conventional acceptance given by global publics to the “normal” practices of businesses, which derive from “far-away” exploitation, individual shareholders of the west are challenged to delve deeper than corporate profit margins as measures of acceptable investments. Absent the active commitment of western investing publics to support and fund



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watchdog groups, anti-sweatshop campaigns, and so forth, the exploitative (albeit hidden) history of profit generation will continue.

Implementation of New Paradigms in South/Southeast Asia Asian-based U.S. AID policy expert Matthew Friedman (2002) has devoted the better part of a decade to identifying and symbolizing the interlocking forces in the trafficking mosaic. In the training workshops and capacity-building seminars he conducts with funders, NGOs, government officials, and researchers, he points out that many of the elements and definitions used to define trafficking are limited in scope, mask moralistic or political motives, and do not reflect the totality of the problem. Likewise, Friedman stresses that whatever feature of trafficking is emphasized will dictate the solutions put forth. To capture this diversity in the sector, Friedman and colleagues in Bangladesh created a complexly detailed matrix, the “Second Generation Trafficking Paradigm,” in the form of a wall-size chart with color-coded grids, topics, and intersecting circles and arrows.6 This poster visually traces the overlapping processes in the adult trafficking cycle (prevention, migration, demand, recovery, integration, and prosecution), and it is a mind-boggling mapping of the phenomenon. Additional analytical resources aimed at centering the human rights concerns of trafficking victims have been directed at anti-trafficking stakeholders and urge both macro and micro analyses. The United Nations Economic and Social Council’s Recommended Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking (United Nations Economic and Social Council 2002), developed under former High Commissioner Mary Robinson, provides analytical markers for all actors in the international system, including governments. The principles attempt to assure that governments fulfill their legal obligation—concretized in national plans of action—to protect the human rights of trafficked victims in every stage of the process. Trafficking, Robinson emphasizes, is not one event but a series of “constitutive acts and circumstances implicating a wide range of actors” (2002: 4). The U.N. Guidelines against trafficking need to be integrated into national development policies to be fully effective, according to UNIFEM director Noeleen Heyzer. Heyzer (2002) makes the further critical point that focusing solely on countries of origin—mandating national plans of action, anti-trafficking legislation, and awareness-raising campaigns—places the primary pressure for prevention on overburdened source countries. The fieldwork undertaken by U.N. researchers Phil Marshall and Oren Ginzberg clarify in graphic terms why the apportioning of responsibility for preventing trafficking in the sending nations is misplaced. Their recent study of conditions in the Greater Mekong region points out:

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By implying that the responsibility for prevention belongs to source communities, one implies, for example, that the five-year-old Khymer child in Bangkok forced by her employer to eat the flowers she could not sell on the same day, is the responsibility of Cambodia; that the young Thai victim who suffocated in her own vomit in a detention centre in Australia is the responsibility of Thailand; or that the Lao child enslaved on a Thai fishing boat, facing certain death if he falls ill, is the responsibility of landlocked Lao PDR. (Heyzer 2002)

Policymakers in the global north have an obligation to assume responsibility for the well-being of workers in the developing world. Asking the already impoverished populations and governments of devastated regions to assume the full burden and blame for the mistreatment of local workers betrays the origins of market globalization. The west, the global north, are far from benevolent actors in this spiral. The north might also tiptoe less delicately around authoritarian regimes in the global south and stand up more staunchly for democratic and just forces.

Conclusion The volatile intersection of twenty-first-century political dynamics involving economic globalization, human rights, and trafficking in persons is defining an important moment in the global justice projects of contemporary transnational feminism—rendering the intended beneficiaries, migrant workers, more vulnerable, more marginalized, and more “disposable” than at any time since the trans-Atlantic slave trade (Bales 1999: 8–9). In the reading of “human trafficking” provided in this essay, the term can be seen as a metaphorical expression of the psyche of twentyfirst-century market globalism, with its urge to order, market, and reconfigure human and capital resources. This trope has come to organize ideological interest groups such as the U.S. Christian Evangelicals and anti-immigration campaigns. The trope allows law enforcement agencies and policy actors to “do something humane and important,” while often doing harm to vulnerable populations. This harm is actuated by misplaced categorical assignments and pernicious labeling, allowing the media, policymakers, and academia off the hook by deflecting attention away from the basic issues of migration and gender—keys to understanding and prohibiting the practices we are seeing around the globe. The new globalization-human rights discourse provided by initiatives such as that held in New Delhi, however, holds great promise for powerless diasporas. If there is a totem in the feminist work discussed in this essay, it is the distant other evoked by Greider. This figure symbolically resides in the New Delhi seminar as the female migrant subject. Since the dominant anti-trafficking approach has “blurred the portrayal of the female migrant,” as stated in the conference publication, pro-



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viding a “thick,” contextualized portrait of her life, travels, and aspirations was an urgent and efficacious political accomplishment (Centre for Feminist Legal Research 2004: 41). This “centering” proposal is not, however, without its flaws. Lucinda Peach provides some thoughtful caveats in rethinking this analytical move to privilege the female migrant. In her critique in chapter 13 of this volume, Peach argues for a broader, more inclusive gathering of subjects (men and boys are also abused migrants) and reminds us of the legal barriers likely to invalidate the female migrant subjects’ “multiple subjectivities and locations.” Existing legal canons, Peach contends, employ a “‘one-size fits all’ approach” that cannot take account of multiple subjectivities. “Theorists are not free,” Peach asserts, “to invent [new multiple selves] that are likely to be dismissed out of hand by lawmakers” (Peach 2006: 112). The New Delhi deliberations not only identified the shortcomings of existing anti-trafficking frames, but also found both human rights discourse and existing labor frameworks inadequate to fully empower the female migrant subject. The assessments offered by seminar participants of the gaps in existing discourses also provide valuable insights for future work by identifying a particularly hopeful new international convention aimed at empowering and protecting undocumented migrants (and their families)—the newly operative U.N. Migrant Workers Convention.7 What will be the texture of future feminist work on forms of unfree labor and human trafficking? Many in the anti-trafficking sector have concluded that this recent rancorous history has led to the devolution of a feminist human rights movement (Platt 2001). The notorious public dissention among those who disagree over the issue of prostitution has indeed poisoned many productive working coalitions (Caraway 2002; unpublished manuscript). These tensions are exacerbated by the influence of Christian Evangelicals—architects of the Bush administration’s “global war on sex slavery” and its human rights and foreign policy agendas. Despite the many theoretical reworkings and disagreements that seem to be the daily challenges of those working on these issues, transnational feminists strengthen their alliances with the world’s most powerless populations by continuing to seek some deliberative space for diverse dialogues. A commitment to more civility—and less sweeping condemnations of our opponents—in our conversations and analyses would be a rejuvenating ethic as well.8 Despite the many ways we “lay each other low,” to borrow V. S. Naipaul’s phrase, and the difficult cultural, ethnic, and class traversals we encounter in transnational feminist alliances, we may “agree to disagree” and hold different “truths” from time to time.9 Recent commentaries in human rights discourse—at the intersection of globalization issues—offer some prophetic strategies for transnational feminist readers. Philosopher Anthony Appiah puts this attitude of “partial agreement” in

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pragmatic terms. In a bold inquiry into the philosophical dimensions of “identity politics,” Appiah argues that human rights discourse is not wholly a western construct; nor is it imposed from above; nor do its adherents need to agree on every ultimate metaphysical question. “Certainly we do not need to agree that we are all created in the image of god, or that we have natural rights that flow from our human essence, to agree that we do not want to be tortured by government officials, that we do not want to be subjected to arbitrary arrest . . .”(2005: 260). Appiah was engaging in his text a conversation with historian, journalist, and human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff. Their inquiry into the state of human rights discourse in the early twenty-first-century serves as a worthy vehicle to guide us about what counts as “not harming others.” They present an ethical account of what “interventionist” action on behalf of oppressed others might look like from the standpoint of those in states of oppression. The Appiah-Ignatieff dialogue offers intellectual resources to transnational feminists who also work, theorize, and strategize in postcolonial intellectual landscapes. In these landscapes we have learned the lessons of history, empire, and “race.” Permeating all our conversations are the global north-south differentials of power, wealth, and opportunity. In a discussion of group versus individual rights, Ignatieff makes a defense of a rooted “individualism” as the very cornerstone of human rights. His attention to what we are calling “the female migrant subject” is notable. It is precisely this individualism that renders it attractive to non-Western peoples and explains why human rights has become a global movement. Human rights is the only universally available moral vernacular that validates the claims of women and children against the oppression they experience in patriarchal and tribal societies; it is the only vernacular that enables dependent persons to perceive themselves as moral agents and to act against practices—arranged marriages, purdah, civic disenfranchisement, genital mutilation, domestic slavery, and so on—that are ratified by the weight and authority of their cultures. (2001: 67–68)

I find Ignatieff’s apologia here persuasive and inspiring. I find his unwillingness to jettison “human rights discourse”—that flawed, Enlightenment-inflected, foundational project left pockmarked and reeling by postmoderns—pertinent to the difficult work of those who advocate on behalf of, and theorize about, female migrant subjects. Ignatieff meets those incisive (but often soul-numbing) postmodern critics with the disclaimer: “Human rights is an account of what is right, not what is good” (55). He refuses to “water down” individual rights discourse and makes a strong case—important for transnational feminists of the global south—that believing in one’s right not to be tortured or abused need not mean adopting western dress, speaking western languages, or approving the west’s “decadent” way of life” (69).



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Academic feminism has spent the last several decades seeking to unburden itself of the residues of white supremacy while responding to “multicultural” tendencies to impose “western” values on the developing world (Okin 1999). Ignatieff sets us straight about the “bottom-up” dynamic and the appeal of human rights to “others.” “The women in Kabul,” he argues, who come to western human rights agencies seeking their protection from the Taliban militias do not want to cease being Muslim wives and mothers; they want to combine respect for their traditions with an education and professional health care provided by women. They hope the agencies will defend them against being beaten and persecuted for claiming such rights. (2001: 69–70, emphasis added)

The international turn, the “NGOization” (Lang 1997) of recent feminist theory and scholarship, indicates a transformative direction in feminist projects. Theorists are writing about and mobilizing on behalf of “democracy and foreigners” (Honig 2001), “Global Containment,” and vulnerable Filipina domestic workers (Hawkesworth 2004; Parreñas 2001). They are raising awareness about and circulating petitions around the world on behalf of, for example, Indian sex workers who face police brutality or Korean sex workers on hunger strikes in the streets of Seoul.10 Feminist theorists are educating themselves and their students and communities about the ethical dimensions of their consuming and purchasing habits (Klein 2000). The New Delhi seminar participants concluded that the dominant anti-trafficking framework is a “monster,” a global buzzword, an “industry” that has nevertheless come to occupy a central spot in the social justice and human rights discourses—which “cannot be easily ignored” (Centre for Feminist Legal Research 2004: 44). The legacy of these critical interventions in revising the anti-trafficking sector is yet to be determined. Following the practice of Edward Said, I have “said that some things are bad, and tried to analyze them intellectually” (quoted in Shammas 2003: 25). And in the process, I hope that I have, “on the basis of that analysis, construct[ed] a movement forward based on optimism, [and] the ability and the desire and the wish to change things” (Said, quoted in Shammas 2003: 25).

Notes Epigraph: Participant commentary offered at the seminar “Cross Border Movements and Human Rights” (CBMHR), Centre for Feminist Legal Research, New Delhi, India, January 9–10, 2004. 1. The mandate of the UNESCO Trafficking Statistics project (2004) is to strengthen research and clarify exaggerated data on numbers of sex-trafficking victims and the num-

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ber of prostitutes in Southeast Asia. The issue of sex workers, according to the web site, is a highly emotional issue that tends to “overwhelm critical faculties.” 2. Landesman’s article was poorly reported, overly generalized, and highly criticized for its inaccuracies and overstatement of the numbers of “enslaved girls” in the United States. In response to public criticisms of Landesman’s freelance piece, the New York Times tasked its “public editor,” Daniel Okrent, to review Landesman’s errors. Several of the newspaper’s own reporters told Okrent, “No one in this room would have written that story” (Okrent 2004). Kristof’s pieces in the New York Times have been criticized by feminists as self-congratulatory colonial missionary work. Janet Miller notes that Kristof repeatedly refers to the young prostitutes in Southeast Asia whom he interviews with terms like “lovely,” “giggly,” and “wisp.” Though he’s “outraged” by their plight, he “has no scruples about revictimizing them . . . subjecting them to antagonistic grilling” (Miller 2004). 3. The consent debate is split between “abolitionist” feminists, who claim that all sex work is coercive, so no women can ever truly consent, and human-rights-oriented feminists, who stress the agency of many women in the sector to make rational economic choices, however distasteful. See Peach, chapter 13 in this volume. 4. The more common reality, however, is more brutal. Milorad Milakovic’s “management” of trafficked women (raping, kidnapping, and selling them) can only be described as sadistic. He commented to a human rights worker who reported on his operations: “Is it a crime to sell women? They sell footballers, don’t they?” (A. Cockburn 2003). 5. An abuse widely overlooked in the west is the situation of young boys, as many as 40,000 of whom were trafficked to Persian Gulf countries from Pakistan and Bangladesh in 2005 to work as camel jockeys (Al-Issawi 2005). 6. The poster is available at M. Friedman (2002). 7. For the first time an international convention safeguards the rights of undocumented migrant workers and their families (United Nations 2003). 8. Nadeem Aslam’s rich novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, set in Indian village life, equally evokes the hostility in many anti-trafficking collectivities: “. . . places of Byzantine intrigue and emotional espionage, where when two people stop to talk on the street their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds” (quoted in P. Mishra 2005: 31). 9. Here the work of Bernice Johnson Reagon is helpful. A masterful deconstructor of romanticized notions of political collectivities, Reagon’s now-classic 1983 essay “Coalition Politics” teaches us that collaborative work (whether among feminists or other solidarity groups) is never “home.” Coalitions, she tells us, are places where we may expect to attain partial convergences around selective shared goals or values—but only rarely, if ever, complete compatibility or consistency. 10. Advocates of the sex workers of Sonagachi, a red-light district in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, are organizing, not against criminals or clients, but police brutality. The re-



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sourceful organization has established microcredit schemes for prostitutes, a cultural wing, and a trade union. Notably, the women run self-regulatory boards in red-light areas to prevent trafficking and the entry of minors into the trade (personal correspondence to Nancie Caraway, January 2004). The case of Korean sex workers is more complicated and involves a schism between the strikers and their feminist allies. The hunger strike in December 2004 was occasioned by the passage of Korea’s new anti-prostitution law (under pressure from the U.S. government in its annual Trafficking in Persons report), which, according to the sex workers’ organization, threatened their livelihoods and publicly shamed them. Their feminist allies in the women’s organizations or the Ministry of Gender Equality said the sex workers were being manipulated by the brothel owners and pimps who, they claimed, staged the strike themselves. Petitions submitted by western feminists, such as Katherine Moon (2004) of Wellesley University, circulated on feminist and human-rights list-servs. Columbia University researcher Sealing Cheng (2004) identifies the punitive new law as “an instrument of harassment” and calls for the Korean government to recognize sex work as a “legitimate form of work.”

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C h a p t e r 15

Gender, Globalization, and Militarization An Interview with Cynthia Enloe

Kathy E. Ferguson, Gwyn Kirk, and Monique Mironesco KF: Cynthia, thank you very much for helping us think about the triangle of relationships among gender, globalization, and militarism. How do you think about the interactions among those three areas? CE: First, let’s talk a bit about method. I try to think about causality. I realize this makes me sound like a creature of the Enlightenment, but I think we need to think about cause and effect. I also focus on process, on the huge number of steps that have to be taken and retaken to make gender relations, globalizing relations, and militarizing relations happen. So I try to think about aspects of globalization being caused by militarization. How do the steps toward militarizing—for example, the banking system, the idea of cheap labor, whatever—have an impact on the way globalization happens? I do that with every point of the triad. So I would also ask, what is there about the way globalization works that has an impact on militarization? If one looks at the globalized trade in small arms, how does that process affect the way militarization happens in, for example, the Congo? Then, I look at the ways in which the creation of masculinities and femininities each shape or cause a certain kind of globalization or a certain kind of militarization. I try to look at the three processes and to think causally about each “leg” of the interaction, although leg isn’t a good analogy because each point is really fuel for the others. Under what conditions does each point of the triad increase or roll back the others? So I try to think causally; it makes me tougher on myself, I believe, to think about cause and effect. KF: Could you give an example? I am particularly interested in the small arms example; how do you think that works? CE: I’ve only begun to learn about the small arms trade, thanks to a group of feminists who work around the United Nations. They brought me in as a neophyte to a discussion they were having because they were so frustrated with the big U.N.-sponsored conferences on small arms trading. Small

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arms means shoulder-propelled rockets, pistols, submachine guns, land mines, rifles, etc.1 They were so frustrated, these feminists from Bali, Congo, Sierra Leone, Norway, Canada, and South Africa. They were frustrated because, while there is a big international movement to try to roll back the global trade in small arms, they could not get questions about masculinity taken seriously. They also could not get serious attention paid to questions about the roles women are playing in the international trade in small arms. So they held meetings after the official meetings. (I’m always interested in meetings that take place after the official meeting!) In July 2003, there was a big U.N. conference on small arms,2 and afterward a smaller group of women activists and academics came together to ask: what is it that the U.N. guys are missing? Why do they have such a stake in not asking about masculinity? These are the good guys, right? This isn’t the NRA; this is the U.N. Why do they still have such a stake in not letting the topic of masculinities onto the table, and why are they so dismissive of gathering any knowledge about the roles of women in the small arms trade? So this made me think about how trade is conducted, because the women from Africa were saying that if you want to understand the trade in small arms, you have to take seriously the long-distance traders, and many longdistance traders in Africa are women.3 That is one of the most striking roles that women play. Perhaps the most famous of long-distance traders are Somali, and when Somali women immigrate, they often develop trade networks in their new place. So these feminists working with the United Nations said, well, first of all, take long-distance traders seriously, and that means watch what women carry, including ammunition and rifles. Who carries the ammunition? It’s oftentimes women. They have to carry all kinds of goods in order to survive. If you take them seriously, you might be able to throw a spanner in the works, as they say, by changing the conditions under which the women select goods for trade. If women doing long-distance trading were brought into the research process, a couple of benefits could ensue. One, they have a lot of knowledge; they know who is operating at the trading points on either end of the routes. So you’d gather knowledge you wouldn’t otherwise get. Two, there might be some potential for slowing down the trade, disrupting it, challenging the morality of the trade, through working with the women traders. The other thing the women working with the United Nations said is that feminists, unlike most other participants, ask about the relation of masculinities to weapons and violence. If you want to disarm boys and men (and



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part of the small arms movement is a disarmament campaign), you have to be genuinely curious about why so many boys and men don’t want to give up their rifles. If you are curious about that, you have to ask about masculinized senses of self-esteem. So I began to think about the small arms movement in new ways. Also, members of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), a man and a woman, took up these questions and did a followup meeting in Oslo in December 2003.4 So I’ve gotten engaged in thinking about the globalization of the small arms trade and what the big guys in the movement don’t understand because they refuse to ask feminist questions. MM: Could you give an example of how the triad of gender/globalization/militarization works in the Asia/Pacific region? CE: I’m particularly interested in how governments use intimidation in strikebreaking. I use the word “intimidation” more now than “coercion” because when feminists think about intimidation, they’re much more imaginative about all the different ways in which intimidation works. Coercion sounds as if you’ve got men with Plexiglas shields and stun guns and so on, but of course intimidation is much more varied than that. I think about how women’s labor is kept cheap, for example, in the Pacific region’s garment industry. What kinds of intimidation are used to discourage women and girls from claiming rights or, if they don’t talk in terms of rights, claiming fairer, more decent, more dignified workplaces? One of the biggest issues for a lot of women in the garment industry is overtime hours because overtime means working at night and working at night means you have to travel after dark. Even if you figure out a strategy to feel safe walking home in the dark, you may fear losing your status as a respectable young woman because you are out at night. Women’s workplace issues are not just about wages or even quality of air in the factory, they’re often about overtime.5 So I think about the intimidation strategies used by managers, employers, local governments, and national governments because that alliance keeps women in place. Another angle on this question is this: under what conditions do the kinds of intimidations used begin to move towards a militarized kind of intimidation? I think it’s a mistake to think that all kinds of intimidation are militarized because then militarization loses any meaning; if something is everything, then it is nothing. So intimidation in the form of a manager saying, “I will lay you off and there goes the remittances to your parents in the poor rural village,” is not really a militarized form of intimidation. But bringing in goons, private security forces, and stationing them outside or inside the factory gates with weapons, even if they never use them, that kind of masculine, armed, organized intimidation is moving towards militarized garment work

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in the Pacific region.6 We need feminist curiosity about how militarization helps keep women’s labor cheap in the globalized trade in garments, apparel, athletic shoes, toys, electronics, and processed foods. In Indonesia under Suharto, for example, there was no question that the government was quite willing to use militarized police forces to put down women’s labor organizing—they were hardly strikes—but they were efforts to have a voice in the workplace.7 That was also true in South Korea in the early 1980s.8 Although many governments are reluctant to be so overt in using force, especially if they claim to be nationalist governments, militarized enforcement is often in the wings. Militarized police forces are just as interesting as militaries. So are the various militias hired by employers, often joint-venture employers rather than clearly foreign employers. Joint ventures really have to be examined. The militias are quite militarized—sometimes they are former military men. Military veterans are very interesting as a factor in militarization because they’re looking for jobs. If employers hire former army or police personnel, they can create these sorts of militias that can be traced back to the military because often the only reason such militias can exist is because they’re allowed to exist by the police and military. While you’d think the official military and police would see them as competitors, evidently they don’t. KF: Could you explain the importance of joint ventures? CE: A joint venture is an economic partnership in which the investment rules state that a required percentage of the shares, sometimes at least 49 percent and sometimes at least 51 percent—and of course there is a very different politics involved in specifiying 49 or 51 percent—must be owned by local entrepreneurs. While Nike or ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries, the big British chemical company), or Proctor and Gamble or whoever comes in may be the most visible owner, and from the outside the enterprise looks like a multinational corporation, in fact the business is established as a joint-venture partnership. Those joint-venture partners are almost always male. This is one aspect of the masculinization of globalization. Joint ventures are often times mandated by governments that are very nervous about being seen as sellouts and also by regimes in power that are eager to keep up the support they have in the business community or in a particular ethnic community. Ethnicity plays a significant role in joint ventures. So it’s ethnicity and class and regime survival and a certain kind of faux nationalism. Andre Gunder Frank9 and others who theorize about the operations of international capital used the phrase comprador to talk about local elites allied with international capital. Such alliances are now extremely common and strongly encouraged because they help create a new middle class and



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secure regime stability. You don’t just have Phillips Electronics come in and then it’s a Phillips Electronics factory, but rather you make sure there is a stake for the emerging local entrepreneurial class in that electronics factory. Those entrepreneurs are often very close to the local regime. So you look at entrepreneurs who are civilians, male (not entirely, but overwhelmingly male), and who often have not just a class affiliation but also an ideological affiliation and an ethnic or racial affiliation with the regime in power. They are very compliant in militarization. So militarization is not just the military, it’s not even just the regime: a civilian masculinized entrepreneurial class also has a stake in keeping women’s labor cheap. Almost nobody is doing studies of men who are the local entrepreneurs in these joint-venture factories. Sometimes they make millions of dollars, and they themselves become international capitalists. In El Salvador and Indonesia today, for example, you see that a lot of the factories are Taiwanese-owned or Korean-owned, but we don’t know much about those men. While of course we should still be interested in western European, Canadian, and U.S. men who are involved in globalized industries that keep women’s labor cheap, they are not the whole story any more. The western men don’t necessarily have the same notions of masculinity as, say, a Korean man who owns a sneaker factory in Indonesia and is making his profits by filling the orders from Nike, Reebok, and Adidas. That Korean man and his U.S. Nike partner, based in Oregon, and the Indonesian finance minister who brought him in (who is probably Javanese) don’t necessarily share the same notions of what it means to be manly. Theirs is not an automatically stable relationship. From what I can gather, it is constantly renegotiated, all for the sake of keeping women’s labor cheap. GK: A similar process is taking place in the Philippines, where outside entrepreneurs are now investing in the former U.S. bases. So the former Subic Bay Naval Base in Olongapo, for example, has some factory employment, mainly for women. The owners are mainly from Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and the United States, but, as you say, the relationships among international investors, global managers, and local entrepreneurs are very complicated. Investment in the Philippines is also linked with the continuation of the sex industry that flourished when the U.S. bases existed. The tourist industry uses the airstrip on the former Clark Air Base to fly people from Taiwan to a new casino there. It’s a weekend package tour. The tourists never see the Philippines, although they come to this spot in the Philippines for leisure activities. CE: Good heavens! When you take seriously women’s experiences of going from “servicing,” that is, providing commercialized sex, for U.S. men of various races and ethnicities and classes, to providing sex for Taiwanese and Ko-

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rean civilian men—how have those women had to change? What are the differences in their strategies, their survival mechanisms, and their commercial practices for “providing pleasure”? I think a lot of feminists analyzing globalization are worried about taking the spotlight off western European and North American men because those men look like they’re the powers in the world. Therefore, it might seem as if we are diluting our attention to the men who seem most powerful if we say, well, we really need to be interested in Korean and Taiwanese entrepreneurial men’s gender strategies. Yet I think it is a mistake to underestimate the complex layers and multidirectional flows of global masculinities. Your example about the Philippines illustrates the complexity of the workings of masculinities in creating both militarized and globalized processes affecting women’s lives. It just doesn’t do us any good to be simplistic out of the fear that we’ll take the spotlight off the guys we think are the most powerful. If you are a woman working in a factory in Nicaragua or the Philippines, you may never see a white European male manager or corporate executive; instead, you see Korean and Taiwanese managers. A Japanese feminist in Nicaragua, Miho Hirohashi, who speaks Spanish and Japanese, has interviewed many Nicaraguan factory women.10 She says that the term used amongst Nicaraguan women, often with real frustration and anger at the conditions under which they’re working, is china (pronounced chee-na). It refers to all Asian men; china is the object of their anger. These women workers don’t know anybody from Beaver Creek, Oregon, where Nike is headquartered; they don’t know anybody from Rotterdam, where Phillips Electronics is based. The men they see who are making their workplace dangerous and unhealthy and unfair are “china.” Miho has said that this kind of racist anti-Asian sentiment, growing out of women’s experiences in the workplace, often diverts their attention from figuring out the total structure under which they are working. A larger question would be: who is imposing such big orders with such short production times that the Korean and Taiwanese factory owners have to speed up the assembly line to meet production goals? My point is not to let those Korean and Taiwanese male factory owners off the hook, because they are making a profit from speeding up the assembly lines, but they don’t write the order schedule. I learned a lot from Miho by really listening to what she was hearing from these Nicaraguan women. Something similar would probably be true from the Filipino women working in the zone now in Subic, I bet. KF: If we were to draw a map with arrows indicating the movement of global corporate investments and management practices, it’s hard to imagine the ar-



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rows going in one direction from “the west” to “the rest.” Instead, you would have a million arrows crisscrossing each other from many different directions. Koreans, Chinese, and Taiwanese owners and managers are not bit players. They may not be the biggest owners, but they’ve inserted themselves into global capital networks. These countries are no longer simply receiving investments and sending labor. However, when I think of global militarism as an order-producing practice that organizes activities around hierarchical and bellicose ways of doing things, I am still thinking in terms of empire. The United States, in my imagination, is still the source, the originator of the arrows pointing to other parts of the world, symbolizing the movement of militarization primarily from the United States to other places. Should I change that image? Even though the United States is the only superpower and even though the U.S. empire operates globally, is it still important for me to understand, say, the Nicaraguan military, the Chinese military, etc., not just as bit players but as having their own contribution, causally, to what is going on and not just being on the receiving end? CE: Only a feminist would ask such a good smart question! I think we do have to investigate multiple sources of militarization. For example, imagine the life of Congolese women (who have their own ethnic and class politics, of course); the U.S. military is nowhere to be seen. It’s the Congolese military, the Rwandan military, the Ugandan military, and the Angolan military that have all been operating in the Congo. At last count there were six different state militaries operating in the life of Congolese women, not counting all the rebel militias.11 So what if one starts with this question: how is the life of a woman affected by organized militaries? We’ll come to militarism conceived more broadly—but even thinking narrowly about organized militaries, the picture is complex and multidirectional. A solid feminist method entails starting with the experiences and the realities that particular women must cope with. The cause-and-effect arrows become densely complicated. To pay attention only to the “big arrows” is a masculinized analytical framework, a very abstracted way of looking at the planet. While of course not all men adopt this view, the dominant masculinized notion is that the only thing to be taken seriously is the most macro-level factors. If it’s not macro, it isn’t interesting or theoretically significant. If it’s not macro, then let somebody else—an anthropologist, a women’s studies person—watch the small arrows, while the big masculinized theoreticians only watch the big arrows. What feminists have learned, I think, and what we have been taught by

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other feminists, is that if you take women’s lives seriously, asking what are their realities, what are their strategies for coping with those realities, what changes are meaningful (both positive and negative) for them, then it’s the relationship of the big arrows to the small arrows that becomes really significant. For example, one can only make sense of the realities of Thai women in Southern Thailand after the tsunami hit in December 2004, if one takes seriously the fact that the Thai military had an ongoing campaign to suppress rebels in Southern Thailand before the tsunami. So for Thai women the question might be: is the relief effort coming in now with the Thai military to be trusted? Is the tsunami relief effort just a new way to carry on the anti-insurgency campaign? Is the U.S. military (the big arrow) now tightening its alliance with the Thai government (the little arrow) in the name of post-tsunami humanitarian relief? Thai feminist Gai Liewkeat wrote me after the tsunami, saying, “Look out—it looks as though the Thai government in Bangkok and the U.S. military are using tsunami relief in Southern Thailand for the sake of intensifying the long-term militarization of Southern Thailand.”12 So the identification of big arrows and small arrows should be understood from the experiences, the thinking, and the strategizing of women who experience the relationships among the governments and the militaries that affect their lives. This kind of complex relational thinking just makes feminists much smarter. I think the masculinized “only the macro matters” kind of thinking is unhelpful and unrealistic. It’s a desire for simplicity in the name of sounding important and serious and theoretical. It drives me crazy. You can quote me! GK: I think the “big arrow/little arrow” relationship can be about coercion, about intimidation, or bribery, or flattery; it could be the way patriarchy allows men to link arms around certain things. The Japanese government is currently putting up the money to build a new U.S. Marine base in Okinawa, for example, the southern-most prefecture in Japan. There is a different relationship between big arrow (United States-Japan) relations and small arrow (Japan-Okinawa) relations, but it’s a very significant, layered set of relations. Okinawan people and critics from outside ask: Why is Japan going along with this? Why is Japan oppressing some of its own citizens and forcing this Marine base on them, when Okinawans have clearly said they don’t want it? Why is the government of Japan prepared to pay for it? What is at stake for them? CE: I think one of the things that is so smart about Okinawan and Japanese feminists is that they really do ask about the masculinized culture of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the long-ruling party in Japan. When I was in Tokyo



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at a feminist institute at Ochanomizo University, I was struck by the new efforts to come to grips with the internal culture of the LDP. As you say, Gwyn, the LDP has won the governorship of Okinawa; feminists are asking, why would the LDP leadership in Tokyo, now in control of the Japanese government, be so unwilling to be seen as unmanly in the eyes of the U.S. national security elite? There is an international contest around who can call whom unmanly, and it is a game that goes on all the time. It is certainly a game the U.S. militarized elite, which is not only the military elite but the militarized civilian elite, plays all the time, and they play it under the Democrats as well as under the Republicans. We’re seeing a most extreme version of it now under the George W. Bush regime, but it has happened previously under Democratic Party regimes as well. The relationship among U.S. elite men and the elite men in other nations is a great puzzle. It’s a puzzle now in Kurdistan; it’s been a puzzle for years in Korea. What are the relations among men in power in places where the United States wants to have bases—in Spain, Italy, Britain, Germany, and now Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria? There is so much masculinized courtship going on: men trying to court other men to accept their military installations. I am sure that if we were flies on the wall in these negotiations, we would spot the “my masculinity is bigger than your masculinity” game. It’s often in the language of modernity: “To be modern, Mr. Prime Minister, to be modern, Mr. Secretary of Defense, to be modern in this global context, you must recognize the need for antiterrorist mechanisms such as a U.S. military base or at least military exercises on your soil.” Under the cover of modernity, I think, lurks a certain kind of masculinity. This is how it works with fraternities on college campuses. We see it all the time. Most men are terrified of being thought of as unmanly. MM: I’m interested in the question of whether we should shift our gaze from the big arrows to the little arrows to understand global militarism. You mentioned the relations of African women to the armies and militias in African countries. Yet don’t the arms come from here, from the United States? Even though a Congolese woman’s life is affected by the Congolese, Rwandan, and Angolan militaries, the arms that those militaries are being furnished are made by U.S. companies, aren’t they? CE: Well, there is a mix of U.S., Russian, Chinese, and European companies and governments furnishing arms to the rest of the world.13 Often the relations among the arms providers are very competitive. One of the most popular rifles is Belgian. Belgian corporations don’t look like big players; they look like a little arrow in the international arms trade, but they have a niche;

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they have a very popular rifle, the Kalashnikov, used in all kinds of insurgencies.14 It is traded and re-traded and re-traded. The nonfeminist international arms trade movement is trying to figure out where these popular small arms come from and how they move through global arms markets. Again, this is not to let the United States off the hook, but the United States may not be the major supplier of small arms, though it may still be the facilitator. For example, one of the main reasons that small arms trade regulation has been so hard to put in place is due to the lobbying of the NRA, the National Rifle Association. The NRA has gone global, not necessarily in the name of Smith and Wesson (one of the big U.S. gun manufacturers) but in the name of their own masculinized notion of the Second Amendment. The NRA is now wading heavily, I hear, into the international efforts to try to regulate the small arms trade.15 So we have to bring the small and medium-sized arrows into our analysis without neglecting the long-standing dominant relations, the big arrows. Of course, U.S. arms manufacturers and the U.S. government as the facilitator of global arms trade are very important. The United States is number one in the world in arms sales. Number two, the former USSR, used to be a close second but now is way behind.16 The United States is several laps around the track before you get to the former Soviet Union, Britain, Italy, France, Brazil, and Argentina. Yet to focus exclusively on the United States, as if every rifle and handgun and shoulder-held grenade launcher comes from here, doesn’t do justice to women’s experiences in conflict zones. So the challenge is to introduce complexity, to retain the variety and layers of the relations, without letting the big guys off the hook. One has to really underscore this point. We do not want to excuse the biggest players by saying, “everyone does it,” but we must avoid being naïve about the extent of the trade and the diversity of the relations that constitute it. KF: Also, we want to articulate the density of the layers without suggesting that the network is uniform or evenly distributed. If we think about global militarism as a kind of electronic circuitry, a massive web, there are places of intense concentration and other places where the relations are relatively sparse. As I imagine the global arms trade, there are dense places where storms are raging, and then there are more “thinned out” places. Of course, these relative intensities are changing over time. In the violence in East Timor, some time ago, the United States would not have been particularly visible; you would have seen Indonesians and Australians, if you were living your life in East Timor. Yet I wonder if the Australians and Indonesians didn’t get at least some of their weapons from trade agreements with the United States?17



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Then there is the whole illegal trade in small arms, which is facilitated by the lack effective regulation of legal sales.18 GK: Let’s talk a bit about feminism in relation to other critical responses to globalization. Religious fundamentalism, hypernationalism, and ethnic cleansing can all be seen as responses to both the problems and opportunities of globalization. What do you think makes feminism a better response than the others? How can and should feminists relate to these other responses? CE: Let’s start with why feminism is a better response than the others. I think one of the great strengths now of feminist thinking is that it is not simplistic. Feminists are not angels. Feminists can be polemical, shortsighted, and exclusivist, but one of the hallmarks of feminist attempts to think about globalized exploitation, globalized injustice, and globalized damage to the physical environment is that feminists try very hard to think in a multivariant way. It’s one of the things we’ve all taught ourselves and been taught by other feminists. Women of color in the United States and women in postcolonial countries have emphasized the importance of always thinking in terms of class, race, nation, ethnicity, and some more subtle divisions between people. Although it is challenging to maintain these many levels and directions of thinking, in general feminists are less likely to be simpleminded than other approaches in thinking through globalization. For example, some women see themselves as gaining from foreign investment in their countries, from learning English, from developing skills and participating in scientific, western-originated research. Because we do actually listen to women, feminists are less likely to write “exploitation” in big black capital (or capitalist!) letters, and more likely to see the contradictory patterns of global inequalities. For example, Nancy Riley argues that the women she interviews in China, who are working in the enterprise zone factories, who are married, often with children, see working in the factories as much better than working in rural areas.19 Even as we critique economic exploitation, we can’t just deny those women’s realities. Other women say: “Well, at least when I work in the factory in town I’m able to put off marriage for a while, because my parents see me as valuable now that I’m sending money home.” In such circumstances, parents are less likely to accuse their nineteen-year-old, unmarried daughter of dishonoring the family. So the first advantage of a feminist response to globalization is that it is less prone to simplistic thinking. It’s more willing to take on the complexities of the processes and the outcomes of globalization, which means that its responses are much more likely to be as nuanced as the many tentacles of globalization. I think the second advantage is that feminist responses to globalization

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are much less likely to be militarized. Other prominent responses to globalization are more prone to militarization. Religious fundamentalism sees a world of enemies and calls for violent responses to people defined as enemies. Hypernationalism has a long history of slipping into or running enthusiastically toward militarized responses in the name of the nation but usually supporting the state. Ethnic cleansing is a militarized response to the fear of “the other,” whoever “the other” is, whether local or global. Even the small proportion of feminists who see women’s inclusion in their state’s militaries as a step towards equal opportunity are less likely, compared to the other responses you mentioned, to endorse militarized solutions to the dangers involved in globalization. Those are two big advantages: a disinclination towards simplistic thinking and a disinclination towards militarized responses. GK: From what you’re saying here, I draw the inference that there is really nothing to be gained for feminists to join forces with either fundamentalists or hypernationalists. Is that what you’re saying? CE: Many women find even masculinized fundamentalist movements very attractive, very comforting or empowering, whether they are Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist (it’s hard to conceive of Buddhist fundamentalism, but you have to think about Sri Lanka),20 or Muslim fundamentalisms. The BJP and the Hindu fundamentalists in India have certainly courted women like crazy.21 But for feminists, I think most fundamentalists’ versions of religions are highly patriotic. Fundamentalists court women, telling us that within fundamentalism we as women are valued, but of course that is not the same as having some control over the social order. For a lot of women who don’t feel valued at all, fundamentalism’s promise can be attractive. One only has to think about why so many women in the United States, for instance, are attracted to Protestant fundamentalism. Also, lots of women in Brazil and other Latin American countries find the vibrant Pentecostal movements appealing. Yet most feminists, by thinking about whether movements, ideologies, or religious practices encourage patriarchy, really put up the warning signs. Nationalism is something else again. I think many women were first empowered, were first given a sense that they were of value in the public sphere, because they were courted by nationalists. To tell an Okinawan or a Filipina or a Kenyan woman that she should disregard or deny her experience in a nationalist movement, that she should reject the analysis and skills she learned there and the value that was accorded her for joining, would be a huge mistake. More and more women who have been in nationalist movements in Nicaragua, South Africa, Korea, and Okinawa are teaching the rest of us what kind of warning flags need to be put up about what happens



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to nationalism (even if it’s not hypernationalism) in terms of validating the male as the personification of the proper citizen.22 Since the late 1980s, the most enlightening critiques of nationalism have often come from women who have first been politicized through nationalist struggles. Korean feminist Insook Kwon, for example, offers a powerful feminist critique of South Korean nationalism (2000) and shows why it is so important for Korean feminists to engage in the politically dangerous work of critiquing nationalism. This work is not coming primarily from western feminists; instead, it is being done by, for example, feminists in South Africa, Kenya, Korea, Chile, and Fiji. KF: What do you think provokes the asking of feminist questions? We have a sense that they need to be complex and to refute simplicity, and they need to have a clear eye for the ways that their very form of inquiry may reinforce what they’re trying to critique. Where does that friction come from? What launches feminist curiosities? CE: We all could tell our own tales of when we first became feminists, right? That is why the coming-out stories of feminists are so interesting. I think we should ask it of everybody. When did you first get an inkling that whatever explanatory vision you had was not enough? Many women and girls (because so many girls become feminists now in their girlhood) become feminists when they confront their disappointment with their prior ways of explaining their lives and, out of the available explanations, seek a better life. We all seek to make our lives better based on some explanation of how the world works. That is why I’m so interested in everybody’s explanations. Nicaraguan feminists say they became feminists when the Sandinistas were in power but did not honor the commitments made before the revolution: the promises that women would be respected, would have a voice, would be serious players in public life. After the Sandinistas came to power, a lot of women began to think: “Well, domestic violence still isn’t being taken seriously. We still are treated as if we are second-class players here.”23 I’m working with Vijaya Joshi, an Australian Indian studying the East Timorese Women’s Movement and its relation to the U.N. Administration.24 She studied women’s organizing in 1999–2001 and realized that she needed to look back to the beginnings of East Timorese women’s involvement in the anti-Indonesian nationalist movement. Watching their trajectory over time, she asked, when does women’s disappointment with nationalism set in? When does the male-led anti-Indonesian insurgency become insufficient? Women saw that the nationalist movement didn’t take domestic life seriously, didn’t take seriously the conditions that erect barriers to women’s public participa-

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tion (barriers greater than those faced by men). The growth of the East Timorese autonomous women’s movement came step by little step out of these new understandings of what was not being treated seriously. I think that is why violence against women, domestic violence in particular, is often a critical turning point. Women in nationalist movements ask: why is domestic violence shoved aside? Why is it treated as trivial? Why are women told, “not now, later”? One of the most patriotic phrases in any progressive movement is to say to women: not now, later. Then women wonder: so when is later? KF: I’m wondering about the context within which women become willing to voice their unhappiness with a nationalist movement to which they are loyal. I’m thinking about the Palestinian example. Perhaps the nationalist movement needs to win something in order for a feminist critique to appear, because as long as the movement is beleaguered, then the women in it are either less likely to think those things or less willing to say them for fear of abandoning their boys and men who haven’t won anything yet.25 CE: That is why nationalism is so complex. It is both empowering and silencing because oftentimes the forces with which nationalists contend seem so overwhelming. In that circumstance, the refrain “not now, later,” seems to make sense. One of the things that makes feminist curiosity so useful is that we are interested in the sort of halting ambivalences that women in nationalist movements may feel. Feminists are always interested in ambivalence. Many other modes of analysis dismiss ambivalence or are just not interested in it, but feminists are very interested in ambivalence because so many women live their lives through ambivalence. You can see it in ethnic communities and nationalist organizing when women are ambivalent about raising issues pertinent to women’s lives because they don’t want to abandon their sons and brothers and boyfriends and fathers. Paying attention to ambivalence tells you so much about the pressures that women are under when they’re in these movements, often including anti-globalization and labor movements. MM: Cynthia, you have emphasized the step-by-step process of decisions and arrangements that create militarization and the corresponding step-by-step process that could move us toward demilitarization. Can we think of a few more examples from Asia and the Pacific? CE: I think Teresia Teaiwa has given us much gritty and insightful information about what has been happening over the last sixty years, maybe eighty years, in Fiji to militarize ethnic Fijian men’s (but not Indo Fijian men’s) sense of themselves.26 Then, at a point where you think it could have been demilitarized, instead it was remilitarized. Militarization and masculinization (making men masculine) intersects with ethnicization (constituting ethnic identities).



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British colonial strategy manipulated ethnicity in order to keep some men’s sense of their manliness demilitarized—in this case, Indo Fijian men— and yet other men’s sense of their manliness militarized. The British first started doing this in Scotland, and they found the strategy so successful that they moved right along to Kenya, to Fiji, and to Northern India and Nepal with the Gurkhas.27 One of the reasons I’ve always followed this is because in my benighted prefeminist days, I spent years trying to chart the ways in which French, British, and U.S. colonial administrations manipulated ethnicity in order to militarize some men and keep other men from being militarized.28 Teresia has shown that after World War II, and also after decolonization and Fijian independence, there was a real opening to roll back the militarization of ethnic Fijian men’s sense of their manliness and public self-worth. There was no great incentive to continue that colonial formula of masculinizing ethnic Fijian men’s sense of themselves. But this rollback in militarization didn’t happen. When was the decision made that ethnic Fijian men would be the basis of the new independent army? Why wasn’t there a rethinking of whether Fiji needed an army at all? Maybe all the country needed was an effective police force and some sort of coast guard. Why weren’t the forces multiethnic, which would have meant that people would have had to rethink masculinity as it relates to policing and to coast guard to include both Indo and ethnic Fijian notions of manliness? Then there are the unasked questions about whether they should have brought in women to “dilute” the masculinized independent force. Teresia also showed us another moment of potential change when the first coup d’état happened. I remember I was in Fiji very briefly, maybe a year or so after the first coup, and there was a refueling of young ethnic Fijian men’s sense of being attractive, of being worth something, of having public stature. At the same time I wondered whether young ethnic Fijian teenage girls were now looking at these coup perpetrators as attractive. You saw them on the street. There was a swagger to these young men. Well, was that appealing or appalling to young ethnic Fijian girls trying to construct their own femininity? I think femininity is affected by dating, by who is attractive, what is considered attractive, where one will get security. So this was another moment when militarization could have been reversed or at least stopped in its tracks. According to Teresia, some elements of the military’s failed coup attempt have really complicated ethnic Fijian men’s sense of their militarized self-worth. Here comes the big arrow (or mediumsize arrow): when the British were running out of volunteers for the British army, recruiters went looking in their former colonies for recruits and con-

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tractors, who are big business in security arrangements. So at several points there were opportunities for stopping the process of militarization. There was nothing automatic or inevitable about each movement down the line. In East Timor, according to Vijaya Joshi (2005), there is a lot of discussion among women about what the new police force and the new army will look like. Women are very aware that this is a critical moment for their society: the militarization of East Timorese masculinity could be propelled forward or somewhat diluted, maybe even rolled back. Militarization is a step-by-step process, as is demilitarization, and women are often in a position to identify strategic opportunities to intervene. I try not to be overly sanguine, but we all have to stay hopeful. I keep looking for, not just chances lost, but the fact that there was a chance. I really dislike the smug notion that militarization is inevitable, and I find that smugness amongst a lot of masculine theorists on the Left in the United States. They want to sound powerful by talking about globalization or militarization as if it’s inevitable. That kind of Leftist masculinized macro-level theorizing is very passive. Feminists know that things aren’t inevitable. They know how many little steps have to be taken in any process of exercising or consolidating power. Then retaken and retaken. This retaking of steps in a process says: “So, you couldn’t stop this the first time, or the second time, but there are always more opportunities to intervene.” GK: One final question: how does feminist curiosity help us to develop activist strategies? How do we go forward? CE: I think we take seriously the places where disruption in the most damaging trends can happen. We don’t underestimate where the spanner can be thrown into the proverbial works or the sugar into the proverbial gas tank. Because we are more interested in and respectful of the micro processes, feminists are probably more able to imagine where that could happen. Some men are also interested in this, especially those who have learned from feminist strategizing. The growing military family speak-out movement in the United States today is no small thing. The public voices of mothers and wives of soldiers make governments nervous. I know it makes the Bush Administration nervous; it also made the Milosevic government nervous; it made the Sandinista government nervous. I don’t mean those governments are equivalent, but governments trying to wage wars are really nervous when a mother of a soldier says, “My son, who has come back with an amputated leg, was sent to war for no good reason.” That is so powerful, yet often it is dismissed. Women in their roles as mothers and wives are amongst the most dismissible people on the political playing field, except to feminists. So, I don’t have any grandiose strategic solutions. I’m always learning, but



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it seems to me that one of the great strategic gifts of feminists is that we are interested in the small crossroads where we can throw things into confusion.

Notes 1. According to the Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers (NISAT), small arms are defined as “automatic rifles, grenades, submachine guns, high powered pistols and other weapons that a single person can easily transport and fire.” http://www.nisat.org/ Small arms are ready candidates for globalization because they are relatively inexpensive, easy to use and maintain, portable, and readily available on black markets. 2. The U.N. Biennial Meeting of States on Small Arms took place in New York, July 7–11, 2003. It was the first major follow-up meeting to the 2001 U.N. Small Arms Conference. The purpose of the 2003 meeting was to consider implementation of the “Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects,” which was accepted at the 2001 conference. For details on the Programme of Action, see IANSA. 3. For background on women traders and war in Africa, see El-Bushra and Sahl (2005). 4. “Militarization: A Gender Approach” (2003). 5. In December 2005, garment workers in Bangladesh threatened to strike over grievances regarding wages and conditions of work, including women workers being forced to work night shifts (“Bangladesh” 2005). 6. Garment work in Fiji exemplifies the militarization of intimidation in global factories. Security forces are present in the factories, where handbag and body searches, verbal intimidation, sexual harassment, and hitting are common. Access to toilets is restricted as well (Harrington 2000). 7. Prior to the overthrow of Suharto’s military government in 1998, military and former military men were often used to control workers, enforce low wages, and repress labor organizing (Enloe 2004: 51–55). 8. While employers could count on government riot police to break up workers’ meetings and suppress labor organizing, women factory workers successfully organized to demand higher wages and to put pressure on South Korea’s military regime, which was overthrown in 1987 (Enloe 2004: 45–51). 9. Andre Gunder Frank, who died in 2005, was the creator of dependency theory in the 1960s and 1970s. He questioned the theories of “development” then prominent in the social sciences and called attention to global systems of inequality (Gills 2005). 10. Miho Hirohashi, a Ph.D. student in the Women’s Studies Program at Clark University, is studying gender/race relations in the foreign-owned maquilas (factories) in Nicaragua’s export-processing zones. 11. A long-running civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo officially ended

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in July 2003, but Rwandan and Ugandan militias still operate in the country, and the state’s military has not firmly consolidated its control. During the height of the violence, nine different governments were directly involved in the fighting. Eight of the nine states were armed primarily or substantially by the United States, either through state-to-state arms transfers, commercial sales, or military training (Hartung and Moix 2000). For a discussion of women’s participation in both conflict and post-conflict settings, see Puechguirbal (2003). 12. Parissara (Gai) Liewkeat, a Ph.D. student in Women’s Studies at Clark University, is studying relations between women and the state across different ethnic groups in Thailand. 13. While estimates of the size and value of the global arms trade vary, depending on adequacy of reporting and inclusiveness of the definition of terms, there is general agreement that “more than 90% of arms transferred to other countries are supplied by the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (China, France, Russia, Britain, and the United States) plus Germany, often termed the ‘Big Six’” (Sidel 1995). While the United States, China, and Europe sell the most arms, “the countries that buy the most arms—66% of the total value of purchases in 2000—are the indebted developing world” (New Internationalist 2002). 14. The AK series assault rifle (or Kalashnikov assault rifle family) was originally produced in Russia by JSC Izhmash, Russia’s biggest manufacturer of small arms (Batchelor and Krause 2002: 24–25). Subsequently produced in at least nineteen other countries, including Belgium, it is “the world’s most widely distributed military-style small arm” (ibid.: 21). While Belgium is not a major producer of conventional arms, “it is still one of the world’s most important small arms producers,” with at least fifteen companies involved in production of small arms and ammunition (31). 15. The National Rifle Association of America has “gone global” to oppose international reforms that might affect the flow of arms (Austin 2000). In 2000, the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu came up against the NRA during its negotiations to join the World Trade Organization (WTO). “Clearly influenced by the National Rifle Association (NRA), Washington insisted that the tiny nation abandon discriminatory tariffs against small arms exporters in order to join the WTO.” The demand to liberalize the trade in weapons, reported Grynberg and Joy (2000), “was conditioned by principle, rather than commercial advantage” (cited in Batchelor and Krause 2002: 126). 16. See Sidel (1995) for a discussion of various nations’ roles in the global arms trade. 17. See Benner (2004) for a discussion of the role of the United States, Britain, and Australia in arming Indonesia against East Timor. 18. For an analysis of the relation between legal and illicit arms transfers, see Batchelor and Krause (2002: 109–148). 19. See Riley’s essay, chapter 12 in this volume. 20. Krishna analyzes the violence involved in the production of official Sri Lankan national identity (1999: 31–58).



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21. Howland (1999) analyzes women’s relation to various fundamentalisms. 22. For analyses of women’s complex relations to national movements, see West (1997); Jayawardena (1986). 23. For analyses of feminist goals and histories in Latin American revolutions, see Gonzalez and Kampwirth (2001); Randall (1992, 1994). 24. Whittington (2003) explores the workings of gender in the post-conflict struggles in East Timor. 25. For Palestinian and Israeli women’s reflections on relations between nationalism and feminism, see Abdo and Lentin (2002). 26. See Teaiwa (1991, 2005) and chapter 17 of this volume. 27. See Enloe’s poem, “Gurkhas Wear Wool” (2004: 314–315). 28. See Enloe (1980).

C h a p t e r 16

Environmental Effects of U.S. Military Security Gendered Experiences from the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan

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ilitarist policies and ideologies valorize preparations for war, threats of war, and ultimately war itself as the only effective way of providing for state security. The realist paradigm in international relations, dominant in political, military, and academic thinking about national security, assumes “a hostile international environment” in which “sovereign, self-interested states” seek their own security through a balance of political and military power among them (Tickner 2001: 38). In this view, war is always a possibility, and “states must rely on their own power and capabilities rather than international agreements to enhance their national security” (ibid.). Michael Renner underscores this point: military security “relies firmly on the competitive strength of individual countries at the expense of other nations.” By contrast, he points out, “environmental security cannot be achieved unilaterally; it both requires and nurtures more stable and cooperative relations among nations” (quoted in Seager 1993a: 60). A growing literature attests to the fundamental contradiction between military security and environmental security. Examples include catastrophic wartime events like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, use of the defoliant “Agent Orange” in the Vietnam War, the burning of oil fields and use of depleted uranium in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the bombing of Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.1 Environmental destruction for military ends involves the entire nuclear cycle, from uranium mining through development, testing, and disposal of weapons-grade plutonium, and recirculation of depleted uranium in “conventional” weapons.2 Governments, military authorities, and many ordinary people accept the environmental destruction caused by military operations as a necessary evil, one of many forms of collateral damage, ultimately justifiable in terms of national security.  According to Gary Vest, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, “There is not a [U.S.] military base in the world that doesn’t have some soil or ground water contamination. That is just a given”



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(quoted in Wokusch 2004). Ret. Adm. Eugene Carroll quoted President Dwight Eisenhower as saying, early in the Cold War, “The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without” (People’s Task Force 1997: 17). This contradiction is nowhere more apparent than in the designation “national sacrifice area,” a phrase used by the Department of Energy under the Nixon administration to justify the contamination of Native American land used for uranium mining (LaDuke 1999). This racist and arrogant concept prompts many questions. Who decides what becomes a national sacrifice area? Whose land and livelihood are degraded or destroyed? How many national sacrifice areas can there be before sacrificing some essential part of the nation? Pacific island nations have been sacrificed for atomic weapon tests conducted by the United States, Britain, and France and indigenous nations of North America, Australasia, and Hawai‘i for uranium mining, bombing training, and waste disposal (Cohn 1993; Women Working 1987; Trask 1999). This study contributes to a small but growing body of feminist analysis that links militarism and environmental issues. It explores the work of community organizations in the Philippines, South Korea, and Okinawa (Japan) as they seek solutions to severe long-term environmental and health problems caused by U.S. military operations. Victims and advocates want meaningful investigation and research; compensation for poor health, injury, and loss of life; firm environmental guidelines; and conscientious clean-up and restoration of contaminated lands and water. Their experiences tell a great deal about military practices and militarism as a system of power, values, and culture that creates many forms of insecurity.3 This is not a comprehensive survey. I consider a few paradigmatic examples of Asian communities’ efforts to deal with the environmental “fall-out” of routine U.S. military activities to illuminate a discussion of military security. These cases do not involve the devastation of outright war. They are significant precisely because they illustrate the everyday workings of the military in “peacetime.” Indeed, peacetime has become what James Der Derian calls “the interwar,” the time between wars that is part of the wars (2001: 25). Since President George W. Bush’s declaration of an open-ended “war on terrorism,” this notion of “interwar” is more explicit and unapologetic, with preemptive attack now an overt part of U.S. policy. In addition to the countries that are the focus of this essay, other parts of the Asia-Pacific region, including Guam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and even Vietnam, have been drawn into supporting U.S. dominance as the United States seeks to control shipping in the Malacca Straits, realigns its forces and moves troops among established bases, and negotiates new access agreements for additional ports and airfields in the region.

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Complex Inequalities: Gender, Race, Class, and Nation Feminist philosopher Val Plumwood (1993) points to dualistic thinking as the logic underpinning hierarchical systems such as colonialism, racism, sexism, militarism, and environmental destruction. All rely on the creation of “otherness”—enemies— and inferiority to justify superiority and domination. These dualisms are mutually reinforcing and should be viewed as an interlocking set. Militarism has been a tool of colonialism and imperialism for centuries and is a key element in neocolonialism and the streamlining of the corporate economy as a global system. In turn, militarism deploys and exploits intersecting inequalities based on gender, race/ethnicity, class, and nation. These systems of inequality and oppression do not completely overlap, but constitute a “matrix of oppression and resistance” (Kirk and OkazawaRey 2004: 4). Contradictions and inconsistencies offer crucial opportunities for opposition. Such efforts can create instabilities that force change or generate more overt repression. In the accounts that follow, I note the ways that these inequalities are utilized in military policies and practices and point to contradictions among them. Later, I consider how community activists and advocates have attempted to use these inconsistencies to their advantage, both to press for change and to put forward new understandings of security.

Setting the Context U.S. economic and military interests have long played a key role in the Asia-Pacific region (Gerson and Birchard 1991). In the late nineteenth century, with a severe economic depression at home, U.S. manufacturers were eager to open trade with China. Given the technology of the time, trade required coaling stations for steamships. The U.S. annexation of Hawai‘i and the defeat of Spain and subsequent colonization of the Philippines provided strategic ports, spaced like stepping-stones across the Pacific. Even after Philippine independence in 1946, the U.S. military retained a 100-year lease for bases, including Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base, the largest U.S. bases outside the United States. Successive U.S. governments supported pro-U.S. presidential candidates in the Philippines, most notably Ferdinand Marcos, who introduced martial law in 1972 to suppress the pro-democracy movement. This movement succeeded in ousting Marcos in 1986 and influencing the Philippine Senate to cancel the U.S. base agreement five years later. The U.S. Navy and Air Force left, but began to negotiate a Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) almost immediately. Ratified in 1999, the VFA allows for U.S. military access to twenty-two ports on all the main islands for refueling, repairs, and R&R—far greater access than before and without the expense of maintaining permanent bases. Joint maneuvers, named Balikatan (“shoulder to shoulder”), between U.S. Marines and Philippine troops resumed



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the same year for the purpose of “combined training, combat readiness and interoperability” (Macatuno and Orejas 2004). U.S. bases in Japan and South Korea date from the end of World War II. The last land battle raged over Okinawa for three months in the spring of 1945. The southern part of the main island was reduced to rubble, and some 200,000 people (approximately 30 percent of the population) died. The postwar U.S. military administration held Okinawan people in camps while it appropriated land for bases. The United States occupied Japan for six years but maintained its military administration of Okinawa until 1972. Okinawa, the poorest, southernmost Japanese prefecture and formerly an island kingdom with its own language and culture, is less than 1 percent of the land area but “hosts” 75 percent of the U.S. military in Japan on thirty-seven bases and installations. A three-tier relationship involves the Okinawa prefecture, the Japanese government, and the United States. In September 1996, 89 percent of Okinawans voted for base reduction in a local referendum, which, while not legally binding, was a significant indicator of public opinion. In South Korea, U.S. troops were hailed as “liberators” in 1945, ending thirtyfive years of brutal Japanese colonization. At the end of World War II, the country was formally divided into the Republic of Korea, with U.S. support, in the south and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, with support from the USSR, in the north. The Korean War (1950–1953) started in response to provocative border skirmishes by both sides. North Korean troops crossed the border in an attempt to take over the South and reunite the country. The war caused great destruction of land and left four million people dead and many thousands missing, wounded, homeless, or exiled (Toland 1991). With South Korean and U.N. forces, the U.S. reversed this attack, but the fear of future invasion has been a cornerstone of U.S. military policy to this day.4 U.S. governments contributed to the economic rebuilding of South Korea and, as in the Philippines, supported, through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, antidemocratic governments that benefited U.S.-based corporations seeking low-waged labor. The United States is currently restructuring and consolidating its bases in South Korea, closing older ones north of Seoul and taking productive farmland to expand others to the south. In the United States there are mechanisms and procedures, however slow and labyrinthine, for evaluating environmental quality and determining necessary remediation when bases are returned to civilian control. Outside the United States, however, procedures vary depending on the context. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs), negotiated separately with each government, detail terms for U.S. military activities abroad and illustrate the unequal relationships between the U.S. and Asian governments (Kirk and Francis 2000).5 SOFA negotiations are affected by the intensity of U.S. desire for access and the relative bargaining power of the “host” nation.6 Despite significant inequalities among these three Asian countries—the Philippines,

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South Korea, and Japan—and despite rhetoric to the contrary, none of them negotiates with the United States as an equal partner. As allies, all depend on the United States militarily, politically, or economically, and view their national security as intertwined with that of the United States. Both Japanese and South Korean governments contribute considerable sums towards the upkeep of U.S. bases in their countries. Successive Japanese governments have supported the U.S. military presence as securing “stability” in the region. Former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung said he would want the U.S. military to stay on even after reunification. The Philippines relies on the United States for economic aid and hardware for its own military and seeks favorable loan conditions from the World Bank and IMF where U.S. interests predominate. These alliances mostly benefit male business and political élites and contribute to antidemocratic political cultures and practices. The receiving governments’ obligation is to ensure that the U.S. military can operate unimpeded. To this end, Asian governments ignore, diffuse, manipulate, or repress complaints and opposition from their own citizens, a point to which I return later. The SOFAs with Asian governments treat the environment as expendable. Article 4 of the SOFA with Japan, negotiated in 1951, explicitly exempts clean-up of environmental contamination due to U.S. military use, stating: The United States is not obliged, when it returns facilities and areas to Japan on the expiration of this Agreement or at an earlier date, to restore the facilities and areas to the condition in which they were at the time they became available to the United States armed forces, or to compensate Japan in lieu of such restoration. (Quoted in Grunder 1999: Appendix IX, 7)

The SOFA with South Korea and the earlier base agreement with the Philippines have similar exemptions. There was much less consciousness about environmental issues when these SOFAs were first negotiated. But even with contemporary awareness and concern, the United States has managed to evade attempts to include environmental remediation in recent agreements. Some Philippine elected officials, including Senator Juan Flavier, a member of the Philippine Senate Committee on the Environment, urged their government to make the VFA conditional on the United States taking responsibility for clean-up of contamination caused before 1991. However, political maneuvering within the Philippine government blocked this demand. A Philippine House committee report held “the United States responsible, morally if not legally, for the trail of toxic wastes in the former U.S. military bases at Clark and Subic” but was not released until after the Philippine Senate had ratified the VFA. The VFA makes no mention of environmental damage or clean-up, past or future (Lee-Brago 1999). In South Korea, environmental groups, human rights organizations, and



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anti-bases activists lobbied hard for substantial changes to the U.S.-Korea SOFA when it was reviewed in 2001. The revised SOFA has, as an addendum, a memorandum concerning environmental standards and the sharing of information by U.S. military authorities in the case of accidents, but this provision relies on voluntary cooperation, and there are no sanctions for default (Green Korea 2001). In contrast with these agreements, the NATO SOFA (for example, with Germany) is much more detailed and includes some environmental provisions.7 Former U.S. bases in several NATO countries have undergone environmental remediation before being returned to civilian control. These European countries have stronger environmental laws than do the Asian countries under discussion, and they have insisted that the U.S. military comply with them. There is also a clear element of environmental racism in this double standard. Despite the “client” status of Asian governments in relation to the United States, U.S. military officials and representatives of receiving governments bond around masculinity as exemplified by the arrangements made for militarized prostitution, apparently based on shared understandings of male sexuality as assertive and needing regular release (Enloe 1993; Moon 1997; Sturdevant and Stoltzfus 1992; Takazato 2000). This connection around gender is complicated by conflicting national or cultural identities. Occasionally, such contradictions surface publicly, as happened when an internal e-mail sent to members of his command by Lt. Gen. Earl B. Hailston, commander of the U.S. Marines in Okinawa, was circulated widely.8 In it Hailston called the governor and other elected Okinawan officials “nuts and a bunch of wimps” in response to the unanimous passage by the prefecture Assembly of a resolution calling for a reduction in the number of Marines stationed in Okinawa.9 This e-mail impugning the governor’s masculinity, and the fact that it became public knowledge, humiliated and angered Governor Keiichi Inamine, who had promised a more “moderate” stance toward the U.S. military compared with former Governor Masahide Ota. Inamine was Tokyo’s candidate for governor and had toed the Tokyo line. The e-mail incident, involving the intertwining of masculinity and Okinawan self-determination, pushed Inamine to take a harder line, which is detailed below, against U.S. military officials and Japanese authorities in negotiations concerning the relocation of the Marine base.

Environmental Effects of U.S. Military Bases and Operations in East Asia The environmental effects of U.S. military operations in the Philippines, South Korea, and Okinawa (Japan) include severe noise from helicopters and planes taking off and landing; traffic accidents; soil erosion; fires; and chemical contamination of land, water, and the ocean from fuels, oils, solvents, heavy metals, and

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depleted uranium. Land used for bombing training is pulverized to dust and rubble. Unexploded ammunition and debris litter bombing ranges and live-fire artillery ranges, as well as parts of the seabed. South Korea hosts major training exercises with the United States, Korean, and other militaries that extend over wide areas and damage crops and agricultural land. In line with hierarchical thinking, as Plumwood (1993) notes, when pressed by the U.S. military to provide land that can be burned, bombed, or contaminated as part of military operations, receiving governments choose disadvantaged and marginalized communities.10 Soil and Water Contamination: Former Clark Air Base, Philippines In June 1991, the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo (Central Luzon) covered a wide area with a thick layer of volcanic ash. More than 20,000 families were forced to evacuate their homes, farms, and gardens. The Philippine government provided temporary housing in the Clark Air Base Command (CABCOM) area, recently vacated by the U.S. Air Force. These families moved into the very basic housing and shared makeshift facilities such as emergency toilets and wells. About 7,000 families lived in tents. Almost immediately people noticed that the well water was greasy with “a funny smell or an oily sheen” (Institute for Policy Studies 2000: 43). They had skin irritations after washing or bathing. As time passed, women experienced a high number of miscarriages and stillbirths, and children were born with central nervous system problems. Some families were moved to neighboring communities; others stayed on, awaiting rehousing. These families had lost their homes and livelihood as farmers and were therefore dependent on government support. The Nuclear Free Philippines Coalition began to document the illnesses of these people, which particularly affected women and children. The Coalition helped to start the People’s Task Force for Bases Cleanup (PTFBC) and worked with scientists and advocates from the United States who analyzed soil and water samples and found clear signs of serious contamination. Advocates and victims turned to church leaders, NGOs, academics, and elected officials for help. They took the story to the media. They turned up a January 1992 U.S. General Accounting Office report that noted environmental contamination of “superfund” proportions at Subic and Clark.11 They lobbied the Clark Development Corporation and the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority, charged with the redevelopment of the former base lands. Contamination was the last thing the authorities wanted to hear about, for they were courting investors from Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to turn the old military buildings into garment factories, duty-free shopping areas, and tourist resorts with yacht clubs, golf courses, and casinos. Media reports and public pressure pushed the development corporations to commission technical research from U.S.-based environmental consulting firms. A study undertaken by Weston International at Clark found heavy metals (mercury



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and lead), pesticides (dieldrin and malathion), and solvents (including benzene and tuolene) in water samples, and PCBs, pesticides, and JP–4 jet fuel in soil samples (Institute for Policy Studies 2000: 41). Many of the chemicals identified at Clark have been linked to an array of health problems including testicular and breast cancer, liver damage, spontaneous abortions with maternal exposure during pregnancy, and increased likelihood of central nervous system, heart, and urinary tract abnormalities (Olib 2000: 87–91). A second report, by Woodward-Clyde International (cited in Institute for Policy Studies 2000: 42), estimated that remediation of sites examined at the former Subic Bay Naval Base would cost $7–10 million, with another $1.4 million for further study.12 In response, the development authorities sealed off specific sites, finally admitting the existence of contamination. Local people continued to experience health problems, but they could not prove that their illnesses were caused by U.S. military operations. Long-term epidemiological studies with appropriate controls are needed to establish causal relationships, but these are time-consuming and expensive. In 1994, the PTFBC approached Dr. Rosalie Bertell, then with the Canadian-based International Institute for Concern for Public Health, who agreed to undertake exploratory research. She designed and analyzed a basic health survey of 761 households in 13 communities inside and around Clark Air Base. Results showed conspicuously high levels of kidney, urinary, nervous system, and female reproductive health problems (Bertell 1998). Examples included tremors, cramps, spasms, frequent dizziness, frequent painful urination, and irregular menstruation. In addition, the weight and height of older children were abnormally low, despite adequate nutrition. Respiratory problems in children were high (24–31 percent) in all communities surveyed. It gradually became clear that the U.S. military in the Philippines had not followed its own, admittedly weak, guidelines on the disposal and storage of fuels, oils, and solvents used for fueling, ship repair, aircraft servicing, armored vehicle repair, and ammunition assembly and transfer. They had not kept full records of their activities; they left Clark hurriedly when the base agreement was terminated; and they provided very little information to the Philippine government. CABCOM was the site of a former motor pool where these substances had been used, spilled, and thrown away. Ret. Adm. Eugene Carroll Jr., former commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Midway, confirmed military contamination at Subic Bay, now the site of a significant cluster of leukemia cases, when he addressed the grassroots International Forum on U.S. Military Toxics and Bases Clean-up in Manila, November 1996: I can recall as commanding officer of an aircraft carrier in 1970, being closely monitored in U.S. ports to insure proper control and disposal of waste material. This increased caution was not evident to me here in Subic Bay in 1971 where ships, our aircraft and our industrial facilities were spewing polluted materials into the air,

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water, and soil with no regard for the short term or long term effects. (People’s Task Force 1997: 18)

In its discussions on whether to renew the base agreement with the United States in 1991, the Philippine Senate had emphasized sovereignty, self-determination, and national pride. By contrast, environmental issues were significant during debates on the VFA a few years later, in light of the new information about military contamination. Senator Flavier and others tried to use the opportunity presented by the VFA negotiations to press the U.S. military to clean up environmental contamination at Clark and Subic, as mentioned above. In 1999, Senator Loren Legarda voted against the VFA, largely on environmental grounds.13 In 2000, the Philippine government finally closed CABCOM, after the Department of Health confirmed the presence of heavy metals in the water and in vegetables grown there (Orejas 2004). Activist research and organizing efforts broke through the silence regarding military contamination, which became the subject of at least thirty resolutions in the Philippine House and Senate, including one urging President Joseph Estrada to take up the matter with President Bill Clinton.14 However, President Gloria MacapagalArroyo was quick to pledge support for the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism.” She was rewarded with an official invitation to Washington and many millions of dollars in military and economic aid. She has chosen not to take up the issue of U.S. responsibility for the long-term legacy of environmental contamination, despite growing evidence of sickness, disability, and deaths in the affected communities. Noise: Kuni Bombing Range, South Korea The former Kuni Bombing Range is situated fifty miles southwest of Seoul. There are ten small villages nearby; Maehyangri, the nearest, is only a mile away. The bombing range was used by the U.S. Air Force for over fifty years, from the end of the Korean War to 2005. Pilots flew low and fast over green farmland, their targets two small islands just off the coast.15 Unexploded ordnance and debris accumulated around the islands, on the beaches, and in the fields. Local farmers required official passes to enter the range to tend their crops when bombing training was not going on. Again, this is a disadvantaged, marginalized community. Villagers made a meager living through farming, fishing, and harvesting shellfish. The shellfish are probably contaminated, but members of Maehyangri Explosives Damage Citizens’ Countermeasures Association have said that local people do not want them tested. If the shellfish are known to be contaminated, they will not be able to sell them, which would add to their economic hardship.16 In recent wars, U.S. bomber crews’ precision, often described as “bombing on a dime” or “making a surgical incision,” has been widely touted by the military and echoed by news reporters to stimulate patriotism and defuse criticism about civil-



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ian casualties. Flying over the Kuni range at 500mph to learn this skill, the difference between hitting the target or dropping a “misfired bomb” was a matter of splitsecond timing. Accidents were inevitable. Over the years, eleven Maehyangri residents were killed and others injured due to misfired bombs (Green Korea 2000). Doctors from the Council of Physicians for the Humanitarian Practice of Medicine found that the residents have high levels of deafness, dizziness, insomnia, and stress (Kim 2000). Ordinary arguments easily escalate to physical violence; depression is common; and thirty-two people have committed suicide.17 Children are easily startled and have difficulty concentrating. In the local school district, 80 percent of the “troublemakers” are from Maehyangri. Women have suffered high rates of miscarriage. Domestic animals were also affected by the noise and vibration. Cows gave little milk and often aborted their calves. The roofs of people’s houses have collapsed and walls have cracked due to severe vibration. In 2000, the U.S. military admitted that they had used depleted uranium at the Kuni range (Talbot 2000). In May that year, a U.S. A–10 fighter jet with engine trouble dropped six 500lb bombs on the range to lighten its load, an incident that prompted major protests and demonstrations at Maehyangri and near the U.S. embassy and the U.S. military command in Seoul (Associated Press 2000b; Baker 2000). Three national organizations based in Seoul—Green Korea United, the Coalition of Korean Environmental Organizations, and the National Campaign for the Eradication of Crime by U.S. Troops in Korea—are working on these issues, though with limited resources as military contamination is only part of their work. Noise and stress are also factors for residents of villages at the foot of Taebek Mountain, a second bombing area, although these villages are not as close as those at Maehyangri.18 This mountain provides an additional challenge for training. The bombing range is hidden in deep terrain, visible only from the mountaintop. Continuous bombing training has denuded one side of the mountain of all vegetation and destroyed wildlife habitat. Less visible is the cultural damage Korean people suffer, for this mountain is the site of Korean creation stories, and people continue to hold ceremonies there to venerate their ancestors. Concern for the environmental effects of U.S. military operations is closely intertwined with anti-bases activism. The onus was on advocates and residents to prove conclusively that poor health or damaged houses were caused by the bombing. The military did not have to prove conclusively that their operations were not dangerous. South Korean authorities consistently supported the U.S. military against citizens of Maehyangri who had been demanding that the bombing range be closed since the 1960s. The government ignored these demands. Instead, they offered to relocate the residents, who rejected this option on the argument that this is their land, their home place where their ancestors have lived and died. In August 2000, in response to the protests mentioned above, the South Korean government

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and U.S. military announced that they would close part of the bombing range “in an effort to ease friction with villagers” (Associated Press 2000b). In 2001, fourteen Maehyangri residents won a lawsuit that gave them a total of $100,000 in compensation from the South Korean government for damage suffered as a result of strafing exercises at the Kuni range (Korean Federation 2001). In August 2005 the Kuni range was finally closed, though the U.S. military has transferred its bombing training to another location in South Korea. Fires, Destruction of Forests, Unexploded Ordnance, Depleted Uranium: Okinawa (Japan) Okinawa is an archipelago, midway between Tokyo and Manila. Twenty percent of the main island, 40 percent of the air space, and large areas of the sea are under U.S. military control. As in the Philippines and South Korea, communities in Okinawa also experience contamination of soil, water, and the ocean due to military operations. Noise is also a major pollutant, causing serious annoyance to local residents, hearing loss, and disrupted classes in nearby schools. Like residents at Maehyangri, Okinawan citizens have chosen not to relocate these schools. To do so, they feel, would legitimize U.S. military operations and concede the struggle against them. An Okinawa prefecture study (1998) shows that babies born to women living near Kadena Air Force Base have significantly lower birth weights than those in other parts of Japan and attributes this to the noise generated by the base. At Kadena, pilots are trained in night flying, and planes are allowed to take off and land at any time. Another finding shows comparatively high rates of leukemia in children and cancers in adults near the White Beach Naval Station, a docking area for nuclearpowered submarines.19 After losing the use of Subic Bay Naval Base during the 1990s, the Navy brought submarines into White Beach more often than before (People’s Task Force 1997: 39). Visiting the United States in February 1996 to address U.S. audiences about the social and environmental costs of U.S. bases and military operations, Okinawan women described fires and accidents from live-ammunition drills.20 The military used to shoot live ammunition across Highway 104, targeted toward Mt. Onna, near the west coast of the main island. In 1989, citizens of Onna village organized to stop live-fire drills on the mountain, the source of their water supply, and to oppose construction of a new urban warfare training facility for the U.S. Army Special Forces (Onna Village Committee 1992). Reluctantly, for over forty years, they had tolerated regular live-fire drills without protest, although this had caused numerous fires. The dry summer of 1988, together with repeated live-fire drills, led to more forest fires and further soil erosion, decreasing the soil’s ability to hold water and leading to faster run-off and subsequent water shortages. Increasing quantities of iron-rich red earth ended up in the ocean where it destroyed edible seaweed and



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contaminated the beautiful coastal park, a protected area. Onna residents are well aware of the priceless value of their ecosystem.21 The army’s decision to construct an urban warfare training facility was the last straw. Women and men from many village organizations held meetings and circulated petitions. They organized a roundthe-clock surveillance system and blockaded the entrance to the military-controlled land, obstructing U.S. military vehicles from May through October 1989. Their concerted opposition forced military authorities to stop the live-fire drills and to seek an alternative site for the urban warfare training facility. Another concern for Okinawan people is depleted uranium. The first known instances of its use occurred in December 1995 and January 1996 when U.S. Marines fired depleted uranium during shelling exercises at the Torishima U.S. Military Firing Range, a small island west of the main island. The U.S. military defines this as a conventional weapon, although it is a radioactive by-product generated by the uranium-enrichment process that isolates the isotope used for nuclear weapons and reactors. Depleted uranium weapons burn on impact, and much of their mass vaporizes and diffuses into the air as uranium oxide particles. If “ingested or inhaled, the combination of radiation and high chemical toxicity can cause cancer and a wide variety of other ailments” (Tashiro 2001: 12). Officially the U.S. military is not allowed to fire depleted uranium in Japan, but as this example illustrates, military authorities have flagrantly broken this agreement. These incidents became public a year after they happened. Okinawan people demanded that the U.S. military retrieve the spent rounds and inform local officials about their operations in future, but activists doubt that the agreement is working effectively.22 Some members of the Okinawa Prefecture Assembly, prefecture employees, local mayors, labor union members, and organizers have participated in official delegations to the United States to learn about procedures for base closure and clean-up here. With the Philippine experience in mind, advocates in the San Francisco Bay area advised Okinawan officials that “you get the clean-up you negotiate” and urged them to make strenuous demands for clean-up before land is returned to them.23 As in the Philippines, there is little systematic information regarding military contamination available to local people. As a contribution to public education and debate, Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, a group formed after the rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by three U.S. servicemen in September 1995, published a small pamphlet entitled “Chronology of Environmental Incidents,” compiled from information provided by base workers, local residents, and newspaper reports (Okinawa Women 1998). A sampling of incidents from 1947 to 1998 includes the deaths of eight people from Ie village in May 1947 due to arsenic poisoning, members of the U.S. Marine Corps having dumped chemicals into their well. In October 1967, wells in Kadena village caught fire due to contamination. In January 1968, large leaks of aircraft fuel from Futenma Marine Corps Air Station polluted

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drinking water and agricultural fields in Isa, Ginowan City. In April 1976, cleaning agents used to detoxify aircraft and embalming fluids used on corpses brought back from the Vietnam War produced severe pollution. Aircraft returning to Okinawa from Vietnam were contaminated with many chemicals including Agent Orange, and so on. Okinawan environmentalists working on this issue have hosted international meetings on military activities and environmental justice to establish an international network with participants from Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, and the United States. In 1999, in response to the 1996 referendum and protests against the U.S. military presence, and under the rubric of “relieving the suffering of Okinawa,” Japanese government and U.S. military officials agreed to move live-fire training to four sites in mainland Japan.24 This “compromise” extends environmental damage and militarization to additional areas and does nothing to reduce the number, or negative effects, of troops currently stationed in Okinawa. Okinawan citizens also deeply regret that the authorities have used their protests against other communities in this way. In 1996 the U.S. military agreed to vacate 20 percent of the land it occupies, including the Futenma Marine Air Corps Station, on condition that the Japanese government provide and pay for a state-of-the-art floating heliport off the coast at Henoko, northern Okinawa. Grassroots groups, elected officials, and former Governor Ota all vigorously opposed the heliport, despite the fact that it could provide some jobs in an area of high unemployment. Japanese and international environmental organizations also expressed concern to protect the coral reef and the habitat of the Okinawan manatee (dugong), an endangered species. In 2001, after extensive opposition, Governor Inamine and local mayors finally accepted the new heliport proposal on condition that it is used for fifteen years only. Okinawan people, including many elders, held daily nonviolent protests on the beach starting in April 2004. In September 2004, they also took to the sea in kayaks and small boats to occupy offshore platforms erected to carry out test drilling in preparation for construction. After a year of concerted opposition, the Japanese authorities removed the drilling platforms, a victory for the protesters. However, in October 2005 the U.S. and Japanese governments announced a new plan to construct a runway, extending from the coastline at Camp Schwab, near the site of the proposed heliport.

A Window to a Larger Problem: Military Imperatives Organizers involved with the People’s Task Force for Bases Cleanup described toxic contamination at Clark Air Base as “a window to a larger problem.” It allowed them to see core elements, priorities, and nonnegotiables of militarism as a system of values, policies, and practices (Institute for Policy Studies 2000: 41). Three key imperatives anchor militarism: readiness, secrecy, and immunity from control.



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Readiness The military’s mission and absolute priority at all times is “readiness” for war, an imperative that takes on even greater urgency in wartime. Ret. Adm. Eugene Carroll described the pressure of the “intense pace of operations” at Subic Bay during the Vietnam War, for example, when environmental issues were completely ignored in the rush to meet operational commitments. . . . Cutting, welding, sand blasting, corrosion control, paint stripping, painting and tank flushing both of ship and aircraft, went on around the clock and the debris was simply flushed into the ground and the bay. (People’s Task Force 1997: 18)

Readiness is a slippery concept, much bigger than war, and an inexhaustible source of legitimation for expanding militarism. Base commanders may allocate funds for on-base environmental clean-up, but these must come out of their operating budgets and thus compete with readiness. Secrecy The mandate for secrecy requires that local officials and residents remain ignorant of events inside the fences sealing off military bases from outsiders. Consequently, local officials have to expend much time and effort trying to find out what has happened to land used by the military and keep track of military activities and future plans so as to be able to make plans for their municipalities. Okinawa set up the Defense Facilities Administration Bureau (DFAB) as a liaison with U.S. military officials. The following examples, among numerous press reports, illustrate the problems for local communities. In 1995, the U.S. military returned the Onna Communications Site used by the Marines from 1953 to 1982. Mercury, cadmium, and PCBs were found in a waste-water treatment facility left on site. Village authorities asked the DFAB to ask the U.S. military “how the hazardous materials happened to be on the site” as a way of finding out what other problems they might have to deal with (Okinawa Times 1998). Three years later, no progress had been made on clean-up, and the land remained off-limits. In January 2002, construction workers in Chatan dug up leaking drums, apparently containing tar and oil, on the site of a former firing range that had been returned to public use twenty years before (Okinawa Times 2002). Chatan officials were faced with identifying the contents, tracing the extent of the leaks, and undertaking clean-up. The governor agreed to request related documents from the U.S. military through the DFAB. Immunity from Control A third imperative is immunity from political and legal control of environmental pollution. Militaries create much more contamination than industrial

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operations, but are governed by fewer regulations, monitoring programs, and controls (Seager 1993b). In the Philippines, South Korea, and Okinawa (Japan), immunity from environmental control is provided through the SOFAs. Within the United States, the Department of Defense (DoD) is, as a federal agency, subject to federal law, though environmental protections may be waived on a caseby-case basis if the DoD shows that compliance would harm military readiness and national security. The President may also permit the DoD to override environmental law. DoD efforts to reduce environmental oversight are significant, however, even though they do not apply to the Asia-Pacific region (with the exception of Hawai‘i) because they signal a trend toward greater environmental irresponsibility.25

Organizing Strategies and Frameworks Organizers in all three Asian countries I have discussed have used a range of methods to increase public awareness and concern and to press governments for compensation and environmental restoration: 1. Establishing a base of knowledge by documenting contamination and effects on health. 2. Making this issue visible through public events, rallies, demonstrations, and lobbying. 3. Creating informational materials for public education and media work. 4. Providing services in affected communities. 5. Networking with civic and environmental organizations, and across regional and national boundaries. 6. Filing lawsuits. 7. Demanding re-negotiation of the SOFAs to provide environmental safeguards. 8. Articulating visions of a genuinely secure and sustainable future. As mentioned earlier, the organizing efforts I have discussed here draw on a matrix of oppression and resistance, based on intersecting identities and inequalities of race, class, gender, and nation. In all three countries, national or cultural identifications are strong. In the Philippines, the pro-democracy movement of the 1970s and 1980s lives on in a range of organizations drawing on a mix of human rights, feminist, nationalist, or Marxist frameworks. In Okinawa, people draw on their sense of Okinawan identity, defined against “mainland Japan” and often invoking Okinawa’s earlier independence, to sustain opposition to U.S. bases and Tokyo-centered policies that have designated Okinawa the major U.S.



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military zone in Japan. In South Korea anti-bases organizing, anti-Americanism, and Korean nationalism are important factors, especially among younger activists. As in the Philippines, a concerted pro-democracy movement in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s has had some success in changing an extremely repressive political culture. One result of these efforts is that younger activists feel more entitled to speak out against U.S. military policy, and, by implication, South Korean government policy. These national and cultural identities are also intertwined with those of class, race/ethnicity, and gender. A crucial strategy in breaking through the secrecy and silence concerning military pollution has been to establish a base of knowledge. In the Philippines, students and faculty at the University of the Philippines and from the United States undertook exploratory research to establish the existence of contamination. Overwhelmingly, those with this technical expertise are college-educated men who have appropriate skills, access to labs, and the knowledge necessary to analyze and critique technical reports from government, military, or environmental research organizations. Their reports and credentials have been essential. These reports also make for dry reading, as they are full of chemical names, statistics, and the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies. The subsequent day-to-day public education and political work has been largely undertaken by women in affected communities, PTFBC staff and interns, and other women activists who have translated technical arguments into accessible language with a focus on “real life” stories of people struggling with illness and tragedy (Olib 2000). This division of labor follows conventional gender lines. Key women from outside the affected communities also played a role in the research and education process. Dr. Rosalie Bertell lent her expertise to the problem when few professionals with her international reputation were willing to get involved. Philippine Senator Loren Legarda used her position to appeal to U.S. legislators and made environmental concerns an important issue in the Philippine Senate debate on the VFA. Judge Aurora Recina, chair of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, took the issue to the U.N. Human Rights Convention in Geneva, using the Stockholm Declaration on Intergenerational Equity, the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, and the Rio Declaration to argue for children’s right to a safe and healthy life (Torres 1999). Gen Vaughan of the Foundation for a Compassionate Society (Austin, Texas) provided financial support (Baldonado 2000). Young Filipino-American women worked as PTFBC interns. Later they were pivotal in founding Filipino/Americans for Environmental Solutions (FACES; www.facessolutions.net), a U.S. group whose members utilize their dual identities as U.S. citizens with Filipino heritage. Women are very active in this group. Also, women have been actively involved in providing services for affected communities. In the Philippines mothers and community volunteers

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have carried the burden of caring for those who are sick. Nurses conducted the health survey and support families with sick children.26 This combination of scientific, educational, political, and community work has been very successful in opening up public debate and action on an issue that had been officially presumed foreclosed. The plight of the affected families, particularly children born with disabilities like cerebral palsy that prevent them from walking or talking, made tragic news. Crizel Jane Valencia, conceived and born in CABCOM, who died from leukemia at age six, on February 25, 2000, became a symbol of this intractable problem. Her joyful spirit was an inspiration to all who met her; her drawings have been shown in the Philippines and the United States in an exhibit entitled “Crizel’s World: Butterflies and Benzene.” Organizers in Okinawa and South Korea have learned a great deal from the Philippine experience. In the Japanese context, Kaori Sunagawa (1999) has identified major difficulties for bases clean-up. These include a lack of sustained citizen participation, no legal framework for clean-up, no clear demarcation of responsibility, no participation of the U.S. military in planning for clean-up, and no demand for information from the U.S. military by the Japanese government. Without a forceful, active citizens’ movement, she notes, these other limitations are unlikely to be addressed. Communities in South Korea face similar difficulties (Kim 2000).27 Gender is a fundamental element in this problem. The deleterious effects of toxic contamination tend to show up first in women and children (Gibbs 1998; Kettel 1996; Nelson 1989; Seager 1993a). In addition, gender-based daily activities that may confine women to the home and immediate neighborhood expose them “to environmental illness in a gender-differentiated manner” (Kettel 1996: 1368). Thus, Okinawan women living near Kadena AFB who do not work outside the home may be much more susceptible to ongoing stress from aircraft noise compared with their husbands, who leave the house for a workplace elsewhere. Fetal development is a complex process that is highly sensitive to toxicities and stressors (Steingraber 2001). A woman’s compromised health due to contaminated water or severe noise and stress means that she cannot provide a safe bodily environment for her fetus. She may miscarry or give birth to a stillborn child or to a child with congenital health problems and disabilities. Further, if the main source of water is contaminated, she cannot care for her family adequately or keep them clean and healthy. This can exacerbate stress and feelings of anger, depression, and powerlessness. Women’s embodied knowledge of environmental contamination is thus both personal and social. By contrast, the initial work of researching the existence of contamination is technical and scientific. The difference has led to a gendered division of labor among activists that can be disempowering for women. Two genderbased strategies could make it less so: technical training for women and an analysis of military contamination linked to reproductive health. In the first case women



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would be trained to take soil and water samples as part of the exploratory research. They could claim technical expertise and “authority,” and they would demystify basic environmental science for other women.28 On the second point, framing military pollution as a reproductive health issue could mobilize a wider cross-section of the population and make possible stronger connections with major women’s organizations and feminist activists for whom the right to reproductive health is a strong claim. Aida Santos has argued that this linkage would be politically effective and culturally appropriate in the Philippines, where general discussion has not yet linked environmental contamination and reproductive health.29 While both of these strategies are promising, they move in different directions. Training women to do scientific research could break down gender hierarchy. An emphasis on women’s reproductive health as present or future mothers reinforces gendered divisions and runs the risk of essentializing women.30 This is an important tension in feminist activism generally and raises fundamental questions of analysis, strategy, efficacy, and consistency between means and ends. Another contradiction between means and ends is militant antimilitarism based on nationalist and masculinist values and culture, as exemplified by the Maehyangri Explosives Damage Citizens’ Countermeasures Association in South Korea. This group was successful in getting national and international attention for their situation, a key factor that led to the closing of the Kuni bombing range. The male leadership mobilized students, workers, and human rights activists to participate in major demonstrations and confrontations, where some attempted to climb over the fence of the bombing range, for example, and to pull the fence down. Their members were beaten up by riot police and served time in jail. Man Kyu Chun, the Association chair, used sexualized imagery in comments about the rape of Korea by U.S. troops, and in comparing the land of Maehyangri to a woman’s breasts.31 Maehyangri women supported the male leaders by providing for their families and cooking food for demonstrators. Nationalism provides an empowering framework, given the neocolonial relationships between South Korea and the United States. However, a nationalist perspective flattens out internal inequalities based on gender, race/ethnicity, and class, and movements operating out of nationalist frameworks may reproduce some of the same dualisms as exist in the wider society. The gendered nature of nationalist discourses often produces negative consequences for women. Women activists are marginalized within the South Korean peace movement. As well as opposing the U.S. military, these women also seek to transform the militarized perspectives and organizing strategies within the nation’s male-dominated peace movement.32 Along similar lines, Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence does not work with Marxist organizations that tend to be male-dominated and doctrinaire. Networking across national boundaries has linked U.S. and Philippine ac-

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tivists, for example, through the U.S. Working Group for Philippines Bases Cleanup and Filipino/Americans for Environmental Solutions (FACES). U.S.based organizations like the former Asia Pacific Center for Justice and Peace (Washington, DC) and the Institute for Policy Studies (Washington, DC), informal groups such as Friends of the Filipino People (Boston) and Okinawa Peace Networks (San Francisco and Los Angeles), as well as Asian American organizations, church groups, and human rights activists have all played a part in transnational organizing. At the International Grassroots Summit on Military Base Cleanup in Washington, DC, September 1999, organizers from Asia, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean shared information and strategies concerning U.S. military contamination and adopted a Host Country Bill of Rights that defined clean-up standards that should apply to all U.S. bases irrespective of location. The Host Country Bill of Rights also includes two internationally recognized principles: the “polluter pays” principle and the precautionary principle that advocates precautionary measures even if some cause-and-effect relationships are not fully established scientifically (Montague 1998: 1). Organizers in the Philippines and the United States have also pursued legal channels in their efforts to get the United States to take responsibility for toxic wastes in the Philippines. On December 3, 2002, a coalition of Filipino nationals, FACES, and ArcEcology filed suit in federal court in San Jose, California, on behalf of thirty-six residents from communities around the former Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base. The lawsuit sought to enforce provisions of U.S. environmental law that require the federal government to investigate contamination resulting from its activities. This is the first time residents of another nation have used this law to sue the U.S. government. Although unsuccessful, this suit may open the way for further legal action. Activists who are working on the issue of military contamination know that their governments do not want to strain relationships with the United States. At the same time, these governments do not want to stimulate stronger opposition to the U.S. military by neglecting local people’s concerns and anger. U.S. military authorities and receiving governments may be forced to make concessions in their efforts to balance these competing claims, for example, by moving live-fire drills from Okinawa to sites in Japan, or closing the Kuni bombing range. Dealing with local opposition and resistance is the job of the host governments. In cases of environmental accidents or reports of environmental illness, they typically attempt to minimize the problem by assuring people that everything is quite safe. In Okinawa, under Governor Ota, however, the prefecture undertook its own research into the issue of low-birth-weight babies born near Kadena AFB. People living near this base have won compensation for noise pollution through lawsuits against the Japanese government (Japan Times 1998). But SOFA (Article 3) precludes the Japanese gov-



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ernment or the courts from banning night flights or restricting “the management and operation of an airport of the U.S. military and its activities” (ibid.). The U.S. military also contributes to managing local opinion by hiring workers, contributing to local causes, and hosting barbecues and open days, replete with displays of military hardware, on the Fourth of July or other major holidays. At times, U.S. military officials offer derisory, pro forma apologies for some egregious military action that has generated sufficiently strong opposition. For example, in July 2000, Lt. Gen. Daniel J. Petrosky, commander of the 8th U.S. Army in South Korea, apologized for an incident in which U.S. military personnel had dumped formaldehyde into the Han River, a main source of Seoul’s drinking water (Associated Press 2000a). On April 30, 2002, U.S. Forces Okinawa Area Coordinator Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson held a press conference to apologize for a recent series of military accidents, including a fuel tank that dropped from a helicopter at Futenma and a fuel leak from a C2 transport jet (Ryukyu Shimpo 2002). Though perhaps embarrassing at the moment, these apologies are easy to make and do not change policies and practices.

Redefining Security In all three countries, activists have created public awareness and debate about the environmental and health effects of routine peacetime military operations. They have challenged dominant narratives that take for granted the need for political and military alliances with the United States and the so-called “protection” of military security. They have opened up a space to talk critically about the heavy social, economic, political, and environmental costs of militarism. Evidence from the communities discussed here suggests that framing the issue in terms of reproductive health could be useful in speaking to women’s experiences and mobilizing more women at an earlier stage. The maternalist emphasis on women as mothers and nurturers accommodates women’s traditional roles and would expose a fundamental contradiction: government support for U.S. military operations has seriously obstructed women’s work of caring for their families and has made them ill. A maternalist approach may make it difficult for governments to ignore women’s claims even though these same governments invoke patriotism, anticommunism, or fear of other countries to silence criticism of U.S. military activities. In official discourse, national security is equated with military security, which places militarism at the center of public policy, justifies vast military expenditures, and naturalizes military activities in people’s consciousness. Compared with “war talk,” Ferguson and Turnbull (1999) see national security discourse as rational and bureaucratic and hence more difficult to challenge. At the same time, Seager notes that national security “is a vague and constantly shifting concept—it has no real or

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absolute meaning; it is whatever the military defines it to be (with the agreement of other men in the national security loop)” (1993b: 38). The experiences and insights of activists in the Philippines, South Korea, and Okinawa (Japan) illustrate fundamental contradictions between environmental security and military security, and contribute to shared understandings about the need to redefine the concept of security to include human and environmental health, as well as redistributive justice. Many draw on the UNDP’s foundational principles for human security: that • the environment can sustain human and natural life; • people’s basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, health care, and education are met; • people’s fundamental human dignity and respect for cultural identities are honored; • people and the natural environment are protected from avoidable harm. Asian activists know through direct experience that militarism has undermined or even destroyed their everyday security. Their experiences of environmental destruction entailed in preparations for war show the interconnections among systems of inequality and domination based on gender, race/ethnicity, class, and nation that are utilized and reinforced by militarism. Their work constitutes a thorough-going critique of these hierarchical systems and the realist state-centered paradigm of international security based on militarism. Local community organizations working for solutions to the severe long-term environmental and health effects of U.S. military operations in these three countries focus on the details of specific, everyday problems. At the same time, their analyses and international connections allow them to see the imperatives and global reach of U.S. military power.

Notes This essay is part of a larger project that I have been working on for several years, both individually and in collaboration with others. Sources include meetings and discussions with activists and researchers who participate in the East Asia-U.S.-Puerto Rico Women’s Network, as well as interviews, unpublished reports, informal conversations, and e-mail communications. I am greatly indebted to those who have provided translations of documents or given their time and skills to interpret conversations and discussions. I am also grateful for the support of a Rockefeller Fellowship that allowed me time to work on writing this chapter. 1. For further analysis of environmental destruction during war, see S. Bloom et al. (1994); Center for Defense Information (1999); Committee for the Compilation of Materials (1981); Gough (1986); Lifton (1967); Seager (1992); Shenon (2000).



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2. For a discussion of uranium mining, see Eichstaedt (1994). For analyses of the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, see Bertell (1983, 1985); Birks and Erlich (1989); Caldicott (1994); Shulman (1990, 1992). For assessment of nuclear weapons tests, see Ball (1986); Ishtar (1994, 1998); Dibblin (1990). For analysis of disposal of radioactive waste, see Christensen (1988); Kemp (1992). For discussion of depleted uranium, see Tashiro (2001). 3. Other ways that militarism undermines everyday security, especially for women, include military violence against women and related civilian cultures of violence, as well as budget trade-offs that lead to disinvestment in socially useful programs and services while military spending is high. 4. North and South Korea are still technically at war as no peace treaty has been signed between them, although they are exploring steps toward unification. Many South Koreans have condemned President Bush’s characterization of North Korea as part of “the axis of evil” because they believe it exacerbates this sensitive situation. 5. Their comparative length in English gives a crude measure of their relative scope: the Visiting Forces Agreement with the Philippines is 7 pages; Status of Forces Agreements with Japan and with South Korea take up 49 pages; but with NATO countries the agreements have more than 300 pages. 6. The DoD uses the term “host” nation, language that suggests the U.S. military is located in Asian countries by invitation, as a visitor, whereas many communities deeply resent the presence of these bases alongside them. 7. Since 2001, the U.S. military has established new bases in Eastern Europe as part of “the war on terrorism.” SOFAs with Bulgaria and Romania, for example, allow lower environmental standards compared with the SOFA with Germany. 8. The e-mail was circulated by the Boston Okinawa Committee with the subject line: “Action against U.S Military Outrages against Japanese and Okinawans” (March 2, 2001). 9. Okinawan leaders introduced this resolution in response to public outrage at the sexual molestation of a teenage girl by a U.S. Marine on January 9, 2001—just one in a long list of incidents of rape and sexual assault committed by U.S. troops against Okinawan women and girls (Okinawa Women 1998). 10. Military operations also provide clear examples of environmental racism and classism within the United States. Nuclear technology has done disproportionate damage in rural and blue-collar communities like Fernauld, Ohio; Hanford, Washington; Rocky Flats, Colorado; and Savannah River, South Carolina. Radioactive waste from uranium mining is scattered on Navajo land and at the Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico. The military appropriated Western Shoshone land for the Nevada Test Site, and the Department of Energy plans to use Western Shoshone land for a high-level radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Depleted uranium weapons are tested at Socorro, New Mexico. 11. If located in the United States, these places would have been considered among the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites and would have qualified for funding from the

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government Superfund, created in 1980 to stimulate clean-up of extremely contaminated areas. 12. These sums are beyond the reach of the Philippine government but small when compared with the U.S. military budget for FY 2005—$440 billion, excluding the cost of invading and rebuilding Iraq. 13. E-mail circulated by PTFBC with the subject line: “VFA and Toxics Issue” (August 5, 1999). Senator Legarda wrote to Senator John Chafee, then head of the U.S. Senate Environmental Committee, urging him to press for clean-up. He forwarded her letter to the Department of Defense for a “detailed response.” Instead, she received the standard reply: the United States has no legal responsibility for clean-up of former bases in the Philippines and the federal budget makes no provision for bases that have been closed (Institute for Policy Studies 1997: 46). 14. In 2000, U.S. Congressman Robert Underwood of Guam introduced the first House Resolution on military contamination in the Philippines, with thirteen co-sponsors from both parties. Although the resolution did not pass, supporters saw it as a step forward. Madeline Albright promised to send a research team to investigate but this did not happen. As of 2007 no progress had been made. 15. There used to be three islands; one has been completely destroyed, and another is much reduced in size. 16. Mr. Chun, Chairman of Maehyangri Explosives Damage Citizens’ Countermeasures Association (Maehyangri, July 30, 2001), interpreted by Don Mee Choi. 17. Interview with Yu Jin Jeong and Dong Shim Kim of the National Campaign for the Eradication of Crime by U.S. Troops in Korea (Oakland, November 14, 2001), interpreted by Helen Kim. 18. Interview with Dong Shim Kim of the National Campaign for the Eradication of Crime by U.S. Troops in Korea (Oakland, November 14, 2000). She joined activists from Green Korea United to investigate this bombing range. They counted 250 to 300 planes a day, flying so low they could see the pilots’ faces. 19. In 1998, for example, two women, who had been in the habit of gathering shellfish and seaweed in the White Beach area, died of liver cancer. 20. A thirteen-woman delegation, the Okinawa America Women’s Peace Caravan, made presentations in the San Francisco Bay area, New York, Washington, DC, and Honolulu. 21. Their ancestors had protected the forest by forbidding the cutting of live trees without permission. As a result, during the three-month-long Battle of Okinawa at the end of World War II, “the lives of almost all the citizens who evacuated and hid out in the forests they had so carefully nurtured and protected were spared” (Onna Village Committee 1992: ii). 22. Interview with Suzuyo Takazato, Co-chair, Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence and elected member of the Naha City Council (New York, February 19, 1999).



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23. Personal communication, Saul Bloom, Executive Director, ArcEcology, San Francisco. 24. These are Yausubetsu, Hokkaido; Yufuín, Kyushu; and Kita-Fuji and HigashiFuji, near Mt. Fuji. 25. In March 2002, the DoD argued before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Readiness for exemptions from laws concerning critical habitat for threatened and endangered species, migratory birds, marine mammals, range management and restoration, and state plans for air quality. House and Senate Committees, the General Accounting Office, and former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman all disputed Pentagon claims that this legislation jeopardizes training and impedes military readiness. In March 2003, however, Republicans attached a similar measure to the DoD 2004 budget authorization bill, citing the imminent war with Iraq and ongoing “war on terrorism” as justification for blanket exemptions (Deardorff 2003). As a result, DoD does not have to comply with legislation protecting endangered species, migratory birds, or marine mammals. It is seeking exemptions from the Clean Air Act and from two toxic waste laws, which could have far-reaching effects on human health (Shogren 2004). 26. Philippine country report to Okinawa International Women’s Summit: Redefining Security (Naha City, Okinawa, June 22–26, 2000) presented by Marisa Navidad on behalf of PTFBC. 27. Japan and South Korea have bodies of environmental law dating back to the 1960s and 1970s respectively (Kato 1996) that do not include military contamination. Environmental movements have mainly responded to the devastating effects of high-speed industrial growth (Lee and So 1999). 28. A U.S. literature documents women’s organizing against environmental hazards after they or their children become ill: Gibbs (1995, 1998); Glazer and Glazer (1998); Kaplan (1997); Krauss (1993); Pardo (1990); Zeff, Love, and Stults (1989). Women from white working-class communities and communities of color have taken on governmental agencies and corporations responsible for contamination, especially from toxic waste dumps and incinerators, despite being ridiculed by officials, industry “experts,” and news reporters as “hysterical housewives.” Nelson (1989) honors their research as kitchen-table science. This organizing has often been framed in terms of environmental justice, with less emphasis on its gender dimensions. 29. Environmental Working Group discussion, East Asia-U.S. Women’s Network Against Militarism, second international meeting, Washington, DC (October 11, 1998). 30. See De Alwis (1997) for a discussion of Sri Lankan mothers’ protests that draw on traditional gender roles. 31. Interview with Dong Shim Kim (Oakland, October 14, 2001), interpreted by Helen Kim. 32. Interview with Dong Shim Kim.

C h a p t e r 17

Globalizing and Gendered Forces The Contemporary Militarization of Pacific/Oceania

Teresia K. Teaiwa

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ichael Moore’s controversial award-winning documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) outlined a veritable conspiracy by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to use the events of September 11, 2001, to justify U.S. military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. While Bush’s “War on Terror” has irrevocably shaped international relations in the twenty-first century, Moore’s success in accessing mass audiences has provided a model—some hope—for constituencies of dissent in the United States and around the world. I, for one, sitting in the Rialto cinema in Wellington, New Zealand, during a screening of Fahrenheit 9/11, was fairly convinced by most of Moore’s arguments. But there were two moments in the film where I found myself disturbed and unwilling to follow the logical conclusions of points clearly tangential to Moore’s main argument. One of these moments involved a fleeting but scornful reference in the film to the tiny Pacific Island nation of Belau as one of the first to join Bush’s “coalition of the willing” for his proposed invasion of Iraq in 2003. The image that accompanied this reference was not from Belau itself, but was of headless torsos swaying to the distinctive sound of Hawaiian music. My reaction to this sudden inclusion of Pacific references in a documentary of such global import was not the glee of seeing the region I call home represented on the silver screen, but the disappointment of seeing it reductively misrepresented. While I am neither Belauan nor Hawaiian, as a Pacific Studies scholar it was frustrating to see Belau portrayed as a pathetic pawn in the “coalition of the willing,” not having a military force of its own to be able to make good its pledge to stand alongside U.S. forces. To add insult to injury, Moore seemed to have neither the time nor the inclination to ensure that the images he used to represent Belau were accurate—easily accessible touristic images from Hawai‘i were deemed sufficient. Indeed, Moore’s lack of concern with accuracy or consistency has been a recurring criticism of his work (Nyhan 2004; A. O. Scott 2004; Youngs 2004). Sometimes, living in the particular portion of the southern hemisphere that I do, it is easy to feel distanced from so-called global events and political machinations. But the region that I describe as Pacific/Oceania is well and truly “hooked up”



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to global systems in simultaneously empowering and disempowering ways. It is intellectually empowering, on one hand, for us to have access through global media markets to a critical counterperspective on the global war on terror such as Moore’s. On the other hand, it is disempowering for us to receive short and simplistic shrift in his otherwise illuminating text. This chapter aims to open up a discussion that may enable progressives to reexamine our configurations of the global and to avoid marginalizing and trivializing practices that prevent us all from accurately comprehending—and where necessary, apprehending—globalizing processes. I seek here to find a middle path between criticizing powerful institutions that on a global scale create and exploit inequalities among people and acknowledging the agency of the peoples of a particular region—Pacific/Oceania. To begin with, I introduce the region by addressing some of the key ways it has been imagined and constructed by foreigners and by its own intellectuals. What I hope to suggest with this sketch, however, is that the globalizing and gendered forces of militarism in Pacific/Oceania are not only external impositions, but also emerge from within the region as expressions of social, cultural, political, and economic agency. In foregrounding Fahrenheit 9/11 at the beginning of this essay, I made reference to two occasions in the film when I found myself troubled: I have referred to the first, but the second I will describe and discuss at the conclusion of my essay when I broach some humanistic questions that arise from the most current iteration of a global militarism—the war on terror. Where must our analysis and action lead, once we have identified processes of militarization in our societies? What is to be gained by “othering” the military? Might we be able to use our militarized lives as the basis for seeking peace? How is the Pacific participating in global movements for peace that can help to demilitarize our region? As indicated earlier, I use the terms “Pacific” and “Oceania” interchangeably to designate the region also known as “the Pacific Basin,” “the Pacific Islands,” “the South Pacific,” or “the South Seas.” Each of the terms carries its own logic of inclusion and exclusion, and some of the terms are more elastic than others. This is important to note for the vagaries of geopolitics produce a number of different configurations of the region. For example, the U.S. nineteenth-century notion of Manifest Destiny conjured up a vision of empire beyond the western continental coast, over the ocean and into Asia. Hawai‘i, American Samoa, Guam, and the former U.N. Trust Territories in Micronesia (present-day Belau, Federated States of Micronesia, Northern Marianas, Marshall Islands) became strategic stepping-stones to Asia for the United States. Although these Pacific Islands have varying degrees of sovereignty today, their importance to the United States remains essentially the same. We can speak also of a British Commonwealth Pacific, a French Pacific, an Indonesian Pacific; a Pacific that reflects Australian neocolonial priorities; a Pacific that reflects New Zealand’s colonial legacies.

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But I have chosen to use the term “Pacific” to both ironically and critically evoke the originary “outsider” vision of the region as placid and peaceful.1 Much scholarship on the region over the past three decades has explicitly engaged in deconstructing this image, and I myself have contributed to such efforts (Teaiwa 2000; Hereniko 2000; Robie 1989). Here, in the context of a discussion of militarism’s globalizing and gendered force, I begin a project of recuperating the term as a signifier of peace. I am not so much recanting my earlier work that insisted on deromanticizing dominant ahistorical images of the region as I am attempting to redeploy the term for the purpose of visualizing and realizing social and political good in the future of our region. I also elect to use the term “Oceania,” as other scholars of the region like Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau‘ofa have done, not so much to delimit the membership of the region, but to signal the danger of underestimating its power, fluidity, and complexity. There are several methods of underestimating and undermining Oceania. One of the most persistent methods involves imagining its islands and peoples as isolated and untouched. This is the mythology that the tourism industry exploits. It belies histories of extensive exploration, settlement, trade, and exchange by indigenous Pacific people amongst themselves prior to the coming of Europeans; intense contact with Europeans since 1521; the advent of Christianity in 1668 and its rapid spread through missionary activity in the nineteenth century; and the adventurous spirit of Oceanic peoples, who used the presence and technologies of Europeans to extend their own horizons (Hau‘ofa, Naidu, and Waddell 1993; Chappell 1998). Other methods of belittling the region include imagining it as empty space that can be conceived as a simple conduit for capital exchanges and gains between Asia and the Americas (Connery 1994), as a “playground” for superpower military testing and firing practices (Firth 1987), or as a “theater” for war (White and Lindstrom 1989). Although at odds with each other in some ways, the image of an empty space and the image of untouched islands and peoples are equally susceptible to being appropriated into gendered discourses of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism (Suaalii 2000; Said 1979). Oceania as empty space—for military purposes—and Oceania as untouched islands and peoples—for touristic purposes— are both easily analogized as feminine and passive, awaiting the masculine and active presence of the (“First World”) military and tourist. Indeed the “First World” most commonly finds its way to Oceania via touristic paths and processes that feminize the region through the media, advertisements, and popular cultural icons such as the “hula girl.” It is highly probable, as Annelise Riles (2001) has suggested, that there is nothing new to be said about globalization. Yet there have been many factors at work within Oceania that have produced what Epeli Hau‘ofa described once as “world enlargement” (Hau‘ofa, Naidu, and Waddell 1993: 2–16). From the very settlement



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of this vast oceanic region over tens of thousands of years, to the formation of extensive kinship networks maintained by oral traditions and regular return voyages, Hau‘ofa argues that the worldviews of Pacific peoples had never been limited by the size of their islands. The paradox of colonialism was that while it introduced Pacific people (sometimes unceremoniously) to a wider world of places, people, and ideas, it also was the cause of tremendous belittlement. Pacific nations became subject to foreign powers, Pacific people were converted in droves to a global religion (Christianity), and through the process of colonial education Pacific students learned more about the geography and history of foreign lands than they did about their own. It was often by acts of colonial military aggression that Pacific people were propelled into global economies. “Globalizing” forces have long been at work in Oceania, and they have not always been external. As Hau‘ofa has argued, the peoples of Oceania have been exercising what power they do have to make choices and have been engaging in practices of “world enlargement” for millennia. Whether there is anything useful to gain from appropriating the discourse of globalization for counterdiscursive purposes remains to be seen; what is beyond doubt is the ongoing need to acknowledge the agency of historical actors. Hau‘ofa’s was an optimistic—some would say utopian—attempt to reclaim some positive aspects of globalization from doomsayers of dependency theory and avaricious world traders and financiers. Hau‘ofa’s thesis has been thoroughly critiqued elsewhere (Jolly 2001; Teaiwa and Kabutaulaka 2000; Hau‘ofa 1993) and in its invocation of Polynesian voyaging histories and heroes, it does tend to privilege a masculinist counterdiscourse to globalization. Yet Hau‘ofa’s is not the only alternative to dominant forms of globalization offered by Pacific thinkers: a small, yet formidable cohort of Pacific feminists consistently and incisively argues that over the last two decades the experience of externally imposed globalization—heir to colonialism and imperialism—in Oceania has been overwhelmingly negative (Emberson-Bain 1994). As elsewhere, the effects of globalization in Oceania, and in particular the effect of structural adjustment policies of the World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s on small, independent or self-governing island nations, have led to unprecedented scales of feminization of labor and feminization of poverty. Although a large portion of the Pacific feminist critiques of globalization focuses on the effects of neoliberal economic policies, there is a clear recognition of the links between these and militarization. Globalization increases the rate of militarization in Pacific/Oceania by limiting economic and development choices for island nations. The militarization of Pacific societies in turn leads to the introduction or ossification of particular gender roles, most prominently the hypermasculinist role of the soldier/warrior, but also that of the devoted and pacifying wife and mother. This essay follows on from previous and ongoing attempts by feminist analysts of Oceania to

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expose and challenge militarized power (Ferguson and Turnbull 1999; Ishtar 1994, 1998; Trask 1999). Indeed, global feminist scholars and activists seem to have kept the Pacific well within the frames of their peace, antinuclear, and demilitarization analysis. From early expressions of a progressive globalization in Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Global (1984), which included a survey of Pacific women’s activism by Vanessa Griffen, to national and regional anthologies of Pacific women’s critical scholarship and writing (Sirivi and Havini 2004; Douglas 2002; Pollard 2000), it has been clear that globalization is a two-way process. Pacific women and progressives especially see much to gain from making links and working in solidarity across national and regional boundaries. I will return to the possibilities for critical and progressive analysis and action in Pacific/Oceania later. But bearing in mind this tradition of international feminist engagement with Pacific/Oceania, I would like to reconsider Moore’s treatment of Belau in Fahrenheit 9/11. Belau (also known as Palau), before it became known as a site for the “reality TV” show Survivor, was once a cause célèbre for international feminist peace activists as the tiny country withstood enormous pressure from the United States between 1981 and 1993 to rescind its antinuclear constitution (the world’s first) in exchange for patronage and aid. The United States was offering a financial aid package in exchange for access to land and ports for military use and the free passage of nuclear-propelled and nuclear-capable vessels. The most consistent Belauan critics of U.S. policy during the constitutional wrangle was a group of women organized under the banner of Otil a Beluad (meaning “anchor of our land”)—members of the group, Gabriella Ngirmang and her daughter Cita Morei, have featured prominently in antinuclear literature from and on the Pacific, and they were the principal informants for Lynn Wilson’s study of Belauan politics and culture, Speaking to Power (1995). In 1988–1989 Otil a Beluad was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, testament to the group’s fortitude in the midst of a conflict that saw the assassination of an antinuclear president of Belau in 1985 and that exerted enormous social stress as families were torn apart by political differences in the tiny island nation. Even though the United States could claim a victory in 1993, when its Compact of Free Association with Belau was passed, this victory came only after wearing down the population with a slew of plebiscites and referenda and resorting to what many consider extortionary methods. In light of these struggles, we must rethink any urge to dismiss the smaller members of the “coalition of the willing” simply as sycophantic admirers of the United States. Some have termed them the “coalition of the billing,” suggesting that their support for the global war on terror was bought with promises of development assistance from the United States.2 An informed feminist peace analysis could not take such a turn. Belau’s early signing up to be part of the “coalition of the willing”



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should not be scorned, but rather lamented as a sign of the severe constraints on sovereignty for small states in a global economic and political regime that makes survival such a desperate struggle for them. It is at points like this that feminist analysis in Pacific/Oceania is challenged to take a humanist turn and move beyond dichotomies of “us” (progressives) and “them” (regressives/reactionaries/compradors, and so forth) to acknowledge the difficulties so many face—as individuals, communities, nations—in preserving integrity. I am not suggesting that because Belauans have had a fairly tortured history of struggle with the United States that their government’s acceding to the “coalition of the willing” is therefore excusable, predictable, or even universally accepted amongst Belauans. Rather, I am insisting that the government of Belau’s decision in 2003 needs to be seen in a broader political context. In fact among the earliest signatories to the “coalition of the willing,” alongside Belau, were two other Pacific Island nations: the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM). In a press release and letter to the Washington Post (2003), the FSM ambassador to the United States, Jesse B. Marehalau, responded to initial media receptions of his country’s offer of allegiance to the United States. His letter illustrates another dimension to the range of factors arrayed before Micronesian peoples and their governments as they consider their options for participating in global economies, and as such it bears quoting at length: Recent articles published by your newspaper [Dana Milbank: “Many Willing, but Only a Few Are Able”] and others cross over the line in their zest for ridiculing the Administration. Most importantly, they missed the point concerning the contribution made by the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and other small nations to the coalition to disarm Iraq. With smugness and arrogance, they mock the small nations’ role in the coalition, concluding that a nation that is only a “speck in the Pacific” (Chicago Tribune) has nothing of value to offer. The point is not whether small nations can contribute troops in sufficient number to turn the tide of battle. Rather, it is that as our sons and daughters place their lives on the line, they show their commitment, and that of our country, to the ideals of Freedom, Democracy and Human Rights. Under the Compact of Free Association between the United States and the Federated States of Micronesia, our citizens volunteer and currently serve in all branches of the U.S. armed forces alongside other U.S. servicemen and women. The son of FSM President Leo A. Falcam was recently selected for promotion to full Colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps. At this time, an estimated four-to-six hundred Micronesian citizens are serving on active duty with the U.S. military. Some have died in that service, and others now stand in harm’s way. This is nothing new. Our citizens have been serving in the U.S. military for decades, and have engaged in combat in every major U.S. engagement since the Korean

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War. At the conclusion of the first Gulf War, then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney wrote to express appreciation to the FSM, stating that no nation’s people had participated in greater numbers proportionate to population than the FSM. Service by our citizens in the U.S. military is indicative of the special relationship of Micronesians with the “American Family.” Extension of formal ties that bind our two countries, in the form of an amended Compact of Free Association, will be considered by the U.S. Congress during its current session. Regardless of political views or your editorial policy, it is mean-spirited to ignore or trivialize our people’s service to your nation at this critical time. (Marehalau 2003)

Ambassador Marehalau’s rebuttal to the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune editorials in 2003 would have served just as well as a response to Moore’s comments in Fahrenheit 9/11 a year later. It would seem from the ambassador’s letter that American “hawks” (warmongers) like Secretary of Defense Cheney have a better sense of Micronesia’s geopolitical significance and Micronesians’ loyalty and service to the United States than even the most elite media commentators and “doves” (critics of war) like Moore. But even the ambassador’s comments are inadequate for understanding the context out of which Micronesians and other Pacific Islanders have come to be overrepresented in U.S. armed forces, and, more importantly, the extent to which this historical relationship has also been contested, resisted, and critiqued by Pacific peoples. The construction and limitation of choice for Micronesians that have been part of the process of negotiating the Compacts of Free Association for all the former Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands is so stunning that it has created new configurations of state and national identity that have managed to produce patriotic warriors for the United States not only in its Pacific colonies, like Guam, Hawai‘i, and American Samoa, but also in nominally independent nations like Belau, FSM, and the Marshall Islands. The Congressional Research Service Report on American War and Military Operations Casualties records 148 deaths of Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders3 in the Korean War, 229 in the Vietnam Conflict, 2 in the Persian Gulf Conflict, and 2 in all other conflicts since 1980 (2005: 6). In Operation Enduring Freedom—the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan—there were three deaths of Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders (ibid.: 14). But in Operation Iraqi Freedom between March 19, 2003, and June 25, 2005, there have been a total of 17 deaths and 76 wounded among Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders (ibid.: 17– 19). Of the seventeen deaths, six of the casualties were American Samoans, three were from Guam, and one from Saipan (Brooke 2005). The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, confirms that Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders are disproportionately represented in the U.S. armed forces. In a report that otherwise sought to disprove claims that U.S. military



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recruitment targets low-income and racial minority communities, the Heritage Foundation admitted that while Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders constituted only 0.13 percent of the total U.S. population, they made up 0.42 percent of U.S. military recruits in 2003 and overrepresented their communities in the military by 249 percent (Kane 2005). A considerable number of Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islander reservists now on duty in Iraq are members of the “Go for Broke” battalion—the 100th battalion of the 442nd Division—with 100 of them coming from Saipan, 300 from American Samoa, and 150 from Hawai‘i to give this battalion perhaps the most Pacific character in the entire U.S. armed forces (Cole 2004).4 One might well dismiss such figures as aberrations caused by the colonial taint on and proximity of Native Hawaiians and Other Pacific Islanders to the world’s only remaining superpower. Indeed, if somewhat belatedly, journalists have begun to recognize that poverty and a lack of alternative development options make American Samoa and Micronesian islands especially fertile ground for U.S. military recruitment (M. Field 2005). As one journalist has noted, the per capita income in the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Northern Marianas, and Guam is US$8,000, $12,500, and $21,000 respectively. In the former U.S. trust territories of the Marshall Islands and the FSM, per capita incomes are significantly lower, at US$2,000. Considering that the minimum signing bonus for the U.S. Army is $5,000, that the salary for a private first class starts at $17,472, and that GIs can earn as much as $70,000 in education benefits, the economic rationales for Pacific Islanders joining the U.S. military are compelling (Brooke 2005). But while poverty plays a big role in persuading Pacific Islanders to enlist in U.S. armed forces, it is not the only motivation. David B. Cohen, deputy assistant secretary of the Interior for Insular Affairs, noted, “There is a very strong sense of patriotism throughout the U.S. territories. . . . How else can you explain someone like Ray Yumul, a sitting Northern Marianas congressman who has spent a year serving in Iraq? He’s certainly not someone who needed the military as a ticket out” (ibid.). This “patriotism,” however, is not limited to the so-called territories. After witnessing on television the full military honors performed at the funeral of the first FSM citizen to die fighting with U.S. forces in Iraq, former president of FSM John Haglelgam observed: At the end of the ceremony, the soldiers removed the United States flag from the top of the coffin, folded it nicely, and handed it to an old lady. The old lady accepted the flag. One of the soldiers, perhaps the highest ranking among them, snapped a military salute and said out loud: Duty, Honor and Country. I stared at the T.V. screen thinking to myself that there is something terribly odd about this funeral. Then it dawns on me that the presence of the United States military, the salute with the ringing words: Duty, Honor and Country, and promi-

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nent display of the United States flag all made the funeral looked [sic] surreal. It was a U.S. military funeral in a foreign country and it was completely out of place in the serene and peaceful surrounding. (Haglelgam 2005)

Haglelgam’s epiphany delivers a sobering truth for anyone under illusions about either the serenity and peacefulness of the Pacific region or our isolation from the globalizing force of militarism. Michael Moore might want to explore at some point in his activist career the tragic and complicated histories that have rendered certain Pacific territories and nations perpetual dependents of the United States (Hanlon 1998). But surely the non-American Pacific has been spared such perversions of loyalty and economy? I take no pleasure in answering in the negative. The former British colony of the Solomon Islands and the independent monarchy of Tonga also joined the “coalition of the willing”: a “postconflict” society itself, the Solomon Islands could not offer much more than moral support to the United States, but Tonga managed to send forty to forty-five personnel from its humble Royal Tongan Marines to serve briefly in Iraq.5 Another former British colony, and the Pacific nation with the most extensive overseas military experience, Fiji has been providing security for U.N. officials in Iraq ever since the United Nations determined that accepting protection from U.S. forces would be a liability (BBC 2004). More than a thousand Fiji Islanders had been recruited into the British Army back in 1999, and Fijians serving with British forces in Iraq had already sustained several casualties prior to this agreement between the Fiji Government and the United Nations.6 And as if the machinations of states are not enough, the twenty-first century has seen unprecedented levels of recruiting in Pacific/Oceania by international and multinational private security companies. Fiji has between 1,000–3,000 citizens working for private security companies in Iraq, Kuwait, and other parts of the Middle East. A total of six recorded deaths of Fiji civilians in Iraq has been reported (National Public Radio 2005; Iraq Coalition 2005): in April 2005, two of these had been killed alongside six Americans and three Bulgarians when their helicopter was shot down. The “war on terror” seems truly global when Pacific Islanders are fighting it as enlisted men and women, officers, and mercenaries. Can the fact that Oceania has been decidedly globalized and militarized be the end of the analysis? Are there any more critical questions to be asked about this overwhelming evidence of militarism’s global influence in Pacific/Oceania? There are. What desperately awaits further exploration by scholars and analysts is not just whether but how our region has been, is being, and is likely to be militarized. We have as evidence of past and current militarization in Oceania a real spectrum: from the formidable colonizing militarization of Hawai‘i by the United States—in the form of enormous land alienation and economic dependence created by mili-



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tary bases and intelligence headquarters (A. Kelly forthcoming)—to the apparently self-determining militarization of Fiji by successive indigenous governments; to the largely symbolic reenactments of indigenous warfare that have become common fare in Pacific showcases for tourists, a form of militarism that I will not discuss here. This range of militarizations generates a range of globalizing and gendered forces as well, and again we must investigate how. As I have experienced, the “how” question can lead analysts to some uncomfortable places. I introduced this essay with reference to Moore’s documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 and what I found to be its unhelpful representation of Pacific/Oceania. I mentioned that there was another moment in the film that troubled me, and it is around this second moment that I would like to build my conclusion. A segment of the film revolves around television news footage of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq discussing their approach to battle. Against the backdrop of their armored vehicles, a number of young-looking white men describe how “a good song can help you get pumped up” for an attack. They provide samples of the type of music they might play on their headphones as they prepare to engage in an assault, and one soldier in particular riveted me with his a cappella rendition of a popular party song: “The roof / the roof / the roof is on fire / we don’t need no water / let the motherfucker burn.” He says he plays this song often because that is their aim— to let Baghdad burn. The way his eyes widened and gleamed as he sang did not surprise me. I was, of course, repelled, and asked as I imagine other viewers would: how did this young man, and so many others like him, get to be so coldly hateful of a whole nation of people? But what startled me was my next, involuntary reaction. I suddenly wondered, what would it take for me to become like him? I shuddered as the thought crossed my mind that I should not take a holierthan-thou position towards this man, but examine myself. Could I have been him? Could I ever become him? Was it possible that I have been part of a process that helped create him? How? Like many people I know, my family and I sustain a complex set of personal relations to global militaries. One of my maternal great-grandfathers served in a “colored” regimental band that was gassed during World War I; the other served as a civilian cook for the U.S. Navy in the Philippines for sixteen years. My maternal grandfather joined the ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) while in college, graduating as a second lieutenant. He joined the army full-time prior to World War II and served in Italy during the war. In the 1950s he was a public relations officer in Korea and Germany, between postings at the Pentagon, and he retired with the rank of colonel. He then served as director of Selective Service for the District of Columbia during the Vietnam War. One of my maternal uncles graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served in Vietnam as an army captain. Indeed, I had been encouraged by my grandfather

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to join ROTC in order to finance my college education in the United States, but chose instead the path of taking on student loans. I have had many close and seemingly innocent encounters with and in military institutions: visiting Fiji’s naval vessels as part of school field trips when I was a child, shopping with my grandparents at various military post-exchanges in the United States, attending a mixer at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis while at college, and inviting women officers in the Republic of Fiji Military Forces to speak to my classes while I taught at the University of the South Pacific. I have close friends and relatives who are in or employed by the military in Fiji, with whom I have spent many hours in significant social bonding by drinking yaqona or kava (indigenous beverage made from the roots of the piper methysticum plant). My relatives in the United States have had in their social support network the families of my late grandfather’s “army buddies.” For many African Americans in the twentieth century, joining the military offered the promise of social mobility in racist America. For my father’s family and community, the militarism of World War II provided a different kind of mobility. During the Japanese occupation of their home island of Banaba (then part of the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands colony, now part of the independent Republic of Kiribati), they were displaced and later resettled by their British colonizers to an island thousands of miles away in the Fiji group. I have not been trained by any military, and I am not employed by the military, but can I say that I have not been militarized? Militarization has been both an empowering and dispossessing force for different branches of my family. Militarization has globalized my family in disparate ways; its promotion of particular gender roles has been at times accommodated and at other times contested in my family. Where I had initially assumed that a feminist analysis would require me to approach my subject in an adversarial manner, my experience of researching militarism in the field—which I call home—has distinctly humbled me. One can move confidently towards opposing something if one believes it is wholly Other, and the young soldier who transfixed me in Fahrenheit 9/11 was doing just that. I did not know what to do about my realization that I was—though distantly—still implicated in his becoming, until almost a year later, when my friend Sia Figiel sent me a series of e-mails. The first was a copy of a poem she had written, titled “Lament in Time of War,” which was published in the American Samoan daily newspaper, Samoa News (2005a). Written by Figiel on the night of Sgt. Frank Tiai’s arrival at Pago Pago International Airport—Sgt. Tiai being the fifth soldier from American Samoa to die in Iraq—the poem began in Samoan, evoking ancient wails of lament for fallen warriors. The English text of the poem, however, echoed and distorted the unofficial U.S. anthem “America the Beautiful!”7 The last three stanzas are reproduced below:



Teresia K. Teaiwa

My America! My Samoan Amerika! O how sad, how terribly sad tonight is If you would have heard us you would know that tonight On our humble little island The sea is wild The birds are dead The wind is restless in her momentous despair And the ifilele tree O the sad, sad, ifilele tree Has closed its leaves to embrace yet another fallen son In the line of duty In the defense of you America the beautiful! God shed his grace on thee! As we mourn our dead—in our fa‘asamoa [Samoan custom] As we roll fine mats on our malae [village green] of hurt Wiping the pain off the face of the winds Under this moon of blood And stand once more on the mouths of open graves Singing this poem of anguish This song of abysmal pain While over-crowded commercial airplanes return our fathers Our mothers Our sisters Our brothers Our uncles Our aunties Our nieces Our nephews Our grandfathers Our grandmothers Our daughters Our sons To the sand-dunes of Iraq and Afghanistan Where our beloved ifilele does not grow Aue! Think of us Uncle Sam, from sea to shining sea—think of us! —In brotherhood with you

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Hear our grief Feel our pain End this war NOW! (parenthetical translations not included in original)

There are a number of significant moves that Figiel makes in this segment of the poem that are worth noting. First, the exclamation “My America! My Samoan Amerika!” signals an important claim and appropriation: America is not the only colonizer here—Samoans have been making America theirs for more than a century.8 Second, at the same time that Figiel appeals to America’s shared humanity and shared patriotism (“in the defense of you America the Beautiful! / God shed his grace on thee”) with American Samoans in describing the pain and the grief of mourning fallen soldiers, she asserts cultural difference with her presentation of Samoan words and funereal customs (“As we mourn our dead—in our fa‘asamoa / As we roll fine mats on our malae of hurt”). In addition, Figiel reminds us that the “warriors” are not only men but also women, and in a perceptive comment on the increasing privatization of war, she observes that it is “over-crowded commercial airplanes” that are taking American Samoans “[t]o the sand-dunes of Iraq and Afghanistan.” Finally, and most unequivocally, she demands “End this war / NOW!” Not long after Figiel’s poem appeared in the Samoa News, the newspaper published another poem, titled “Don’t Cry for Me Sia Fiegel [sic],” by a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, David Rotorua Louisiale Kava. It begins: Don’t cry for us, at least not for me Sia Figiel Stop scaring our parents and relatives at home Above all, don’t make it sound as if we are complaining Bringing shame to American Samoa Most of us prefer the Military at a very young age We were determined when our fathers and uncles Marched off to War Our faith strengthened when body bags were brought home

The poem continues on to refer to September 11 and the necessary sacrifices required by those who want to enjoy “freedom.” A further notable stanza goes: Please don’t cry for me American Samoa But if you must cry for my beloved Island Country It is to bring you comfort and allow you To accept the fact



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That the military is what we asked for It is our lives and our love (Kava 2005)

It is ironic, but both poems stake similar claims on America and end up miles apart. Although Figiel received thanks and response from many members of the public and key public officials in American Samoa, the storm of debate that arose around Kava’s and Figiel’s poetic exchange appeared to revolve around Figiel’s right to criticize America. As someone whose Samoan roots are in the independent state of Samoa (formerly Western Samoa), Figiel was seen by some as an outsider and therefore an illegitimate commentator. It fell, then, to Figiel to present her credentials. In a letter to the editor of Samoa News responding to Kava’s poem, Figiel outlined her military genealogy: I am Sia Figiel, the oldest surviving daughter of the late Retired Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Stanislaus S. Figiel. WWII, Korea and Vietnam veteran, buried in the Independent State of Samoa, home of our mother, Tofa Vaiagalepa Moana Toomalatai Figiel. (2005b)

In the body of her letter, Figiel eloquently described her late father’s enduring sense of service to the United States (after twenty-six years in the Coast Guard, he was one of its most decorated enlisted servicemen), his inculcation of military discipline in their family life, the ethos of a military fraternity that he maintained, and the celebration of American culture that he promoted in their household in the independent state of Samoa—with the Fourth of July, Halloween, and Thanksgiving all being observed. Addressing her letter to Kava, Figiel countered his portrayal of her poem “Lament in Time of War” as somehow disloyal, by recalling that her father’s most important legacy for her was the belief that “the beauty of America . . . was that we were allowed to express our opinions as citizens” (2005b). Furthermore, in writing her poem, Figiel had followed her father’s injunction to always speak the truth. Although Figiel has consistently resisted being described as a feminist, her three novels (2001, 1996a, 1996b) and one collection of poetry (1998) certainly have feminist-informed content, as does her concern for and advocacy of peace, not just in Oceania, but globally. Sia follows in a long and distinguished line of peace activism and peaceful resistance in the region: from Queen Lili‘uokalani of Hawai‘i (1898) and Iosefa Mata‘afa of Samoa (R. C. Thompson 1994) facing foreign takeovers in the nineteenth century; through Rua Kenana, the Maori prophet who protested New Zealand’s contribution to the British effort in World War I (Binney, Chapman, and Wallace 1979), and Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, who led peaceful protests against New Zealand’s post-war administration in Samoa (Field 1984); through Otil a Beluad and the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement (Teaiwa 2000); and, most recently, in the region’s reception of the war on terror:

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. . . in . . . Apia . . . Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele told 2,000 demonstrators that Samoa remained committed to multilateral action only within the framework of the UN. Anti-war demonstrations have also been held in Suva, Fiji’s capital and, of course, in the metropolitan cities of Honolulu, Sydney, Auckland and Wellington. In Sydney, 30,000 Australians came out to express their disapproval of the Howard government’s war stance. (Whitney 2003)

Marginal as the Pacific may seem to international politics and trade, militarism is literally a globalizing and gendered force in the Pacific, and such force must necessarily be met with a humanizing force that does not belittle, but seeks understanding and offers respect; that does not demonize but is self-reflective. Feminist-informed analyses and feminist histories of activism offer us ways to reclaim a “pacific” Oceania.

Notes 1. Scholars including Howe (1984) attribute the naming of the region to Ferdinand Magellan who was the first European to cross the ocean in 1521; Oliver (1989) and others claim that Ferdinand Balboa named the ocean from a vista in the South American Alps. 2. Current levels of development assistance from the United States languish far from the 0.7 percent GDP called for by OECD. A more accurate application of the term “coalition of the billing” would be to multinational private security companies who are truly doing the billing for their services in the global war on terror. 3. Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) is an official category in the United States census. 4. The “Go for Broke” battalion, also known as the “Purple Heart battalion,” was made famous in World War II by Japanese American soldiers, who distinguished themselves in service while also facing prejudice from the U.S. Army. 5. This reportedly constituted 10 percent of the total Tonga Defense Forces and was Tonga’s first ever deployment outside of the Pacific region (Menashi 2004). 6. In November 2004, Private Pita Tukatukawaqa, serving with the prestigious Black Watch, a Scottish regiment in the British Army, was the first Fijian to die in Iraq when a roadside bomb hit the armored vehicle in which he was traveling (BBC 2005). 7. Because the Samoan alphabet does not contain the letter “c,” the name of the United States is spelled “Amerika” in Samoan. A Samoan “Amerika” unwittingly slips into a critical discourse calling the United States to account. 8. By way of comparison, Vicente Diaz (1994, forthcoming) has written convincingly of Chamorro processes of “indigenizing America” on Guam from invocations of the U.S. Constitution to appropriations of sport and other popular cultural forms.

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Conclusion

C h a p t e r 18

Advancing Feminist Thinking on Globalization Kathy E. Ferguson and Monique Mironesco

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e bring this intellectual and political journey to an end, not with a final summary or act of closure, but with our reflections on what we have learned and where we might go from here. While no single or unified conclusion is available, or indeed desired, to sum up this complex, layered material, the collective force of these analyses makes fresh thinking possible. Returning to the three umbrella themes we developed in our introduction, we find that the first two—representations/reproductions and spaces/borders—have endured while morphing in unanticipated directions, but the third—voices/bodies—has dispersed among the others and an unexpected newcomer—methods of scholarship/activism—has joined the fray. Representations/reproductions has developed to include the multiple levels and genres in which discursive practices produce and are produced by power relations. This theme could be called semiotic—it refers to the meaning-making practices entailed in constructing imaginaries, naming events, producing categories, identifying genres, detecting and responding to voices, and following representations as they travel. Spaces/borders has expanded to include physical arrangements of states, labor markets, families, bodies, clinics, schools, prisons, and security apparatuses. This theme could be called material—it encompasses multiple sites for producing, distributing, prohibiting, and transforming globalizing flows of bodies and institutions. State practices, both ideological and structural, have come to the fore, suggesting that globalization alters but does not overcome government power. While it may be tempting to refer to the material level of analysis as “real,” in contrast to “merely” discursive inquiries, the force of these essays disqualifies that easy, misleading distinction, showing language practices as no less real and no less implicated in power than more tangible arrangements. Both of these umbrella themes are best thought of as verbs, as something we do—we globalize by representing and by materializing, interactively, simultaneously. Feminist methods of scholarship/activism has emerged as a theme due to the essays’ shared reflections on how feminists study globalization. How do we connect

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careful empirical work and robust theorizing to activist agendas? These essays exemplify careful practices of identifying and interpreting data, vigorous attention to what counts as knowledge, and sustained consideration of the relations between studying the world and changing it. While none of these essays is “quantitative” in that they do not employ sophisticated mathematical techniques, all are empirical in the stronger sense that they are grounded in evidence gathered about specific times and places.

Confronting Colonial Discourses The global reach of colonial authorities into the Pacific has imposed several kinds of violence on native societies: the physical violence of disease and dispossession; the institutional violence replacing indigenous with colonial organizations of land, medicine, education, family, and law; the cultural violence that erases or debases indigenous worldviews and assaults them with western ways of making meaning. Yet indigenous peoples are never simply passive recipients of colonial encounters. They are active participants, sometimes resisting and other times incorporating western practices into local ways of being. Further, the colonial authorities sometimes find themselves changed as well, as their relations with those they intend to control or “save” become unruly or take unexpected turns. In Raiskin’s analysis of Sia Figiel’s novel where we once belonged, painful yet creative interactions take place at the intersection of indigenous ways of knowing with formal colonial education. Set in American Samoa, Figiel’s characters struggle to make their way in the confusion of clashing worlds. Not only education and knowledge but also proper gender relations and sexual identities are challenged. Yet these sites of struggle sometimes provide their characters with resources to negotiate the conflicts between colonial and local ways. Similarly, Metaxas’s analysis of missionary medical practices in nineteenth-century Hawai‘i reveals a pervasive violence against indigenous practices of health along with the remarkable persistence of native ways. Missionary doctors combined their religious convictions about “heathens” with their patriarchal views of women to draw self-serving conclusions about native health and disease. Yet, again, encounters between colonial and indigenous practices of health and wellness host continuing struggles that colonizers do not always win. Critical readings of missionary records and self-reflections dislocate the common narrative about the inevitable march of “progress” in medical science and replace it with a political account of power and resistance. The rapid growth of literary culture in the Pacific Islands since the 1960s offers literary forms and themes addressing and constituting globalization. At the semiotic level, tensions abound: while the first language of many Pacific Island writers is their national language, much Pacific Island literature is written in English, the lan-



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guage taught in colonial schools (or those based on formerly colonial curricula). Discursive struggles between languages are layered on top of parallel frictions within languages. At the material level, literary scholars date the emergence of literature in English by Pacific Islanders to the establishment of regional universities, the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG) in 1966 and the University of the South Pacific (USP) in 1968. These universities provided a meeting place and a publishing venue for writers from countries across the Pacific with diverse experiences of colonialism. Small magazines and journals such as Mana published this work, and two important collections edited by the Samoan writer Albert Wendt, Lali (1980) and Nuanua (1995), introduced regional and international audiences to Pacific Island writers. Journals and universities provide the material opportunity for creating and circulating global/local representations.1 In the dynamic relation between colonial and indigenous societies, colonialism is revealed as a complex, incomplete process. Since one aspect of colonialism is the figuration of the natives as lacking something—legitimate science, or civilized sexuality, or a proper work ethic, or the light of god—which the colonizers conveniently believe themselves to possess, anticolonial struggles are always already positioned, by their opponents, as speaking from the lesser place, the receiving place, the place that stands in need of what the colonizer offers. Yet relations in colonized places move in multiple directions at once, with feedback loops making simple oneway articulations of cause-and-effect impossible. Christian conversion projects, patriarchal gender arrangements, and the discourse of “civilization” interdigitate with persistent indigenous practices. Colonialism is permanently incomplete because its participants keep thinking, acting, talking, struggling, and affecting one another in ongoing interactions. Colonial relationships combine violence and resistance, move in many directions, and often contain surprises.

Cultural Translations As feminist ideas travel around the world, they require translation. Translation of terms like “gender” or “gay” is problematic because representations of sex and gender are seldom simple or straightforward. Instead, they are laden with many meanings, heavy with grammatical connections to other loaded terms, historical links to particular family structures and reproductive patterns, and evolving connotations in labor and law. When these representations travel, they do not just plop down, unchanged, in a new place; instead, they interact with the practices of naming and thinking already going on there. The connections thus made often have unintended consequences, making feminist translations and travels both promising and problematic. In these planetary interactions, the dominant representation often fancies it-

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self the “global” one, while the less powerful is often called “local.” This association with power is sometimes overt and other times subtle and unintended. Sometimes the global flows are initiated from a more powerful place and received by a less powerful one, as the term “gender” travels in Min’s essay from the United States to China, or the global gay moves in Puri’s essay from the United States and Europe to India. Or the flows can be initiated in a less powerful place, one not considered fully “modern” yet nonetheless with some resources to put into circulation, as, for example, Pacific Island rhythms make their way to the U.S. music scene, Argentinian tango blossoms in Japan, or falafel becomes popular in New York City. Either way, the less powerful language or society is often considered “the local,” while the more powerful is recognized as “the global.” The only way to figure out how these complex global flows actually work is to look at them closely on local levels. To do a careful analysis of how ideas and categories travel, how they make their way into one society from another, the researcher has to be there. This requires careful fieldwork by scholars who can speak more than one language, interact with people from diverse places, and take part in multiple cultures. Puri watches the western producers of the idea of the global gay interpret local sexualities in India and also situates herself within India to analyze the concept’s reception. Min watches western feminist ideas of gender come into China and also studies the various meanings of gender within western feminist academic institutions. The location of points of view becomes evident in good field work: Puri shows how ideas of the global gay are challenged from the points of view of sexual minorities in India; Min shows how the concept of gender is defined and put to work differently by women who require specific discursive resources in their particular institutional settings. Puri and Min are both insiders and outsiders to their inquiries, and they use that doubleness to their advantage. Women in the party-linked All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) receive the term “gender” differently than women in NGOs or universities; the first group needs to relate this largely American idea to official Marxist or Maoist language about women and to largely misogynistic state practices relying on gender neutral language; the second needs to relate to American and European universities and foundations. All of them need to talk to each other and other women in China, particularly rural women, who are partially or wholly outside both groups. Sophisticated feminist translators in China know these contexts and struggle to bring gender into Chinese language practices in ways useful to them. Bland questions about the accuracy of translations are reconfigured as intense political contests over the utility of competing articulations for particular agendas. Puri shows how the discourse of global gay ironically strengthens the very thing it criticizes, which is U.S. hegemony in sexual politics. Puri performs the clas-



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sic deconstructive move, showing how thinkers can become dependent on the very idea they oppose. Representations of gay men’s sexuality that are recognizably urban and hip are welcomed by western thinkers as part of the global gay, while nonconforming indigenous sexualities lack intelligibility within this frame. The unspoken logic of the global gay gaze is something like, “That must be global, it’s kind of like me.” While advocates of global gay identities agree with Puri that the particular local context shapes the expression of queer identities, they nonetheless look at India in ways that recognize some sexual minorities as fellow global gays and fail to connect with other potential candidates for this recognition. Concepts travel and translate within both the concrete, material circumstances and the discursive practices by which the travel takes place and the translations are articulated. Material structures of travel and translation include: technologies (books, journals, newspapers, magazines, television, radio, internet); organizations (governments, NGOs, universities, activist groups, businesses, foundations, international organizations, professional groups, retail outlets, bars, cafés); systems of transfer (academic scholarships and exchanges, international business opportunities, conferences, workshops, tours, demonstrations, advertising, consumer habits); government and international policies (regulating travel, trade, immigration, finance, crime, conflict, and development aid); and patterns of immigration (legal and illegal, sought and coerced). Discursive practices include the ways that ideas or events can be articulated and imagined, the ways they are put into or kept out of circulation so that the speakers and writers of a language can make use of them. The practices for making meaning that are available in a culture include modes of address, processes of recognition, patterns of naming, grammatical standards, rhetorical styles, and other practices of intelligibility. The means of enunciation that can operate in a place, the desires that can be legitimately articulated, the people who have standing to speak with authority—all these are aspects of discursive practices. The key figures of “global” and “local” become complex figures of speech set within unequal power relations. Global and local are ways of making meaning, not actual stable physical places. They are interpretive frames, not transhistoric essences or fixed traits of places. They require discursive categories and material arrangements that people have invented to stabilize and make sense of the flows of stuff around the world. Every global is somebody’s local, but not everybody’s local is equally authoritative or desired. Explorations of cultural translation helps explain why globalization often looks a lot like colonialism. The colonial gaze actively, selectively recognizes some sexual subjects and not others; colonial institutions validate some domestic arrangements but not others. The concepts of global and local ride piggyback on prior colonizations, obscuring the inequalities they help create and hiding the unintended consequences of looking at the world largely from its more powerful sites.

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Media Of all the “stuff” that circulates globally, words and images are among the fastest and most nimble of travelers. Representation is a field of power in which meaning is enforced through repetition, and what counts as clarity is achieved through insistence. The institutions of media—internet, television, radio, newspapers, cell phones, and theaters, among others—move pictures and ideas at remarkable speeds in many directions. These words and images produce as well as represent the world; the people or institutions with the most power to control these circulations are able to exercise the most influence over the stories that can be told. Increasing concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few global conglomerates limits diversity and restricts access to markets. At the same time, access to some aspects of the local and global apparatus producing and circulating images and ideas is increasingly available via the internet to nonelites, who usually bring different interests to their production and consumption of media products. Media Gaze Media products allow us to see and hear the world and in the process they help produce the world that we are able to see and hear. The gazes of media are manysided, including both the production and the reception of images and ideas. There are the practices by which people are represented by others—usually powerful others who own and control media outlets, including film studios, cable companies, and news outlets. In this case the gaze generally moves from the more powerful to the less powerful, telling stories that tend to support hegemonic arrangements. There are also practices by which people represent themselves; these practices may reproduce the dominant relations or may contest them and often do both at the same time. There are also complex practices of reception by which people receive, sort, translate, and engage the representations that come their way. The essays by Yano and Yau Ching on Japanese girls are “book ends” for exploring the globalized production and circulation of representations, including both good girls, who confirm established racial/national/gender arrangements, and bad girls, who interrupt them. Yano’s account of the popular Japanese soap opera Sakura analyzes the making and viewing of officially sanctioned stories about what it means to be properly Japanese. The young female lead character is a world traveler who nonetheless comes to represent the “real” Japan, becoming a diaspora source for object lessons in docile, “cute,” innocent but alluring Japanese femininity. In contrast, Yau Ching’s journey into the world of incarcerated Japanese girls invites us to see these girls talking back to Sakura’s iconic pieties, longing for but also rebelling against approved national “cuteness.” The delinquent girls, perceived by authorities as sexually dangerous, use visual media to represent themselves and to ne-



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gotiate with dominant media practices to become authors and performers of their representations rather than simply acted-upon by the representations of others. A third essay shifts our attention from the production to the consumption of globally circulating images. Derné’s analysis of the film-viewing practices of young, locally rooted middle-class men in India highlights their selective encounters with western images of sexuality and gender. Consumption of Hollywood films offers these men new images of masculinity, which they often embrace, and new images of femininity, which they generally disdain. They approve of globalizing representations of gender and sexuality that enhance their traditional privileges over women, while dismissing the images that might reduce men’s control over women’s sexuality. Consuming images, like making them, is a thoroughly active, interpretive, temporal process and not a passive incorporation of the “already there.” Visual media offer opportunities to examine representations of bodies and to track the relations of bodily images to national, corporate, and family agendas. Girls and women are typically placed differently than boys and men. Females are often utilized as repositories of tradition: the young and eager Sakura, like the absent women in Indian movie theatres, can be taken by audiences to represent proper Japanese and Indian gender traditions (thus relieving men of that obligation), while the disobedient girls in Japanese correctional facilities or the brazen, exposed women in Hollywood films represent the limitless dangers of “fallen” women. Bad girls, it turns out, are useful to producing good girls; the bad girls are the necessary outside, the needed violation of virtue that confirms its value. Audiences come to know what good girls are by learning what they are not: not overtly sexual, not assertive, not cheeky, not “out of control,” not present in public life. Bad girls make good girls look good. Representations of bodies are accompanied by compelling emotional connotations that make the images attractive or repulsive (or both). Media images produce and reflect emotional economies of desire, nostalgia, and shame. The shame associated with an improper Japanese female body out of control, or an Indian female body not properly covered, help create moral panic about violations of approved sexuality and nationality. Nostalgia for an officially endorsed past in which women and girls allegedly behaved themselves reinforces national agendas concerning proper domestic order. These economies of affect echo missionary representations of failing Native Hawaiian bodies, Samoan girls’ struggles to find livable images of femininity, and clashes among feminists over global sexual labor. Consumable images of desirable people and objects can be both instruments for controlling people and also, ironically, vehicles by which marginalized people gain some power by making themselves desirable objects of consumption. Global and local are again seen to be figures of speech allowing us to talk about relationships, not literal places or fixed ways of life.

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Labor, Migration, and Families Women’s laboring bodies are prominent in global flows. Women move around the world looking for work, learning new work, adapting to new places, working, sending money home, organizing relationships in their new workplaces, maintaining family and kin networks, working, working, working. In addition to the labor women traditionally do in agriculture, these essays show women producing industrial goods, providing caregiving and domestic services, and working in construction. Global women workers organize production, reproduction, domestic labor, and childcare, both their own and others’. Delving deeply into the concrete circumstances of specific global women workers shows them neither as pitiful victims nor as heroic immigrants but as resourceful women utilizing the opportunities at hand, under conditions of global inequalities, to meet their obligations and construct their lives. Filipina and Mexican women move across national boundaries to locate and perform domestic labor in other women’s homes. Indian and Chinese women move from rural to urban areas to find and perform factory or construction work. Adequate accounts of their lives must look at both the material circumstances of women’s global labor—the technologies, organizations, and institutional structures—and the semiotic expressions—the prevailing images, values, emotions, points of view, and language practices within which global women workers view themselves and are viewed by others. Some patterns emerge in these complex movements and activities. First, relations among local and global sites, between “the west” and “the rest,” or between the global north and the global south are complex and multilayered. Price and Riley investigate important movements within the global south, studying global labor migration taking place within state borders while involving multinational corporations, global financial institutions, and international consumer markets. The Dalian Economic Zone in northeastern China is particularly interesting in this regard because it hosts corporations from Japan and Korea, not just the United States and Europe. Filipina workers move not only to western nations but also to Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and other societies having enough wealthy families to generate demand for international domestic labor. Ibarra’s analysis of Mexican women moving to the U.S. mainland and Hawai‘i shows not a steady stream of movement to “the west” from “the rest” but a complicated cyclical movement combined with a longing to return. These multidirectional movements complicate easy dichotomies between local and global, east and west, or north and south. These terms still can be useful, marking crucial differences in the distribution of world resources, but they morph, when pushed, into metaphors marking shifting, unequal relations rather than actual physical places. Second, despite common allegations that globalization weakens states, gov-



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ernments actually play a central role in organizing women’s global labor. State enforcement of boundaries and criteria for crossing borders shape what is possible and available for global women workers. In the Philippines the government puts women in a contradictory position by pursuing economic policies that encourage women to leave the country in search of work while simultaneously enacting family policies that insist on women’s presence in the home. To be a good worker and good citizen is to be a bad mother, creating a no-win situation generating considerable stress and requiring extensive emotional labor on the part of globally working women. In China, on the other hand, while the state’s residency policy penalizes peasants for seeking urban lives, it does not explicitly single out women as “bad mothers” for leaving their families in search of work. On the contrary, rural women laboring in the Dalian Economic Zone in northeast China view themselves as good mothers because they are providing their children with resources and opportunities unavailable otherwise. Arguably, it is China’s attenuated socialist heritage, which stresses the value of public (as opposed to household) labor for women as well as men, compared to the strong, gender-conservative Catholic traditions in the Philippines, that could account for such differences in state policies. In the case of India, the state’s embrace of neoliberal economic reforms converts the manual occupations upon which women construction workers depend into either mechanized occupations for which women are considered ineligible or into casual, low-wage jobs with little security. Further, the Indian government’s reluctance to enforce labor reforms originating under earlier, more socialist states, and now discouraged by the international bodies enforcing neoliberal policies, coerces women into the uncertain world of casual, unskilled laborers. Governments enforcing neoliberal labor policies presume a “free market” yet regulate numerous boundaries, including those between states and between rural and urban areas, complicating neoliberal trends. Third, women who leave their homes to work elsewhere do not generally leave their families and kin networks behind. On the contrary, they continue to be tied to and reliant upon networks of family and community connections. A common recuperative story about globalization is that it frees the traveling worker from the obligations and confinements of kin relations at home.2 Yet women participating successfully in global labor markets call on kin and community relations to move to new places, establish new lives while maintaining families at home, secure and learn occupations, and negotiate the demands of jobs. Successful global workers must recruit kin selectively, using those relations that can sustain their circumstances while avoiding or reconfiguring other kin demands. Fourth, women’s participation in global paid labor does not produce a commensurate participation by men in unpaid family labor. Derné’s essay shows Indian men recruiting selectively those global images that expand masculine pre-

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rogative, while screening out and dismissing those that might challenge it. Parreñas demonstrates a parallel selectivity on the part of fathers in transnational Filipino families, where absent mothers, even though they contribute essential financial support to their families, must depend on other female kin to take up the labor of child-rearing that fathers decline to assume. In both instances, shifts in global arrangements are selectively adapted by men to support local patriarchies. Women, then, must balance the long-range demands of domestic labor and care of the young, sick, and elderly with the requirements of global labor. They do this by developing long-distance communication strategies (including text messaging, regular phone calls, e-mail, and care packages) and by organizing the labor of other women to substitute for absent mothers. Fifth, the vast preponderance of women who move in the global flows of laboring bodies are poor. They do physically and often emotionally demanding labor under difficult circumstances for uncertain remuneration and few assured benefits. Their circumstances make them both materially available and ideologically suitable for filling global labor shortages. Recent immigrants from Mexico to the United States, or from the Philippines to the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, are usually economically vulnerable; if they are illegal immigrants, they are legally and politically vulnerable as well. Indian women construction workers are rendered vulnerable by the increasing casualization of their trades, making employment uncertain and conditions severe. Chinese women factory workers, newly arrived from the villages to the economic zones, are rendered vulnerable by internal state policies reserving legal residency and access to services for those with permits to live in cities. Prevailing images of laboring women conspire with their material circumstances: middle and upper class women looking for domestic help often see Filipina and Mexican women as “naturally” suited for caregiving work, while international factory managers look for “nimble” Asian fingers attached to “obedient” Asian women, and women carrying headloads in Indian construction sites are viewed by bosses, husbands, and fathers as naturally suited for backbreaking labor but inappropriate for skilled trades. The expansion of global capitalism has not led to a decrease in marginalized, exploited labor, because the conditions producing unfree labor have also expanded. Sixth, serious attention to unfamiliar and perhaps unappealing points of view expressed by global women workers is critical to a robust account of globalizing circumstances of gendered labor. Why do women construction workers in India insist on preserving their unskilled, physically exhausting jobs? Why do they appeal to unions, NGOs, and the state to protect their jobs rather than mechanize them? Price’s essay requires us to question easy assumptions that mechanization of demanding physical labor counts as progress, or that training women in skilled trades will help them get better jobs. Why do women factory workers in the Dalian Eco-



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nomic Zone in China embrace their polluted, crowded industrial wasteland as “paradise”? Why do women who are willing to contest gender inequality in employment accept it in their homes? Riley’s essay challenges us to put aside ready judgments about preferred life choices and look instead at the women’s complex negotiations, using whatever resources are at hand, to create successful lives. “Successful lives,” for the women Riley interviews, are “modern,” that is, urban. Perhaps the highly mobile relocations of global capital create “the shadow space of ‘the north’ in the territory of the south,”3 so that rural migrant workers can see “paradise” in an urban economic zone.

Trafficking Globalism plus capitalism plus patriarchy produces global sex work. Global capitalism gives men and women incentive and opportunity to sell women’s bodies on an international market. Patriarchy devalues women as persons but values women’s bodies as sexual opportunities for men. In the fluid intersections of worldwide capitalist patriarchy, women’s bodies become global sexual commodities, exchanged through women’s migration for purposes of sexual labor. Sex trafficking is a high-profile topic in academic, governmental, and activist contexts. Feminists frame international prostitution as a logical consequence of globalization, not an isolated “downside” or unique “side effect.” Peach sketches ideological disputes within feminist analyses of trafficking, while Caraway stresses the structural, material flow of women around the world in the global sex trade. Feminists differ over the conceptual anchor through which they center their analyses: is global sexual labor primarily about sex, or primarily about labor? “Abolitionist” voices center sex, seeing prostitution as inherently demeaning to women who are victimized by criminal traffickers. Their solution is to rescue women, return victims to their homes, and arrest traffickers, not to decriminalize sex work or ameliorate the conditions under which it is performed. “Reformist” voices center work, seeing prostitutes as migrant laborers and traffickers as their transportation. The reformist solution is to change immigration policies, decriminalize sex work, and improve workers’ conditions of labor. At stake are critical ideological differences, substantial budgets, and vastly different structural implications for relating global sexual labor to other dimensions of globalization. The differences between “abolitionists” and “reformists” are amplified by the sorts of political coalitions they entertain. Abolitionist agendas tend to segue into the world of Christian evangelicals and the more conservative wing of the Republican Party in the United States. If sex work is primarily about sex, then controlling sex becomes important and moral panic over uncontrolled sexuality readily ensues. Like missionaries panicked over unrestrained Hawaiian bodies, abolitionists

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marshal states, churches, and NGOs to regulate the global sex trade and save or punish its participants. Reformist agendas, in contrast, tend to overlap with those of labor organizers and mass antiglobalization movements such as the regular protestors at IMF and WTO meetings. Rather than inciting moral panic over illicit and degrading sexuality, this constellation of actors expresses heightened political objections to all unfree labor. In their effort to position sexual labor as work, not sex, they tend to skirt prostitution’s particular degradations. As with other sorts of labor and community organizing, NGOs are big players in trafficking struggles: they produce knowledge about trafficking, lobby for policy changes at state and international levels, organize conferences and workshops, provide direct services to sex workers, and help sex workers organize. Global NGOs move ideas, ideologies, policies, and personnel around the world, making selective alliances with other players, including states, international organizations, churches, militias, political parties, interest groups, universities, and unions. The philosophical and material struggles among NGOs constitute an explosive field for international feminist politics. Peach and Caraway agree on both the limitations of human rights discourse as a response to trafficking and the crucial need for the resources of human rights to be available to sex workers. While rights talk is a flawed tool in that it may impose individualistic and property-based ideas of human worth onto situations calling for more collective approaches, it is a crucial tool nonetheless. Both authors urge us to put migrant women themselves in the center of our analyses, privileging their complex and contradictory stories about global sex work in our own understandings. Since migrant sexual laborers’ own stories thoroughly mix “the sex story” with “the work story,” the dualistic opposition of sex versus work will have to give way to a more integrated and contextualized understanding.

Global Militarization Militarism often seems to stand outside of globalization because wars and armies are generally activities of states (although nonstate terrorism complicates this understanding) and because violence seems to separate people and places, while global flows connect them. Yet global flows of violence, arms, soldiers, mercenaries, contractors, strategies, environmental destruction, and bellicose gendered imaginaries are part and parcel of globalization. Militarization, and by implication demilitarization, is a complex process with a long history and many layers. Militarization happens step by step, through dense networks of microdecisions about how we live, work, and think as well as through obvious public policies, violent colonial histories, and visible macrodecisions through which elites organize the world and use its resources. Militarization also marks sites of struggle, contests over not just how to militarize but whether to do so.



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Global economic inequalities are created and enforced by militarized means on many levels. First, the enormous human suffering created by neoliberal economic policies is a form of structural violence. Second, security forces, as Enloe explains, break strikes, discipline workers, quell union organizing, and make the global south safe for capital investment. Third, the legal and illicit production, distribution, and trade in weapons mark a global flow of enormous proportions. The arms trade is not “outside” of globalization, not a strange perversion or unfortunate side effect of global trade. Like the trade in women’s bodies, trade in weapons is the predictable consequence of combining global flows with willingness to sell anything to anybody. Fourth, there are enormous opportunity costs to global militarization. As Kirk shows, governments allow environmental destruction in exchange for membership in global systems of military bases, training, and recruitment. Governments erode or abandon health, education, and welfare services to invest their resources in war. Colonial relations are reinforced by global militarization, as the land and oceans of indigenous people are used for weapons testing, military bases, training facilities, toxic dumps, and “sacrifice zones.” Fifth, expectations about properly masculine and properly feminine identities recruit some men and women into warrior roles while sidelining others. Images of warlike men and dependent women shape available understandings of masculinity and femininity; these floating signifiers also segue into colonial contexts, as Teaiwa shows, marking colonizers as properly strong and masculine while the colonized are written as receptively feminine and needing help. Not surprisingly, colonized people may respond defensively, claiming their men and their governments are just as manly and warlike as the next man or state. Sixth, sexual violence circulates with the movement of militaries. Just as global prostitution is the logical consequence of globalism + capitalism + patriarchy, rape, domestic violence, and sexual abuse are the predictable companions of global militarism. Armies use sex to torture prisoners; militias use rape as a kind of ethnic cleansing; civilian women and girls around military bases are sexual prey, while military men are consumers of sexual services. Rape and sexual abuse also take place within militaries, not just between them, confusing definitions of “the enemy” for women who are soldiers. Lastly, hierarchical, bellicose cultural imaginaries are hot commodities in militarized global communications. Far from representing a breakdown of communications, militarization works through intensified communication flows that naturalize top-down authority and interpret differences in terms of absolute “otherness.” Militarized societies neglect the possibilities of diplomacy or other strategies to resolve conflict, and become accustomed to solving (or pretending to solve) problems with violence; violence becomes routine, ordinary, “just the way things are.” Yet demilitarization struggles are also global, recruiting counterflows of language and material to imagine a different world.

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Reflecting on the State While globalization is often blamed or praised for weakening state sovereignty, states’ actions and nonactions are central to women’s globalizing lives. The term “the state” comes apart, showing states to be sites of conflict rather than unified centers of power. Contradictory gender projects emerge within neoliberal states: the government of the Philippines urges women both to go abroad to make money and stay home to raise children, and leaves women, rather than men or governments, to sort out the ensuing difficulties. The government of China embraces neoliberal economic reforms, creating conditions that pull peasants to the urban economic zones, yet regulates rural-to-urban labor flows, leaving the penalized workers to figure out how to live with the problems thus created. The Chinese government officially declares equality between men and women, while allowing privatization to create greater gender inequalities. Women’s organizations aligned with the ruling Communist Party turn to the discursive resources of “gender” analysis to negotiate the conflict between official declarations of equality and circumstances of inequality in times of rapid change. Yet the inequalities that the concept of gender helps them name are unlikely to get much attention in state policies because neoliberal economic reforms move the state out of the business of intervening to ensure public goods, such as equality between men and women, and into the business of privatizing production of goods and services. Most governments face some version of the contradictions entailed by combining extreme commodification of women’s bodies with efforts to control women’s sexuality. Girls and women are taught, with regard to their bodies, to advertise but not to sell. Those who “go too far,” who sell their sexual services, may be incarcerated to be taught proper domestic virtues. Or they may be caught in the crossfire between the categories of “trafficking victim” and “global prostitute.” In either case, geographic and social borders are sites of intense state activity around gender, sexuality, and labor management. The image of the vulnerable young woman forced into prostitution has become an icon for strengthening border controls, while states pushing neoliberal reforms are uninterested in addressing the economic misery that recruits women into global labor flows in the first place. The “war on terror” intensifies militarization of borders, making migrant workers’ lives harder; immigrants continue to be “pulled” to the greater economic opportunities available in industrialized states or urban areas, but “pushed back” by intensified scrutiny and heightened danger attendant to border crossings. One might speculate that the war on terror mostly terrorizes illegal immigrants and their families. States police borders ideologically as well as militarily. The Japanese melodrama Yano analyzes is produced by the Japanese Public Broadcasting Corporation, a government-supported station with a strong mandate to promote traditional



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cultural values. Sakura can be seen as a containment site for imagining proper gender and racial membership in the nation. It can also serve as a marker of the ironies of border policing in a global context, since the ideal young Japanese woman is found not in Japan but in Hawai‘i. The containment process can work in the opposite direction as well: small, struggling Pacific Island nations may selectively let in ideologies and institutions from “outside,” including missionaries, medicine, law, investment, and militaries, in an attempt to secure their precarious sovereignty among larger, predatory states. Oceanic governments’ tragic strategy of allowing border porosity, within the relentless context of global inequality, lets in the stuff that kills as well as the stuff that may help survive the killing.4 If borders are sites of magnified state actions, other political spaces may be just the opposite: sites where states fail to act, often with significant gender consequences. The neoliberal state in India declines to enforce labor legislation while facilitating the mechanization of labor that displaces women workers. Governments in the Philippines, South Korea, and Okinawa resist enforcing minimal environmental protections while making land and water available for U.S. military uses. Where states decline to act, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often step in, organizing at community levels, tapping foundation funding, and articulating agendas to which states and international organizations must respond. The “NGOization” of global feminism can be seen as a response to, among other things, the void created by the atrophy of state programs addressing women’s health, education, job training, welfare, or sheer survival.

Feminist Methods To investigate how feminist globalization research does its work, we borrow Sandra Harding’s useful distinctions between method, methodology, and epistemology. Harding describes research methods as “techniques for gathering evidence,” methodology as “a theory and analysis of how research should proceed,” and epistemology as “issues about an adequate theory of knowledge or justificatory strategy”(1987: 2). At the level of method, researchers are concerned with what counts as data; where do we look for our evidence and how do we recognize it? At the level of methodology, we ask how we analyze our data and what theoretical arguments provide the context for that analysis. At the level of epistemology, we focus on the (usually hidden) assumptions about what counts as knowledge and who count as knowers. It is tempting to think of these as building blocks, with method as the most basic, methodology as intermediate, and epistemology as the larger meta-question. However, such a linear arrangement evades the necessary link of epistemology back to method, since identification of something that can be called data is itself reflective of epistemological assumptions about knowing.5

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Data can be seen, following Donna Haraway’s brilliant metaphor in her essay “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” (1989), as organized into dioramas, that is, framed spaces of relevant statements, observations, and relationships within which researchers look for patterns. Dioramas, Haraway shows, are made, not found. Research projects take shape around researchers’ implicit assumptions and explicit choices about what stays “inside” and what falls “outside” the frame of relevant questioning. There is no formula for deciding what is in and what is out. Instead, data dioramas take their shape through sustained, meticulous questioning about what there is to know, who is best positioned to know, and how knowing takes place. An intriguing diorama follows unexpected leads and cultivates nonobvious links. Some threads of connection between available facts, some relationships among actors, will inevitably be privileged as researchers construct their frames; others will be backgrounded, as researchers “connect the dots” by following some possible trails and leaving others undeveloped. Method: Selection of Data While none of these essays is directly about research methods, the authors in this volume are explicit (within space constraints) about how they conducted their work. They have immersed themselves in the rich geographic, historical, and conceptual material they have studied, paying careful attention to the identification and selection of data. Nine out of the sixteen essays utilized interviews and were entrepreneurial in seeking access to interview subjects. Often, repetition of interviews and long-term relations with their research communities blurred the distinction between interviews and ethnographies. Ibarra explains her “snowball” method of contacting Mexicanas in California, where one would expect scholars to study Mexican immigrants, and in Hawai‘i, where no one has thought to do that before. Yau Ching gives a similarly detailed account of gaining access to incarcerated girls in Japan and constructing a research setting in which the girls represent themselves outside the constraints of official channels. Both researchers illuminated the challenge of creating relationships with research subjects who are in highly constrained situations (illegal immigrants or institutionalized teenagers) and have reasons to be suspicious of authorities. Interviews concerning migrant mothers investigated their relations from many directions: while Ibarra interviewed women migrants in the receiving country, Parreñas conducted interviews with the children left behind in the sending countries. Riley conducted sustained, often repeated interviews with migrant women factory workers in their places of employment, their homes, her home, and available public spaces in the enterprise zone. Derné and Riley solicited interviewees in public places, while Kirk, Puri, Min, and Price tapped activist and academic networks. Several writers combined their intellectual research with their political activ-



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ism and personal involvement in the communities they studied. Their analyses are, in Nancy Naples’s words, analyses “constructed through interactions between researchers and the persons researched in ever-changing social and political environments” (2003: 198). Their perspectives were “achieved in community” and intended to contribute to the further development of communities (ibid., emphasis in original). Kirk’s extensive connections with anti-bases activists across the Pacific and Asia gave her access to politicized communities already hard at work collecting information and creating communications about U.S. military use of their communities. Her research both relied on and helped to create the East Asia–U.S.–Puerto Rico Women’s Network Against Militarism, a collection of feminist individuals and organizations struggling against militarization. Enloe’s global work as a scholar and activist connects her with worldwide networks of grassroots political struggles.6 Several of the other feminist scholars she cites are or were her students in the innovative Women’s Studies doctoral program at Clark University, which cultivates “the academic-practitioner model in which theory, practice and social action are integrated.”7 Price’s interviews with activists and construction laborers in India were framed by her own history working in construction and organizing workplaces. She participated in workshops held by the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) and in labor actions organized by women workers and organizers in India. Teaiwa’s analysis of militarism in the Pacific took shape in the context of her poetry, writing, and performance in and with Pacific communities as well as her participation in Pacific women’s and antinuclear groups.8 Puri’s links to gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender activists in India were both a vehicle for enabling her research and a self-reflective aspect of the research. Min’s involvement in a development project in China gave her personal experience with the travels of the concept of “gender” among activists. Caraway and Peach organize and participate in conferences, workshops, and publications from the field of trafficking activism in U.N. and regional contexts. Yau Ching combined her study of media and her production of media projects with her activism with and on behalf of incarcerated teenagers in East Asia. These scholars added layers to their interview material by placing themselves within the struggles they were studying. They negotiated the shifting boundaries of being an “insider” and an “outsider” at the same time.9 In addition to interviews and participant observation, other data identified in these essays include government documents (both historical documents such as missionary records, and contemporary legal and constitutional documents, including family law); films, TV shows, poetry, and novels; and amateur multimedia projects. Data are identified on multiple levels: Derné looked at films and at men viewing films; Yano examined central tropes and themes in the soap opera as well as the state and commercial operations producing the show; Raiskin examined the textual practices of Figiel’s novel as well as the novelist’s published statements and the

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colonial educational process framing both the fictional story and the indigenous readers’ relations to the story. The multiplication of levels of analysis is particularly striking in Yau Ching’s work: using multiple visual and auditory recording devices, she studied the girls while enabling the girls to study themselves. Methodology: What Do They Do with Their Data? Scholars assemble their data to look for patterns, analyze relationships, and find the stories that reside in, or can be imagined through, the material. Feminist scholars invite women and gender into the center of their analyses, using the analytic energies of feminist theory, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and other variations on contemporary critical theory to explore power relations. They presume that women are significant actors who are central to the workings of institutions and that gender relations, intersecting with racial, class, sexual and colonial relations, always already shape men and women’s lives. Theorizing power from least advantaged positions, they sustain analytic curiosity about the activities and ideas of women and the working of gender. Some of the essays in this book concentrate on identifying relations of cause and effect, as Enloe encourages us to do, to understand the multiple causes of globalization and militarization. Others focus primarily on meaning, articulating contending interpretations of data or asking what the material can mean, especially from less privileged points of view. Price, Ibarra, and Riley invite us to hear immigrant Indian, Mexican, and Chinese women’s accounts of their global work, to take seriously the interpretations these women offer of their lives. While feminist research is generally premised on a commitment to listen respectfully to those we study, researchers still need to make informed judgments on the validity of our subjects’ views. Respecting the views of those we interview does not mean always accepting their claims to truth; researchers may instead interrogate the points of view they encounter for the ways such perspectives reinforce patriarchal or colonial power. Derné enters the perspective of Indian male filmgoers, not to persuade us that the men are right about what they see, but rather to explain the ways in which the men respond to gender anxieties by selectively embracing global media to enhance their power over women. Riley introduces us to women who see the dismal urbanscapes of economic zones as “paradise,” not because she agrees with them but because she is curious about the process that produces their enthusiasm. Peach and Caraway intervene in the contending interpretations of global sexual labor currently dominating international discussions, unraveling their logic and tracing their implications in order to find a way out of the current impasse between those who see sexual labor as primarily about sex and those who see it as primarily about work. A significant methodological element of these essays is their attention to genre. Soap operas, historical archives, novels, NGO literature, films, legal documents,



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poems, and interviews are kinds of texts requiring specific attention. Genres employ characteristic tropes, put into circulation particular rhetorical gestures, tap or produce relevant emotional economies. Reading these diverse texts, and positioning the researcher and the reader in relation to the texts, segues from the methodological to the epistemological dimension of inquiry. Epistemology: How Do We Know What We Know? Selection of research data always circles back around to epistemological questions because the appearance of claims that can count as facts, and facts that can count as relevant, is always already shaped by prior understandings of how we know what we know. While these essays are steeped in empirical data, they are not positivist; that is, they do not assume a one-to-one correspondence between words and things. Rather, they locate the practices of interpretation within the heart of their analyses; the relation of words to things is always mediated by the location of the speakers, the points of view shaping knowledge claims, and the realm of intelligibility within which statements can be recognized as legitimate. Empirical work that understands itself to be “selective, partial, positioned” (Lather 1991: 78) can provide nuanced descriptions and explanations without assuming that the world is a stable site of fixed meanings. Reflections on the relationship of the researcher with her/his material help locate the research gaze and articulate the practices of creating, not simply finding, meanings. Many of these essays develop a feminist hermeneutic: that is, they articulate and privilege a neglected and devalued point of view, pull it to the center of the analysis, and use it to generate a critique of the power relations that produced the neglect and devaluation in the first place. Feminist hermeneutics allow readers to enter the lifeworlds of the research subjects, imagine previously unknown worlds, and understand unfamiliar others as creatures of reason. Feminist hermeneutics allow us to articulate submerged discourses and tell neglected stories. Metaxas’s essay honors the subaltern discourse of Native Hawaiian healers, suppressed but not destroyed by missionary hegemonies. Her hermeneutic is suspicious of the missionary’s accounts of Native Hawaiians because she locates the missionaries’ points of view within the structural context of colonial power inequalities. Raiskin uncovers indigenous stories hidden in or coopted by colonial accounts of Samoa. She takes readers into Pacific Island stories in order to apprehend the gaze of colonized people back onto the anthropologists, missionaries, developers, and educators who are usually empowered to speak authoritatively about “natives.” While both writers are in the complex position of nonindigenous scholars doing research on indigenous topics, they position themselves not as speaking for native people but as speaking with them and others about colonial encounters.10 Ibarra and Price employ a similar tool of hermeneutics when they include lengthy

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quotations from the Mexican and Indian migrant women workers they interview. These writers frame extensive quotations within a context that recovers the sense of their interviewees’ words and renders their worlds intelligible. Yau Ching, Derné, Riley, and Kirk exemplify a comparable hermeneutic tool—active, patient listening, over a considerable period of time, to bring the lifeworlds of delinquent girls, film-viewing men, migrant women, and political activists into focus for readers residing outside those worlds. At the same time, readers may find overlap between their lives and the worlds these essays portray, since girls and women in all parts of the world, including college classrooms, may have experience with laboring under extremely difficult conditions, or leaving their children to find work, or selling their sexuality, or injuring themselves. In some cases a powerful hermeneutic can create empathy for an unfamiliar life, while in other cases it can clarify shared struggles. While feminist hermeneutics asks, “What do things mean?” feminist genealogy asks, “How do things mean?” At the genealogical level, authors are hyperaware of, and reflective on, the meaning-making practices they employ. At this level, scholars interrogate prior hermeneutics by questioning the questions; we ask, “Why are we asking these questions?” in order to make space for other questions to be posed. Genealogy looks behind hermeneutics to see the conditions of possibility for telling particular stories and articulates the unspoken discursive context within which some stories are considered intelligible while others cannot be heard.11 Puri’s essay does a great deal of its work at the genealogical level, since her task is to show how an ostensibly liberatory discourse, that of the global gay, unintentionally reproduces the oppressions and exclusions it arose to combat. The discourse of the global gay, she argues, is dependent on the very universalizing move it seeks to contest. Puri pushes her readers to ask how the claims of the global gay are produced in discourse and how some nonnormative sexual identities get to be the “real” global gays while others are not candidates for that position. By calling attention to other nonconforming sexualities not included in the “global gaze,” she shows how one manifestation of a phenomenon is taken to be the proper one. Yau Ching’s essay also does a great deal of its work at the genealogical level. Her deconstructive move shows how mainstream Japanese society becomes dependent on what it claims to oppose. The society constructs a self-contradictory sexual economy based on childhood innocence and reproductive sexuality within marriage, along with a political economy of unrestrained consumerism, including commodification of female bodies for sale or trade. If girls are defined as innocent, then when they are not innocent, they are not proper girls. Girls who find entrepreneurial opportunities to enhance their power by selling their innocence are the logical but condemned outcomes of these contradictions. They become scapegoats for the incompatibilities of the larger social order. Yau Ching asks



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how childhood is produced in discourse and shows how incarcerated girls talk back to discourses of shame. Genealogical thinking looks for ways in which stories may be told otherwise. Essays that do their work largely at the genealogical level pay close attention to the details of their material because they are looking for the things that do not quite fit, the material that, if taken seriously, undermines the conventional interpretations. Data that “escape, exceed, and complicate” (Lather 1991: 125) the prevailing stories provide openings to shift the direction of interpretation. Yano’s analysis of the Japanese soap opera Sakura makes genealogical moves by showing how a form of identity seen as natural is actually the artifact of a dense network of discursive and material conditions of production. Parreñas similarly maps contradictory state policies to show how the good worker/failed mother is produced within the available subject positions of the Philippines’ discursive economies. Parreñas and Caraway trace the ironic process by which NGOs working with unconventional families (transnational mothers or sex workers) develop a stake in their subjects’ oppression since it is the alleged severity of the problem that legitimized the NGOs in the first place. Raiskin makes genealogical moves when she looks at the conditions under which certain stories about Pacific Islands can be told, and the changing material and linguistic circumstances that allow different stories to be told. Genealogical analysis proceeds by looking for the tensions within texts, the sites of contradiction where competing agendas or naming practices contend with one another and where people, often under hard-pressed circumstances, negotiate those spaces of contradiction. Genealogical inquiry insists that facts never speak for themselves, that clarity is always ideological, thus bringing epistemology back around to investigate the status and selection of what can count as data. A final question haunts feminist research: who benefits from our work? Feminist researchers struggle with the challenge of studying others without contributing to their oppression. How can we “give back” to the communities we study, sharing the benefits of our research with our research subjects? How can we include ourselves in the research gaze, so that we, too, are learners, and those we study are recognized as teachers? Sometimes those we study benefit from our literacy skills, as Puri recounts, or our access to academic resources, as Min indicates. Hawaiians and Samoans may benefit from insights into colonizer’s reasoning and gain allies in their struggles to resist colonialism, as Raiskin’s and Metaxas’s essays suggest. Teaiwa’s analysis of the relations producing and contesting militarism in Samoa can support activists working to reconfigure the relations between manliness, postcolonial struggles, and war. Similarly, Enloe’s insights can guide feminist analyses of global militarization just as anti-bases organizers in South Korea, Okinawa, and the Philippines benefit from Kirk’s careful listening, meticulous gathering of details, and assistance in writing counterhistories of their communities’ demilitariza-

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tion struggles. Women construction workers organizing in India can benefit from Price’s analysis of their strategies and tactics. Incarcerated teenagers get an opportunity to narrate themselves in Yau Ching’s workshops. Women struggling to reconfigure their relationships with men may benefit from insights, such as those Derné and Parreñas offer, into the ways some men have found to turn global changes to the service of traditional male privilege. With the help of Ibarra and Riley, immigrant women get an opportunity to tell their rich stories and be received with dignity. Consumers of global media reading Yano’s analysis harvest critical insight into the production and circulation of hegemonic images of nation, race, and gender. Critical observers of the dense machinations around trafficking reap insights into current controversies from Caraway and Peach, as well as resources to approach the issue in a fresh way. Women and men contending with globalizations’ numerous insults and burdens get help in publicizing their struggles to a broader audience. While it is prudent to be modest about the effects that one book can produce, these essays nonetheless strive to make contributions to social change. They respond to the challenge we set out in our introduction—to think outside of “us” and “them” dichotomies, to do the hard work of cultivating feminist imaginaries that enact (rather than just call for) multidimensional analysis. Out of these essays may come intellectual and political resources for imagining a better world, along with the humility to attend critically to the echoes of our opponents in ourselves.

Notes 1. This paragraph was written in conjunction with Judith Raiskin. For an overview of Pacific Island literature and writers, see Lal and Fortune (2000: 516–538). 2. Our thanks to S. Charusheela for her insights into relations between women’s global labor and their kin networks. 3. Our thanks to Jungmin Seo for this felicitous phrase (personal communication, January 2, 2006) and for his insights into labor migration within the global south. 4. For analysis of the “letting in/keeping out” strategy among Hawaiian governments and sovereignty activists in the context of struggles over “gay marriage,” see Goldberg-Hiller (2004). 5. For a more sustained analysis of empirical, hermeneutic, and genealogical work in feminism, see DiPalma and Ferguson (2006). 6. See Enloe’s extensive footnotes in Maneuvers (2000) for documentation of women’s worldwide demilitarization activism. 7. See Clark University’s Women’s Studies homepage for their global/local focus of feminist doctoral work. http://www.clarku.edu. 8. “Terensia, Amplified Poetry and Songs” is a poetry and music CD of Teresia Teaiwa and Sia Figiel. http://home.hawaii.rr.com/dougwords/terenesia/.



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9. For a discussion of the discursive construction of insider and outsider research positions, and the power imbalance between researcher and researched, see Naples (2003: 49–66). 10. For reflections on the relation between indigenous research material and nonindigenous researchers, see L. Smith (1999). 11. For a more extensive analysis of hermeneutics and genealogy in feminism, see Ferguson (1993) chapter one.

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Contributors

Nancie Caraway received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawai‘i.  Her book Segregated Sisterhood:  Racism and the Politics of American Feminism won the APSA best book on women and politics award.  She consults on and researches women’s human rights initiatives and directs a project on human trafficking in Asia at the Globalization Research Center, University of Hawai‘i. Steve Derné (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2002) is Professor of Sociology at SUNYGeneseo. He is the author of Culture in Action: Family Life, Emotion, and Male Dominance in Banaras, India (1995), Movies, Masculinity and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men’s Filmgoing in India (2000), and Globalization on the Ground (2008). Cynthia Enloe received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and is Research Professor in the Department of International Development, Community, and Social Change. She pioneered feminist studies in militarism. Her most recent book is Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link (2007). Kathy Ferguson is Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Hawai‘i. She is writing a book on Emma Goldman’s political thinking. She researches gender and militarism in Hawai‘i with co-author Phyllis Turnbull; they wrote Oh, Say, Can You See? The Semiotics of the Military in Hawai‘i (Minnesota, 1999). Maria Ibarra (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2004) is Associate Professor of Chicana/o Studies at San Diego State University. She received her Ph.D. from the Anthropology Department at University of California, Santa Barbara. Publications include “The Tender Trap” in Aztlan (2003) and “Buscando la Vida: Mexican Immigrant Women’s Memories of Home, Yearning, and Border Crossings” in Frontiers (2003).

400

Contributors

Gwyn Kirk (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2002) holds a Ph.D. in Political Sociology from the London School of Economics. She has taught Women’s Studies and Sociology courses at several U.S. academic institutions. She edits a text/reader for introductory Women’s Studies courses, Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives, now in its fourth edition (2007), together with Margo Okazawa-Rey. Sally Engle Merry is Professor of Anthropology and Law and Society at New York University. Her most recent book is Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (2006). Virginia Metaxas (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2003) is Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, CT. She received her Ph.D. in history from SUNY Stony Brook in 1984 and conducts research on women’s history and the history of medicine and health. Min Dongchao (Rockefeller Fellow, Fall 2003) is Professor of Philosophy in the School of Social Science at the Shanghai University. She received a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. Her most recent publication is “Duihua (Dialogue) In-between: A Process of Translating the Term ‘Feminism’ in China,” in Interventions. Monique Mironesco completed her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Hawai‘i in 2003. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i, West O‘ahu. Her dissertation analyzed the experiences of returning women students in women’s studies courses, and her current research investigates the connections between gender and local food communities. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2004) is Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She received her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is the co-edited volume Asian Diasporas: New Conceptions, New Frameworks (2007). Lucinda Joy Peach (Rockefeller Fellow, Fall 2003) is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University in Washington, DC. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of Legislating Morality: Religious Identity and Moral Pluralism (2002). Vivian Price (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2003) holds her Ph.D. in Political Science and is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills. She produced Transnational Tradeswomen, a film



Contributors

401

on women construction workers in Thailand, Taiwan, Singapore, India, Pakistan, and Japan, and a work-in-progress on the Bracero Program. Jyoti Puri (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2003) is Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Simmons College, Boston. She earned her Ph.D. from Northeastern University. Her most recent book is Encountering Nationalism (2004) and she co-edited a special issue for Gender and Society (2005) on state, nation, sexuality, and gender. Judith Raiskin (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2002) is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, wrote Snow on the Cane Fields: Women’s Writing and Creole Subjectivity (University of Minnesota, 1996), and edited the Norton Edition of Wide Sargasso Sea (1999). Nancy Riley (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2003) is Professor of Anthropology/Sociology at Bowdoin College. She received her doctorate from John Hopkins. She has written a book-length examination of Dalian migrant women’s lives, titled Laboring in Paradise: Gender, Work and Family in a Chinese Economic Zone. Saskia Sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Her newest book is entitled Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales, and Subjects (2007). Teresia K. Teaiwa is Senior Lecturer and Program Director of the Pacific Studies Center at the University of Wellington, Victoria, New Zealand. Her most recent publication is “On Analogies: Rethinking the Pacific in a Global Context,” in The Contemporary Pacific (Spring 2006)18 (1):71–88. Christine Yano is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa. Her book Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Race/Ethnicity, and Culture in a Japanese American Beauty Pageant in Honolulu, Hawai‘i was published in 2006. Yau Ching (Rockefeller Fellow, Spring 2004) is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University. Recent books include Sexual Politics (2006) (in Chinese) and Filming Margins: Tang Shu Shuen, a Forgotten Hong Kong Woman Director (2004) (in English). An award-winning filmmaker, she has made more than fifteen films and videos.

Index

abject, 140–141, 153–156 Abolitionists, 237–246, 249–250, 270n.3, 345; moral views of, 237–238 activism: anti-bases, 296, 299, 302, 303, 305, 309, 311, 314, 316n.18, 351; anti-colonial, 73, 337; anti-immigration, 266; anti-trafficking, 234–237, 239–246, 345, 351; and China, 81, 84, 86–87, 95–97, 97n.1, 351; environmental, 3, 211, 310, 312–313; feminist, 5, 75, 96–97, 197, 290, 311, 331–332, 335–336; global gay, 11, 61, 71, 73, 76; human rights, 5, 246, 248–250, 265, 311, 312; and India, 60, 70–71, 73, 74–76, 128, 136; labor, 119n.17, 128, 197, 202, 205–208, 257, 351; migration, 259, 260; NGO, 4; Nikkei, 113; Pacific, 326; peace, 311, 322, 331, 355, 356n.6; scholarship and, 1, 59, 254, 276, 322, 335, 336, 339, 350–351, 354; sexual rights, 73, 351, 356n.4. See also Abolitionists; Reformists adivasis (tribal peoples), 199 Afghanistan, 294, 318, 324, 329, 330 Africa, 21, 276, 286, 287, 291n.3; small arms trade in, 276, 283 agencies: government, 193, 197, 204, 256, 258, 266, 308, 309, 317; international, 97, 163, 196, 204, 210, 211n.3, 258, 269; recruiting, 256; remittance, 194n.12 agency, 2, 162, 164, 174, 175, 249, 321; Chinese women’s, 10; Japanese girls’, 11, 139, 148; migrants’, 235; Nikkei’s, 114; Pacific peoples’, 319; sex workers’, 237, 239, 242, 248, 270n.3; voice and, 10, 11; workers’, 161, 163, 164 ali‘i, 46–48 All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF), 80, 81, 85–87, 92–95, 96–97, 228n.1, 338 Alofa: and education, 24; “girl lessons” for, 28, 30; as narrator, 16, 22, 27, 28; and Peace Corps teacher, 25, 30; in relation to Siniva, 17, 18–20, 29–30, 33; and traditional Samoan culture, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33

American Samoa, 319, 324, 325, 328, 330–331; Figiel and, 336 Anatomia, 1838, 37–38, 48–49, 53nn.1, 2 anthropology/anthropologists, 43, 61, 83, 164–165, 281; in Pacific, 16, 22, 25, 31, 33n.1, 353 anxiety, 7, 8, 9, 10; translation and, 82. See also moral panic Aquino, President Corazon, 176, 178 army/armies, 278; British, 289, 326, 332n.6; East Timorese, 290; Fijian, 289; labor, 200; U.S., 304–305, 313, 325, 327–328, 332n.4. See also military Asadora, 102–105, 118nn.7, 8, 119n.13. See also Nikkei; Sakura Asian-American, 118n.6; critics, 20; organizations, 312; women, 101, 117n.1. See also media; Nikkei assault, 327; on gays and lesbians, 64; rifle, 292n.14; sexual, 9, 72, 130, 315n.9 Australia, 22, 24, 32, 77n.5, 259, 266, 319, 332; and East Timor, 284, 287, 292n.17 Axis of Evil, 315n.4. See also War on Terror “bad girls,” 28, 139, 340, 341 Balikatan, 296 Balikbayan (return migrant) box, 191, 194n.12 Bangladesh, 204, 265, 270n.5, 291n.5 beedi workers/beedi-rollers, 198, 209 Beijing Declaration, 85. See also United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women Belau, 22, 318–319, 322–324 binary(ies), 66, 147–148; gender and, 9; globalization and, 3, 68–69, 71, 82. See also dualism bisexual, 59, 60, 74–75, 351. See also gay; heterosexuality; homosexuality; lesbian Bishop, Artemas, 44–47, 51, 54n.18 body(ies): Christian views of, 37, 39, 48; dying, 26, 29, 330; foreign, 111; and healing, 4; media representations of, 101, 107, 111, 129, 149, 341; mind and, 2; national, 102, 146; Native Hawaiian,

404

Index

48–49, 52; out of control, 107, 145–146, 149, 341; searches of, 291n.6; sexuality and, 39, 101; standards of beauty for, 121, 129, 132, 134–135; teenage female, 145, 149–150, 156; transvestite, 32 border(s): control of, 165, 174, 264, 348–349; crossings, 12n.5, 175, 233–235, 262, 343, 348; geographic, 39, 84, 168, 175, 238, 241, 245, 254, 260, 342, 348; militarized, 164, 297, 348; and spaces, 5–7, 335; of states, 349 breadwinner(s), 113, 176, 184, 192 brothel(s), 248, 250n.1, 264; and foreigners, 47; rescuing women from, 238, 252n.12, 259; and the state, 74, 236, 251n.6, 270n.10 Bush administration, 283, 290, 295, 318; Christian evangelicals and, 267. See also Axis of Evil; War on Terror California, 2, 173, 312; migrants in, 10, 161, 164–169, 170, 172, 350 capital: accumulation of, 162; critiques of, 64; cultural, 4, 8; foreign, 121, 193, 278–279, 281, 347; global, 1, 59–60, 67, 320, 345; and migrants, 258, 264, 266. See also currency capitalism, 67–68, 143, 189, 193, 253, 285; in China, 220, 221, 223, 345; church and, 81; gay politics in, 63; girls and, 143, 145, 148, 150–151, 156; in Japan, 139, 144, 145–148, 150–151; labor and, 264, 279, 344; patriarchy and, 199, 345, 347; values of, 25, 67–68, 146–148, 150. See also liberalization; neo-liberalism caste system, 198, 199, 203, 206, 208, 210 Chennai, 199–202, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211n.2, 212n.8 child/children: adult, 164, 350; of Chinese migrant mothers, 10, 216, 225–226, 285, 343; as consumers, 145, 147–148; education of, 23–26, 35n.5, 212n.9, 222, 226; fallacy of infanticide of, 41–42, 47; of Filipino migrant mothers, 10, 176, 177–179, 186, 188–192, 348, 350; health of, 300–301, 303, 304, 309–310, 317n.28; incarcerated, 146–147; Indian, 123, 126, 199, 203, 212n.9; labor of, 233, 264, 266; media and, 103; of Mexican migrant mothers, 164, 167–169, 170, 172–173, 174, 175; migration of, 32; of missionaries, 42–43, 54n.11;

Native Hawaiian, 35n.5, 44, 50, 51–52; of Nikkei, 113; in Pacific novels, 17–20, 26, 27, 31; Philippine’s Family Code and, 10, 179, 180–182; Sakura as, 106–108, 110, 112, 117; sexuality of, 35n.6, 142, 144, 145–146, 148, 237, 241, 354; trafficking of, 237, 241, 248, 251nn.5, 8, 261, 264, 266, 268 childcare, 8, 163, 164, 166, 172, 174, 205, 214; centers, 199, 211n.1; men and, 186, 189, 190, 192, 256, 344; workers, 209, 219, 233, 342 childhood: and capitalism, 145, 147–148; in discourse, 157n.11, 354–355; experiences of, 20, 26, 154, 189, 328; in Japan, 105, 147–148, 157n.9. See also moral panic China, 2, 3, 351; consumerism in, 224–225, 227; economic zones in, 213, 220–221, 228n.1, 285, 342–345, 348; education in, 222; feminism in, 79–82, 84–97, 338; juvenile delinquency in, 157n.4; migration within, 216, 218–220, 227; modernity in, 213–216, 220–221, 223–224, 226; role in arms trade of, 292n.13; trade with, 29, 296; urban/rural contrast in, 6, 214–216, 217–218, 220, 227; women’s traditional roles in, 224–225. See also hukou system; translation china (chee-na), 280 Chinese Women’s Studies, 80–82, 84, 88–90, 93, 95, 97, 97n.1 chithals (women helpers), 201, 207 Christian/Christianity, 40, 45–46, 54n.18; and disease, 37, 51–52; and education, 23, 24, 46; evangelicals, 258, 266, 267, 345; and healing, 37, 52; and indigenous epistemologies, 15, 18, 27, 29, 337; and missionary wives, 42; NGOs, 238; in Pacific, 320–321; and prostitution, 241–242; in Samoa, 16, 21, 28; and sexuality, 25n.6, 30–32, 42; theology, 242. See also Anatomia, 1838 city(ies), 108, 123, 124, 141, 165–167, 170–171; in China, 213, 215, 217–220, 225–228. See also urban Clark Air Base, 280, 296, 300, 301, 306, 312 Coalition Against the Trafficking in Women (CATW), 237–239 Coalition of the Billing, 322, 332n.2 Coalition of the Willing, 318, 322–323, 326 coalitions, 211, 267, 270n.9, 345



Index

coercion, 199, 234, 235, 241, 250n.2, 253, 277, 282 colonialism, 296, 321; critics of, 29; discourses of, 320; feminism and, 21; gaze of, 339; and history, 337; and human rights, 248; indigenous cultures and, 25; and militarism, 296; mythmaking of, 355 complicity, 69, 233; activism and, 75–76; of host nations, 248; Spivak on, 59–60, 76 comprador, 278, 323 construction work(ers): Chinese, 219, 228n.2; and environmental clean up, 307; and equipment, 195, 201, 210; in India, 4, 196–200, 207, 210, 211n.1, 343, 344, 356; male, 200; temporary, 200; unions of, 208–210 consumer(s): affluent, 124, 255; children as, 145, 147–148, 150; of goods, 221; of media, 123, 126, 132, 133–134, 356; of sexual services, 347 consumerism, 61, 143, 145, 214, 222, 224–225, 227, 354; media and, 119n.11, 122, 124 consumption, 121, 124, 127, 150, 224, 340–341 control: of bases, 297, 299, 301, 304–305; of bodies, 9, 107, 147, 149, 235, 341, 345, 348; of borders, 5–7, 255, 264, 348; colonial, 336; by employers, 163; of family over farming, 217; of feelings, 9, 49; of girls, 142–143, 145–146, 147, 151; of industry, 201; in Japan, 146; of media, 340, 341; by migrants over households, 186; of military, 306, 307–308; of sex workers, 242–243, 262; social, 146, 243, 247; by states, 85, 216, 219–221, 283, 292n.11, 295; of trafficking as crime, 241, 249, 251n.9, 254; of venereal disease, 45, 52; by women, 286; of workers, 291n.7 Cook Islands, the, 22, 24 corporations, 259, 300, 317n.28; Belgian, 283; joint venture partnerships in, 278; multinational, 6, 21, 136, 197, 220, 261, 264, 297, 342. See also capitalism correctional facilities, 138, 148, 151, 341. See also prisons crèches, 199, 211n.1 “Cross-Border Movements and Human Rights” Seminar, 258–259, 261, 266–267, 269 Cultural Revolution, 214, 224 culture(s), 7, 9, 12n.3, 59, 62, 162, 204, 338, 339; American, 21, 242, 331; Belauan, 322;

405

Chinese, 20, 91–92, 94, 218, 221, 223; of consumption, 224–225; and feminism, 197; gender, 92, 94, 122, 125, 157n.4, 204; Hawaiian, 39–40, 50; and imperialism, 25, 39; Indian, 129; indigenous, 15, 25, 35n.5; Japanese, 102–103, 106, 109, 112, 147, 255, 282–283; literary, 336; local, 35, 59, 62, 129, 175n.2; material, 141, 148, 150, 156; Mexican, 171, 173; and militarism, 295, 311, 315n.3; non-western, 62, 246, 268; Okinawan, 297; Pacific Island, 25, 336; political, 298, 309, 322; popular, 17, 130, 135, 150, 162; Samoan, 16–17, 20–21, 24, 29, 31–32; Thai, 246–247; and translation, 80, 83–84; traditional, 147; western, 34n.1 currency, foreign, 176, 182–184, 187–188, 193, 248, 256 curriculum, 23–25, 35n.4, 88, 138. See also education cuteness, 116, 340. See also kawaii Dalian Economic Zone (DEZ), 217, 220, 225, 228n.4, 342–343, 344–345; as paradise, 213, 227 Dalits (scheduled caste), 199, 212n.5 daughter(s): Hawaiian word for, 50; in Japan, 108–110, 111, 117; of Laueleela, 19; of migrant mothers, 192, 226, 256; as migrants, 166, 174, 186–187, 190; policing of sexuality of, 35n.6; as sex workers, 247; as soldiers, 323, 329; unmarried, 285 debt: and arms sales, 292n.13; of migrant workers, 199, 235–236, 244, 256, 264; of the Philippines, 183, 184 decolonization, 289 deconstruction, 17. See also genealogy Defense Facilities Administration Bureau (DFAB), 307 demilitarization, 10, 288, 290, 322, 346–347, 356n.6. See also activism dependence, 21, 88, 110, 146, 203; economic, 178, 188, 326 destruction, 17, 48; environmental, 11, 294, 296–297, 314, 314n.1, 346–347 development, 16, 22, 35n.5, 61, 63, 88, 92, 291n.9, 325; agencies, 211n.3, 300–301; and arms trade, 292n.13; assistance, 323, 332n.2, 339; curriculum, 23, 35n.4; discourses of, 197, 203, 211; economic, 12n.7,

406

Index

121, 148, 183, 215, 219–220, 222, 227; gender and, 12nn.3, 6; Indian, 195, 201; of lesbian and gay movements, 61–62; and militarization, 321; narratives of, 63; policies, 265; projects in China, 80–82, 96–97, 351; and sex work, 248–249; strategies, 255; sustainable, 196–197, 256; tourist, 26 diaspora, 194n.12, 260, 266; Chinese, 88–89; Japanese, 6, 340 dichotomy(ies), 2, 82, 150, 323, 342, 356 discourse(s): of abandonment, 189; activist, 60; anti-trafficking, 234–237, 239–246, 247–250, 251n.5, 254, 258, 263, 266–267, 269; bisexual, 60; of civilization, 33n.1, 39, 41, 47, 48, 337; critical, 332n.7; of development, 197, 202–203, 205; gay, 3, 11, 62, 69, 73, 75–77, 77n.1, 78n.11, 338, 354; gender and race in, 80, 163, 311, 320; of globalization, 62, 66–68, 70–71, 72–73, 82, 321; of human rights, 246, 248–250, 258, 260, 266–269, 346; national in Japan, 106, 115, 145, 148; of national security, 313; official in China, 86–87, 90, 95; representation in, 1–2, 335, 339; scholarly, 124; of shame, 141, 143, 148, 153–154, 156, 355; state, 177–178, 187, 193; submerged, 353; of trafficking, 5, 234–235, 239–250, 250n.4, 251n.5, 261; of the urban, 213–214 diversity, 69, 164, 265, 284; limits to, 340 divorce, 144–145, 168, 194n.7, 199 Dock Workers Act, 196 domesticity. See ideology domestic violence. See violence domestic work(ers), 151, 255, 256; Chinese, 219; Filipino, 176, 184–185, 187–188, 190, 192, 269; Indian, 198, 199, 209; Korean, 173; Mexican, 6, 161, 163–165, 167, 174–175. See also immigrants; migrants dualism(s), 2, 296, 311; Christian, 242; rethinking of, 2

336, 352; and feminism, 269, 305, 308–310, 314, 349; in India, 207, 210, 211n.1; in Japan, 115; of migrants, 165, 166; and military benefits, 325, 347; in Okinawa, 305; in the Philippines, 184; in rural schools, 216, 219 either/or thinking. See dualism employment, 174, 196, 199–203, 279, 306, 344, 345, 350; domestic, 161, 163–167, 175, 257; in economic zones, 221; growth of, 204, 210–211; of Indian middle-class, 124; lack of, 255; lower-paid, 186–187, 194n.11; niche, 205; opportunities, 185; overseas, 177–178; restrictions on, 212n.10; rights, 236, 241–242, 250n.3, 256; skilled, 184. See also labor enjo kōsai (enko), 142–145, 148, 150, 157n.4 enlightenment, 49, 246, 268, 275 entrepreneur(s), 205, 221, 223, 350, 354; local, 278–280 environment(s): activism about, 3, 5, 197, 202, 211, 285, 303, 317n.28; cultural, 20; destruction of in development, 196, 346; and health, 44, 313–314; military destruction of, 6, 9–10, 11, 294–296, 297, 298–308, 309–312, 313, 315nn.7, 10, 316n.13, 317n.27, 347, 349; sacred, 26; of schools, 25; security of, 294, 314; urban, 141, 222–223 epistemology, 26–27, 35n.5, 349, 353, 355 ethnic cleansing, 285, 286, 347 ethnicity, 278, 285, 288–289, 296, 309, 311, 314 ethnography, 10, 34n.1, 140 European(s), 15, 17–18, 21–22, 35n.5, 197, 279–280, 320, 332n.1, 338; companies, 283; countries, 299; culture, 116, 125; in Hawai‘i, 41; languages, 81, 90 exploitation, 67, 235, 237, 239, 240, 257, 261, 263–264, 285; economic, 143, 204, 285; sexual, 3, 199, 235, 253; and slavery, 235. See also labor; trafficking

East Asia-U.S.-Puerto Rico Women’s Network, 351 East Timor, 284, 290, 292n.17, 293n.24 East Timorese Women’s Movement, 287–288 education, 63, 139, 140–141, 146–147, 150–151, 318; in China, 86, 88, 221–222, 224, 226; Christian missionary, 46–47; colonial, 4, 9, 15–16, 18, 21–24, 26, 30–31, 34n.3, 321,

fa‘afafine, 9, 16, 30, 31–33, 35n.7 fa‘aSamoa, 16, 21, 27, 30, 329, 330 Fahrenheit 9/11, 318–319, 322, 324, 327–328 family(ies): abandonment of, 180–181, 189; and arranged marriages, 125–126, 127, 128; change in, 8, 71, 122, 337; and development, 26; expectations of, 15, 18; gender relations in, 2, 109–110, 121, 122, 128–129,



Index

145, 193; Filipino, 10, 178–182, 185–186, 189; and identity, 27–28, 30, 215, 247; law regarding, 177–182, 188–189, 193, 194nn.4, 5, 7, 343, 351; and media, 103, 105–106, 107, 108–109, 115, 125–127, 341; and migration, 166, 167–168, 171–173, 175, 185–186, 217, 229n.4, 235, 256; military, 290, 327–328, 331; missionary, 42; Nikkei, 111–113, 116–117; remittances from, 22, 225, 285; and sex, 31, 144, 242; and trafficking, 248; transnational, 9, 179–180, 189–192; and work, 199, 204, 205, 206, 217, 222, 224, 311, 342, 343 Family Code of the Republic of the Philippines (1987), 10, 177–182, 188–189, 193, 194nn.4, 7 femininity, 101, 118n.3, 142–143, 149, 151, 154; in media, 340–341; and militarization, 289, 347. See also masculinity feminism: in academic institutions, 11, 88–89, 94, 95–97, 97n.1, 269, 338; and activism, 75, 197, 311, 322, 331–332, 335–336; and Christianity, 242; and development, 96–97, 211n.3, 269; and fundamentalism, 285–286; genealogy in, 354–356, 356n.5, 357n.11; and human rights, 267–269, 270n.3, 308; and legends, 16, 19–21; and Marxism, 80, 85–87, 92–93, 95, 97, 148, 308, 311, 338; and migration, 254, 257, 266–267; and nationalism, 286–288, 293nn.22, 25; NGOization of, 3, 349; and objectification of women, 17, 134–136; projects of, 266, 269; research methods in, 349–356; scholarship in, 10, 12nn.2, 3, 7, 60, 67, 83–84, 96, 162, 186, 269, 295, 335–336; and sex, 142, 154, 341; and the state, 5–6, 12n.6, 194n.7, 204, 258, 270n.10, 290; and trafficking, 260–261, 267, 269, 270n.2, 345–346; and translation, 79–84, 89–91, 94, 95–97, 337–338; in the U.N., 275–277; and the Vatican, 81; ways of thinking in, 2–4, 11, 80–81, 96, 197, 277–278, 280–283, 285–287, 291, 296, 308, 321, 323, 328. See also activism; coalitions fieldwork, 265, 338; anthropological, 164–165, 171; in China, 80, 228n.1; in India, 60, 64, 70, 74, 77. See also methods Figiel, Sia, 11, 15, 17, 34nn.2, 3, 336, 356n.8; “Lament in Time of War,” 328, 330–331;

407

on traditional Samoan society, 28; on western culture, 22, 27 Fiji, 23, 287–289, 291n.6, 326–328, 332 Filipino/Americans for Environmental Solutions (FACES), 309, 312 film(s): Asian American women in, 101; and body building, 135; control of, 340; global gay, 64; Hindi, 122–123, 125–126, 129, 130, 131, 132–134, 136; Hollywood, 122, 124–125, 129–130; indigenous, 23; Japanese, 119; male viewers of, 122–123, 126, 129, 135, 341; masculinity and femininity in, 3, 11; and nationalism, 7; pornographic, 130–132, 137n.2; portrayal of love marriages in, 125–126; portrayal of women in, 9, 132–134, 136, 341, 351, 352, 354; and soap opera, 104; Taiwanese, 154–155. See also Fahrenheit 9/11 Ford Foundation, 88 free market, 1, 27, 35n.4, 197, 204, 343. See also capitalism Fulian. See All-China Women’s Federation fundamentalism, 285–286; Hindu, 6, 128, 286, 293n.21. See also Christianity Futenma Marine Corps Air Station, 305–306, 313 gaijin. See Japan garment industry, 277–278, 291nn.5, 6, 300 gay(s), 68, 70–71, 77n.1, 113, 117n.2; activists, 70–71, 73, 351; and class differences, 76; and dualism, 2, 76; global, 3, 9, 11, 59–70, 71, 73–74, 76–77, 338–339, 354; identities of, 3, 9, 59, 61–67, 69, 70–71, 73, 75, 339; and lesbian/queer studies, 60, 61, 70; movement, 73, 76; non-western, 59, 61, 62–63, 69, 71; organization, 70; politics, 61, 63, 76; rights, 69; sensibility, 61; sexualities, 59–60, 62, 66, 68, 70–73, 74, 77n.1, 339; subject, 60, 63, 67, 68, 70; tourists, 77n.3; translation and, 337; visibility of, 71; westernized subculture, 71. See also homosexuality; lesbian gaze, 73; colonial, 339, 353; epistemological, 68–70, 72, 76, 353, 355; global gay, 11, 65, 66, 339, 354; male, 214; media, 116, 340; social, 150, 152 genealogy: indigenous, 19, 22, 27, 35n.5; personal, 331. See also feminism

408

Index

girl(s): Asian-American, 101, 108, 117n.2; “bad,” 8, 11, 28, 139, 340–341; boys’ views of, 130; as commodity, 143–146, 148, 149, 150, 348, 354–355; as consumers, 119n.11, 150–151, 354–355; controlling sexuality of, 35n.6, 142–143, 145–146; as daughters of migrant mothers, 167, 256; and discourses of shame, 140–141, 143, 148, 153–154, 156, 355; and femininity, 143, 151–152, 289, 341; as feminists, 287; and “girl lessons,” 28, 30–31, 33; “good,” 340–341; hula, 320; incarcerated, 138–156, 340, 350, 354; labor of, 277; and national agendas, 117, 144–146, 148, 340–341; performance of, 32–33, 148–150; purity of, 27–28, 30, 32, 35n.6, 157n.9, 241; rape and sexual abuse of, 19, 28, 30–31, 256, 315n.9, 347; resistance of, 144, 147–148, 150, 340–341; in rural areas, 218; Samoan, 16–17, 19, 21, 27–33, 34n.1, 35nn.6, 7, 341; self-injury by, 153–156; self-representations by, 138–139, 140–141, 142, 144, 146–147, 149–150, 152–153, 154–156, 340–341, 350–352, 354; sexual activity of, 142, 144–146; sexual exploitation of, 143–144, 158n.12, 238–240, 258, 260, 262, 270n.2, 347; sexual knowledge of, 132; as victims, 143, 153, 238, 239, 242, 258–259. See also child/ children; daughter(s); kawaii; Sakura; shōjo Girl in the Moon Circle, The, 20 Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW), 237, 238–239, 260, 262–263 global gay. See gay “Go for Broke” Battalion, 325, 332n.4. See also “Purple Heart Battalion” government. See state Green Korea United, 303, 316n.18 growth: of consumerism, 122; economic, 115, 183, 185, 201–203, 210–211, 221, 223, 233, 317n.27; of female labor force, 196, 200; of literary culture, 336; of migration, 166; personal, 104–105; population, 144, 170; western models of, 196; of women’s movements, 288; urban, 217 Guam, 22, 295, 316n.14, 319, 324, 325, 332n.8 Gulf War, 122, 294, 324

Habitat Technology Group, 202 harassment, sexual, 106–107, 136, 199, 209, 271n.10, 291n.6 Haraway, Donna, 350 Hau‘ofa, Epeli, 18, 25, 34n.3, 320–321 Hawai‘i, 2, 4, 8, 10, 11n.1, 22, 31, 49, 331; annexation of, 296; domestic violence in, 246; environmental destruction in, 295, 308; gender in, 36n.8, 41, 105, 109, 111, 112, 349; labor unions in, 119n.17; “local” in, 175n.2; medical practices in, 43, 47, 52, 336; Mexicans in, 161, 164–166, 170, 172, 174–175, 342, 350; military in, 319, 324, 325, 326; missionaries in, 39, 43–44; Nikkei in, 101, 106, 115–116, 118n.5, 119n.10; population loss in, 39–40, 42; sexual activity in, 39, 42–43, 45, 47; schools in, 34n.3, 35n.5, 46; as tourist destination, 318 Headloads/headloaders, 198, 344 health: activism regarding, 308–310, 313–314, 349; adolescent, 152; of children of migrant mothers, 190; of clients, 169; colonial vs. indigenous ideas of, 5, 8, 37–43, 44–50, 52, 337; documentation of, 308; as human right, 269; lack of in workplace, 280; of migrants, 165, 194n.3, 218, 219; and militarization, 10, 295–306, 313–314, 317n.25, 347; missionary views of, 42–43, 51–52; reproductive, 88, 301, 310–311, 313; in rural areas, 221–222; of sex workers, 240, 251n.11, 258, 261; and standards of beauty, 134–135 “heathens,” 39, 42, 43, 54n.11, 336 hegemony(ies), 4, 17, 67, 91, 95, 145, 150, 340, 353, 356; American, 39, 59; and global gay, 60, 73, 338 Hereniko, Vilsoni, 22–23, 32 Heritage Foundation, the, 324–325 hermeneutic(s), feminist, 353–354, 356n.5, 357n.11 heteronormativity, 69, 72, 76, 255 heterosexuality, 2, 32, 60, 66, 69, 77n.3 Hijra, 70–71, 73, 74, 78n.9 Hindu, 6, 69, 72–73, 76, 125, 128, 134, 286 history: Chinese, 215; colonial, 18, 23, 34n.3, 321, 323; cultural, 20, 22, 27; of gay identity, 69; Hawaiian, 38, 40–45, 47, 50, 52; immigrant, 115, 119n.17, 254; labor, 204, 207, 267–268, 351; life, 139, 167, 171; lin-



Index

guistic, 81, 83, 91, 92, 95; and militarization, 346; and tradition, 242, 247 HIV/AIDS, 60, 236, 238, 251n.11 Hochschild, Arlie Russell, 12n.7, 189, 191 homosexuality, 63–64, 66, 68, 71–75, 77n.4, 180. See also gay; lesbian Hong Kong, 157n.4, 158n.13, 176, 192, 194n.9, 220, 254, 257 household(s), 255, 257, 301, 331, 343; Chinese, 214–216; dual income, 176, 190; Indian, 123, 127; Japanese, 105, 109–110, 113, 117; missionary, 42; needs, 225; patterns among, 162–163, 166, 180, 186; transnational, 179, 181, 187, 189, 193; workers in, 165, 167, 174 hukou (residency permit) system, 215–216, 218, 225. See also city; urban space human rights: abuses of, 257–259, 260–261, 264–265; activists, 5, 75, 257, 270n.4, 298, 308–309, 311, 312; commitments to, 324; crises in, 253–254; limits of, 246–250, 252n.11, 346; and migration, 254–257, 259–260, 263; relation to states of, 5–6, 12n.6, 265–266; sex work and, 237–241, 244–246, 248–250, 251n.8, 270n.3, 271n.10, 346; and women’s empowerment, 234, 246–248, 267–269 humility, 110, 356 hypernationalism. See nationalism identity: cultural, 114; gay, 61–64, 66–67, 69–71, 75–76; gender, 89; girls’, 30, 144, 155; global, 253; individual, 27, 67; men’s, 123; migrants’, 166, 224, 245; national, 6, 101–102, 114, 116, 119n.10, 292n.20, 308, 324, 355; sex workers’, 237, 242, 244–245, 247; sexual, 9, 61–62, 70, 75, 77n.4, 336; traditional, 15; western, 246, 268 ideological stall, 177, 189 ideology: of childhood, 14; of domesticity, 144, 176–177, 182, 187–189, 193, 242; dominant, 34n.4, 226; feminist, 12n.6; market, 197, 221; missionary, 48; national, 108, 114, 188; workings of, 103 images: of beauty, 134; consumable, 1, 341; cultural, 5, 16–17, 118n.3; of femininity, 126, 127, 343–344; film, 318; hegemonic, 356; movement of, 3, 340–341;

409

of Pacific, 320; photographic, 139; pornographic, 121, 132; and self-representations, 101, 152, 154, 342; of urban life, 223; video, 140; warlike, 347 imaginary(ies), 335; of Asia/Pacific, 2; dominant of Japan, 144–145; feminist, 356; gendered social of immigrants, 161–162, 164, 167, 171, 175; militarized, 346–347; of modernity, 223–224. See also discourse immigrant(s), 68, 342, 352, 356; assimilation of, 8; class background of, 165, 166; and divorce, 168, 174, 194n.7, 199; as docile work force, 6, 163, 217; elder care by, 164, 167, 168–169; gendered social imaginary of, 161, 162, 167, 175; as housecleaners, 171–173; labor contractors and, 164; Mexican, 6, 161, 163–175, 342, 344, 350; and militarization of borders, 174, 175, 348; Nikkei, 106, 112–113, 115; as paniolos, 170; undocumented, 5, 163, 170, 260, 261, 267, 270n.7, 344, 348, 350. See also migrant(s) immigration policies, 6, 248, 257, 259, 345 Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), 278 imperialism, 37, 39, 53n.4, 68, 82, 320, 321; academic, 22; cultural, 248; military, 11, 296 income, 4, 7, 176–177, 206, 325; disposable, 123–124, 126, 132, 216, 219, 225; dual, 189–190, 194n.6; inequality of, 221. See also wage gap India: cities in, 215; colonization of, 53n.6, 289; construction industry in, 195, 198–201; family arrangements in, 121, 122, 125–128; feminists in, 134, 135–136; fundamentalism in, 6, 128, 286; general labor conditions for women in, 198; liberalization of economy of, 71, 121–123, 124, 196, 200–201, 203, 210, 343, 349; media in, 122, 124–136, 341, 352; middle class men in, 3, 9, 11, 122–129, 136–137, 341, 343–344, 352; migrants from, 255, 352, 354; pornography in, 121, 130–132, 137; same-sex sexualities in, 59–60, 62, 65, 70–77, 78n.11, 338, 339; sex work in, 158n.12, 269, 270n.10; standards of beauty in, 132–135; sustainable development in, 196, 202, 211; travel of ideas to and from, 89, 338; women construction workers in, 4, 7, 195, 197, 198, 200, 202–206, 210, 211n.1, 342, 344, workers’ activism in, 196, 197, 206–210, 212n.8, 344, 351, 356

410

Index

indigenous people: education of, 24–25, 27–28, 35n.5, 337, 352; epistemologies of, 15, 17, 23, 25, 35n.5, 336; of Hawai‘i, 175n.2; knowledge of, 11, 22, 24, 33, 35n.5, 336; Pacific Island cultures of, 15, 25, 33, 34n.3, 320, 328, 336–337, 353; perspectives on health by, 5, 336; in relation to military, 4, 295, 327, 347; research on, 353, 357n.10; sexualities, 69, 70–71, 77n.4, 339; values of, 17–18, 25–29; writers from, 34n.3 individualism, 16, 268; and capitalism, 25 individuality: and capitalism, 145, 148, 224; and choice, 63, 72, 75, 125; and consent to sex work, 241, 244, 246; performance of, 149; and relationships, 247–248; and rights, 93, 147, 241, 245–249, 268–269; sacrifice of for collective, 107; western ideas of, 27, 29 Indonesia, 62, 63, 68, 255, 278–279, 284, 287, 292n.17, 295 industrialization, 49, 71, 180 industry, 49, 128, 219–221, 227, 269, 277, 317n.28; agricultural, 170; construction, 195, 198–200, 203–204, 207, 208; media, 129, 133, 149; service, 219; sex, 143, 234–239, 241–245, 247–249, 251n.6, 262, 279; tourism, 251n.6, 279, 320 informal sector, 208, 219, 256; organization of, 197, 210 insider(s), 107, 115, 338, 351, 357n.9 Institute for Policy Studies, 312 International Labor Organization (ILO), 204, 212n.8, 243, 244 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 121, 183, 264, 298, 346 International Organization for Migration (IOM), 254, 256 internet, 4, 71, 339, 340 interpretation(s): competing, 15; of Family Code, 10; of gender, 92–94; historical, 39; indigenous, 35n.5, 46; men’s, 3; methodological, 8, 352; of Samoan culture, 16, 31; theoretical, 4, 353, 355; translation as, 83; women’s, 222 interview(s), 3; with Chinese Women’s Studies scholars, 80, 84, 88, 92, 93; of female construction workers in India, 200, 202–203, 205–206, 211n.2, 212n.8; of Filipino children of migrant workers, 186, 189–192; of filmgoing men in India,

122–127, 129, 135, 137n.1; of gay rights activists in India, 70–71, 73; of incarcerated girls in Japan, 138, 143, 154; methods, 8, 10–11, 350–354; of Mexicanas, 165–166, 170–171; of migrant women in China, 225, 227, 228n.1, 287, 345; of Nicaraguan factory women, 280; in Thai Trafficking Study, 244–245, 247 interwar, 119n.11, 295 Iraq, 294, 316n.12, 317n.25, 318, 323, 325–330, 332n.6 Japan: childhood in, 147–148, 157n.9, 354; colonialism of, 24, 297, 328; customs and traditions of, 101–102, 105, 106–111, 112, 113, 116–117, 118n.4, 150, 255, 348–349; feminists in, 280, 282; firms from, 201, 220, 342; foreign residents (gaijin) of, 106, 110–112, 114–115, 119n.15, 255; gender in, 106, 109–110, 116–117, 139, 151, 340, 341; immigration policies of, 259; language of, 106, 110, 113, 115, 116; male chauvinism in, 106–107, 282–283; media in, 4, 6, 8, 101–105, 108, 115–117, 118n.4, 348; military in, 282, 297–300, 304–306, 308, 310, 312, 314, 315nn.5, 8, 317n.27; modernity in, 144–146; nationalism in, 6, 8, 101–102, 106, 115, 144, 156, 340, 349; reform institute in, 139–143, 147, 150, 152–153, 157n.10, 341, 350; sex workers in, 243–244, 255. See also enjo kōsai; kawaii; Nikkei; Sakura; shōjo Japanese Americans, 6, 8, 102, 105, 108, 113–117, 118n.4, 119nn.12, 17, 332n.4. See also Nikkei Japan Public Broadcasting Company (NHK), 101, 106–107, 110–111, 112–113, 114, 116–117, 118n.10, 119n.16; and asadora, 101–105, 118nn.8, 9, 119n.13; viewers of, 105, 113–114, 118n.7 Javanese, 279 Jie Gui, 79, 84–85, 89, 95 joint ventures, 201, 278–279 Judd, Gerrit P., 37–38, 48–52, 53nn.1, 2 justice: criminal, 140, 142–143, 150; environmental, 306, 317n.28; feminist, 259; social, 258, 266, 269, 314; systems, 23 Kadena Air Force Base, 304–305, 310, 312 kahuna, 37, 39, 43, 48, 50, 52



Index

Kamakau, Samuel, 40 Kava, 328 kawaii, 110, 117, 152 Kenya, 286–287, 289 kin, 247; and migrant workers, 161, 164, 174–175, 186, 189–190, 192; networks of, 10, 63, 342–344, 356n.2 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 20 Kiribati, 328 knowledge: colonial, 31, 336; of foreign things, 116, 119n.11; indigenous, 11, 22–23, 25–27, 31, 33, 35n.5, 52, 336; of investors, 264; local, 2, 25; and methods, 349, 353; migrants’, 165, 174; of military contamination, 308–310; of native populations, 53n.7; Nikkei’s, 112, 114, 116; and power relations, 60, 84; production of, 349; of sexuality, 74, 132; subjugated, 76; travel of, 79, 91, 93; of women, 310 Korea. See South Korea; North Korea Korean War, 297, 302, 315n.4, 323–324 Kothi, 65, 70, 72 Kuni Bombing Range, 302–304, 311, 312 labor: activists, 119n.17, 197, 206, 210, 257, 278, 289, 291nn.7, 8, 305, 346, 351; cheap, 202, 248, 275, 277–278, 279; child care and, 186; children’s, 145, 147–148, 211n.1, 222, 233; contractor(s), 164, 199; division of, 4, 181, 186, 192, 195, 243, 309, 310–311; domestic, 161, 163–164, 167, 171, 174, 200, 209, 254, 342, 344; exploited, 4, 10, 235–236, 253, 260, 264, 344; feminization of, 162–163, 167, 187, 321; and foreign currency, 176, 182–184, 187–188, 193, 248, 256; hard, 112, 195, 213, 344, 354; and law, 119n.19, 176–182, 189, 193, 207, 211, 238–239, 240–241, 244, 256, 337; lowwage, 6, 161, 183, 187–188, 193, 243–244, 245, 291n.7, 297, 343; market, 7, 11, 167, 171, 181, 184–185, 186–187, 189, 199, 213–214, 335, 343; mechanization of, 7, 195–198, 200–203, 205–206, 209–210, 344, 349; and migration, 3, 6–7, 9, 10, 68, 163, 166, 170, 172, 176, 186, 220, 221, 233, 256–257, 259, 261, 263, 267, 281, 345, 348, 356n.3; in Pacific Islands, 16, 34n.3, 35n.5; reproduc-

411

tive, 177, 186, 198, 342; role of state in, 343, 348–349; sexual, 3, 9, 181, 233, 238, 240, 241, 242–244, 341, 345–346, 352; traditional female, 30, 177, 198, 214, 225, 256, 342, 343–344; unfree, 264, 267, 344, 346; wage(s), 63, 164, 175n.1, 176, 180, 184–187, 198, 200, 203, 207, 208, 212n.10, 213, 221, 224, 259, 277. See also prostitution; trafficking laborer(s), 151; agricultural, 201, 264; bodies of, 2, 342; construction, 199, 205, 212n.8, 351; in Hawai‘i, 175n.2; in India, 124, 125; low-wage, 6; manual, 196–200, 202–204, 209, 212n.10; migrant, 175n.2, 345, 346; unskilled, 343 Lali, 337 land, military use of, 195, 297–300, 302–306, 307, 311, 315n.10, 322, 326, 347, 349 Land Has Eyes, The, 23 language: and activism, 97, 309, 347; Chinese, 79, 89–90, 92, 338; Christian, 48; English, 24, 39, 52, 54n.9, 71, 123–124, 133, 137n.1; formal, 31; Hawaiian, 23, 49, 50, 53n.1; Hindi, 133–135; indigenous, 34n.3; Japanese, 105–106, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116; local, 122; Maoist, 338; of militarization, 283, 315n.6; of obligation, 174; Okinawan, 297; Pacific Island, 336–337; of pop culture, 150; and power, 338; practices, 1, 335, 339, 342; regional, 70–71; of rights, 268; sexualized, 268; of state, 206; of subjectivity, 156; of therapy, 152; of trafficking, 262; of westernized gay, 71, 73. See also discourse; translation law, 351; Chinese, 86, 93; colonial, 46, 336, 349; enforcement agencies, 236, 261, 266; environmental, 308, 312, 317n.27; Filipino, 176–182, 189, 192–193, 194nn.4, 7; Indian, 136, 207, 211n.1; international, 234, 238, 240, 247, 258; Japanese, 102, 156; Korean, 271n.10; labor, 256, 337; martial, 296 lesbian, 59–64, 70–76, 77n.3, 351. See also gay; homosexuality Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), 282–283 liberalization, 71, 124, 128, 200, 203, 210–211, 260; policies, 196. See also neoliberalism life history(ies), 161, 165, 175 literature, 12n.3, 162, 164, 170, 294, 352; feminist, 77n.2, 95–96, 317n.28; gay sexu-

412

Index

alities, 60, 69, 77n.3, 78n.9; Pacific Islands, 17, 25, 34n.3, 322, 336–337, 356n.1; Samoan, 8, 9 London Anti-Trafficking Programme, 258 Maehyangri, 302–304; Explosives Damage Citizens’ Countermeasures Association, 311, 316n.16 Malo, David, 40, 45–48, 53 Manifest Destiny, 39, 319 manufacturing, 183, 185–188, 201, 221. See also labor Maori, 25–27, 34n.3, 331 maquilas, 291n.10 markets. See labor marriage, 9, 35n.6, 109, 125–127, 143–145, 148, 354, 356n.4; in China, 217–218, 225, 227, 285; in India, 207, 213; and migrant women, 243, 253; in the Philippines, 174, 178–180, 194n.4. See also divorce Marshall Islands, the, 22, 319, 323–325 masculinity(ies), 2, 204, 279; in film, 3, 9, 10, 129, 130, 341; in gendered social imaginary, 162; and militarization, 3, 11, 275–276, 280, 283, 289–290, 299, 347 masculinization, 278, 288 mechanization. See labor media, 340; activists and, 300, 305, 308, 351, 356; Asian-American women in, 101, 107–108, 117; and cable television, 65, 122, 125, 127, 128, 129–130, 132–133, 136, 340; celebration of male violence in, 121, 129–130; and cell phones, 191, 340; consumerism and, 119n.11, 122–124, 132; critical ideas in, 319, 324; enjo kōsai in, 143; and gender anxiety, 352; images of Chinese urban life in, 223, 228n.1; images of Nikkei in, 102, 114–116; love and marriage in, 121, 125–128; migrants in, 176, 193, 193n.1, 266; movement across borders by, 7, 31, 121; new body ideals in, 132–135; newspaper, 34n.3, 39, 44–46, 54n.9, 177–178, 193n.1, 328, 330; Oceania in, 320, 323; radio, 19, 223, 339, 340; representation of bodies in, 107–108, 111–112, 149, 341; resistance expressed in, 8–9, 139, 149–150; samesex sexualities in, 70, 73; self-disclosure through, 152–156, 340–341; sexuality as

commodity in, 135–136, 147, 157n.6, 158n.12, 258, 261, 270n.2; public in Japan, 101, 102, 115; women in Chinese, 85; women in Japanese, 152; workshops, 138–140, 153–156. See also film; internet; Japan Public Broadcasting Corporation (NHK); pornography; video medicine: native Hawaiian, 43, 45, 48, 52; western, 37, 39, 42, 44, 48–52, 53n.6, 336, 349 men, 28, 63, 69, 72, 75, 94, 101, 131, 142, 155, 156, 226, 282, 290, 341; college-educated, 309; in construction, 195, 198–200, 202–203, 205, 214; and equality, 86–87, 92–93, 97, 178, 181, 348; Fijian, 288–289; Filipino, 176, 184, 189; gay, 61, 63, 65, 70, 77n.4, 185, 194nn.10, 11, 339; gender and, 91, 162, 217, 222–223, 224, 243, 280, 341, 348, 352; Hawaiian, 47; and housework, 162, 186, 189–190, 343; Japanese, 105, 106–107, 110, 119n.11, 144, 145; and the law, 194n.7; masculinity of, 279, 281; Mexican, 170, 172; middle class Indian, 3, 9, 11, 121, 122–132, 134–136, 137n.1, 341; migrant, 267; and militaries, 4, 278, 291n.7, 313, 326, 327, 330, 347; and nationalism, 288; Nikkei, 113; Okinawan, 305; pay of, 4, 177, 184, 185, 187, 194n.9, 227, 256; power of, 6, 11, 21, 127, 136–137, 280, 283, 343–344, 356; and prostitution, 262, 280, 345; Samoan, 31, 32, 33; weapons and, 276–277 methodology(ies), 8, 10, 90, 258, 349, 352–353 methods: of activists, 308; of construction, 202; feminist, 275, 281, 335, 349; of healing, 52; of imagining, 320; research, 335, 350–352; of social control, 247; of states, 206, 322; in workshops, 140. See also interviews; life history; participant observation; video Mexico, 2, 165–166, 169–171, 173–175, 344 Micronesia, Federated States of, 319, 323 migrant(s), 7, 200, 218, 228n.3, 233, 254–255, 264, 345–346, 348; agencies for, 163, 256; domestic workers, 161, 163–164, 184–185; families of, 177–182, 186; Filipino, 10, 176, 182–187, 342, 344; in gendered moral economy, 188–189, 193; human rights of, 258–259, 266–268; Mexican, 169–172; as mothers, 10, 164, 174, 176–177, 178–179, 186, 187, 189–193, 213, 225–226, 256, 350; as



Index

national heroes, 6, 176–177, 187, 193, 255–256; and rural/urban divide, 7, 216–217, 218, 219–220, 227–228, 228n.2, 345; and separate spheres, 187; smuggled, 235, 255, 261; state policy toward, 6, 177, 183, 248, 256–257, 258–259; stories of, 354, 356. See also domestic workers; immigrant(s); remittances; sex work; trafficking migration: Chinese urban, 215–216, 219–222; feminization of, 345; Filipino women’s, 176–178, 181, 183, 185–186, 189, 192–193; global, 254–257, 259–260, 262, 266; and human trafficking, 233, 242, 245, 248, 250n.2, 265; labor, 3, 12n.7, 184, 188, 238, 263, 342, 356n.3; Mexican, 161–162, 164–166, 169–171; postcolonial, 16, 18, 22, 31 militarization: in Asia-Pacific, 277–279, 282, 291n.6, 355; and environment, 306; and masculinity, 3, 289; in Pacific/Oceania, 318–319, 321, 326–328; as a process, 10, 275, 281, 286, 288, 289–290, 346–348, 351–352 military: African Americans in the, 328; bases, 5, 22, 299–301, 304–307, 312, 315n.6, 316, 347, 349, 351; discipline, 331; environmental contamination, 11, 295, 301–305, 309–311, 313, 315n.10, 317n.27; government, 291n.7; and masculinity, 282–283, 289; and national security, 9–10, 294, 308, 314; Nicaraguan, 281; in Pacific Islands, 4, 17, 24, 318, 321–328, 330; post exchanges, 328; protection, 278–279; relations, 2; Thai, 282; training, 292n.12, 306, 317n.25, 320; U.S. presence of in Asia, 296–299, 313; violence, 284, 292n.11, 315n.3 militias, 269, 278, 281, 283, 292, 346, 347 minority(ies), 147; in Japan, 120n.19; model, 114; racial/ethnic, 166, 260, 325; sexual, 59, 73, 74–75, 338–339 missionaries: children of, 42; and discourse of civilization, 37, 39, 53n.5, 349, 353; and disease, 40, 51; and education, 16, 23–24; medical practices of, 52; and sexuality, 22, 32, 35, 345; and traditional healers, 49–50; and western medicine, 44, 49; wives of, 42–43 modern, 81, 102, 227; beliefs, 19; capitalism, 63, 144–145; childhood, 147–148; China,

413

90, 214, 216, 221, 223; colonial education, 4; consumer goods, 132; economic life, 254; economic zones, 225; family, 144, 180, 194n.5; global flows, 338; identity, 15; Japan, 106, 144–146; moga, 119n.11; mothers, 225; nationhood, 157n.8; Samoan society, 33; sex trade, 251n.6; success, 224; women, 213, 225–227 modernity, 3, 119n.11, 132, 222, 223, 225; China and, 213, 223; cities and, 215; consumerism and, 222, 224, 227; critique of, 19; diaspora and, 16; dualisms and, 3; EuroAmericans in, 147; gay identity and, 61–63, 68; gendered, 214, 223; language of, 283; masculinity and, 283; men and, 105, 147; narrative of, 222; representation and, 17, 67; tradition and, 33, 62, 68; urban space and, 213–214, 217, 227, 345; values of, 18, 156; westernization and, 68, 115, 157n.9 modernization: and construction equipment, 195; and global capitalism, 193; of India, 196; of the Philippines, 179; progress and, 144 Moore, Michael, 318, 324, 326 moral economy, 188; gendered, 177, 188, 193 moral panic, 8–9, 143, 145, 157n.11, 250n.2, 341, 345–346 Morei, Cita, 322 motherhood, 42, 145, 179, 225 mothering, 7, 182, 189–191; care labor of, 192 mothers: absent, 193, 344; bad, 176–177, 179, 187, 343; education and, 31, 54n.11; in Japan, 109, 145; labor of, 4; and law, 176, 182; migrant, 166, 177–179, 181, 186, 189–192, 350, 355; and military, 290, 329; remittances of, 6, 10, 190; roles of, 213–214, 225–226, 269, 309–310, 311, 313; Sri Lankan, 317n.30 movements: environmental, 317n.27; gay and lesbian, 61–62; global, 5–7, 121, 196, 241, 319; labor, 288, 346; multidirectional, 342; nationalist, 286, 288, 293n.22, 311; political, 254; protest, 3. See also activism Mumbai, 60, 64–65, 70–71, 74, 126, 129, 131, 198, 210 “My America! My Samoan Amerika!” 329–330 Myanmar, 252n.12 myth(s), 20, 74; colonial, 16, 40; Samoan, 19, 29 nation, 182, 184, 187, 193, 255, 285–286, 312,

414

Index

327; and Chinese modernity, 222; gender and racial membership in, 102, 106, 156, 296, 308, 314, 349, 356; Hawaiian, 48, 51; “host,” 297, 315n.6; identity of, 145–148, 176, 178–179, 181; imagined, 6–8; and national sacrifice areas, 295; security of, 245; and women’s domesticity, 189, 193n.3 National Campaign for the Eradication of Crime by U.S. Troops in Korea, 303, 316nn.17, 18 nationalism: critiques of, 64, 286–288; cultural, 6–7; discourse of, 72–73, 145, 309, 311; faux, 278; and feminism, 293n.25; hyper, 285–287 National Rifle Association (NRA), 276, 284, 292n.15 national security, 9, 257, 283, 294, 298, 308, 313 Native Hawaiians, 34n.3, 46, 49–50, 52; disease and, 37, 39–40, 45, 51; education of, 35n.5; missionaries and, 42–43, 353; population of, 53n.8, 175n.2, 324–325. See also Hawai‘i neocolonialism: and militarism, 296; discourse, 320 neoliberal(ism): economic programs, 12nn.3, 7, 210, 253, 263, 321, 347; role of state in, 196, 343, 348–349 Nepal, 132, 158n.12, 204, 256, 289 New Zealand, 15, 18, 22–24, 27, 32, 34n.3, 318 NGOization, 3, 269, 349 NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations Nikkei, 119n.18; and gender, 102, 107, 109–110, 113, 116–117; in Hawai‘i, 101, 106, 112–113, 115–116, 118n.5, 119n.16; in Japan, 105–106, 110–113, 114–116, 118n.10, 119n.19; media portrayals of, 101–102, 114 Nirman Madzoor Panchayat Sangam (NMPS), 208–209, 212nn.8, 9 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), 3–4, 85, 89, 198, 349, 352, 355; anti-trafficking, 237, 258–260, 262, 265, 267, 269; in China, 338; environmental, 197, 300; labor, 198, 204, 344; trafficking, 7, 234, 236–238, 258–260, 265, 346. See also organization(s) Northern Marianas, 319, 325 North Korea, 297, 315n.4 Norwegian Initiative on Small Arms Transfers (NISAT), 291n.1 nuclear family, 194n.5; among Filipinos, 180; among Indians, 71; among Mexicans, 175

Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific, 331 Nuclear Free Philippines Coalition, 300 nuclear vessels, 203, 322 nuclear weapons, 314n.2, 315n.10; in Bikini, 17; environmental destruction by, 294; in Pacific, 19; in Okinawa, 305 Oceania, 2, 10, 318–323, 326–327, 331–332. See also Pacific Okinawa(n), 118n.8; activism in, 3, 11, 295, 310–312, 314, 316n.20, 317n.26, 355; internal others in, 115; migrants from, 113, 115, 118n.8; military in, 282–283, 297, 299, 304–308, 310, 313, 315nn.8, 9, 316n.21, 349; nationalism in, 286 Okinawa Prefecture Assembly, 305 Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, 305, 311, 316n.22 Olongapo, 279 Ong, Aihwa, 188 Operation Enduring Freedom, 324. See also War on Terror Operation Iraqi Freedom, 324. See also War on Terror organization(s), 339, 342, 346; anti-trafficking, 238–239, 254, 257–259; church, 165; colonial, 336; community, 295, 314; criminal, 262; environmental, 303, 305–306, 308–309, 312; of farming, 217, 220; financial and trade, 4, 264, 292n.15; gay, 61, 70; housing, 202; human rights, 298, 308; labor, 197–198, 204, 206, 208, 212n.8; nongovernmental, 3, 85, 236, 349; sex workers, 270n.10; women’s, 80, 87–89, 95, 96, 97n.1, 132, 136, 210, 211n.1, 257, 311, 348, 351; of work, 202, 204, 205, 210, 215, 220 organized crime, 233, 260, 263 organizing: union, 196–197, 206, 208–211, 270n.10, 278, 287, 291nn.7, 8, 347, 351, 356 Otherness, 90, 101; and Asian American women, 101; creation of, 296; and discourse, 90; and documented migrants, 261; of Nikkei, 102; and militarization, 319, 347; sexual, 11 Otil a Beluad, 322, 331 outsider(s): appearance of, 47; exploitation of native peoples as, 35n.5; inquiries and, 338; insiders and, 351, 357n.9; migrant/ tribal workers and, 200; military bases



Index

and, 307; peasant, 216; rural women and, 110; Sakura as, 106, 110, 115; Sia Figiel as, 331; visions of the Pacific of, 320 Overseas contract workers (OCWs), 178–179, 184. See also the Philippines, remittances Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), 182–184. See also the Philippines, remittances overtime, 208, 212n.10, 277 Pacific, the: colonization of, 21–24, 39, 319, 336, 349, 353; feminist analysis of, 322–323, 331–332; garment industry in, 277–278; imaginary of, 2, 15–16, 18, 33n.1, 319–320, 355; and migration, 164; military use of, 10, 17, 288, 292n.15, 295–296, 308, 319, 321–323, 326–327, 332, 351; nonwestern paradigm for, 21; as Oceania, 318–323, 326–327, 331–332; prostitution in, 46; tradition/modernity in, 15 Pacific Islanders: education of, 21–28, 33, 34nn.4, 5; literature of, 15–18, 22, 31, 33n.3, 336–337, 356n.1; and the military, 4, 324–326, 332n.5; women’s activism among, 322, 351–352 paradise, 15, 22; economic zones as, 213, 227, 345, 352 participant observation, 122, 351. See also methods patriarchy, 21, 145, 206, 282, 286; and capitalism, 199, 245, 345, 347; and globalization, 197, 345, 347 patriotism, 302, 313, 325, 330 peace: in Buddhism, 247; and military operations, 295, 313, 320, 326; movements, 311–312, 317n.20, 319, 322, 331–332; and the Pacific, 320, 322, 326, 331; treaty, 315n.4 Peace Corps, 16, 27 Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), 277 peasants: displaced, 186, 213; in economic zones, 221–222, 225, 227, 348; residency of, 215–217, 219, 343 Pentagon. See United States Department of Defense People’s Task Force for Bases Cleanup (PTFBC), 300. See also activism petitions, 136, 269, 271, 305. See also activism Philippines, the: activism in, 3, 295, 300–302, 308–314, 355–356; debt of, 183, 186, 296; export processing zones in, 176, 186; fam-

415

ily policy in, 177–182, 187–189, 194n.7; fathers in, 186–187, 189; foreign currency in, 176, 182–184, 187–188; militarism in, 6, 279–280, 296–299, 301–308, 315n.5, 316nn.13, 14, 349; remittances to, 22, 178, 183–184, 256; sex work in, 158n.12, 279; state policy toward migrants in, 6, 176–177, 343, 348, 355; women migrants from, 183, 185–186, 189–191, 255–256, 344; women’s wages in, 176–177, 184–186, 193, 194n.11 pimp(s), 142–143, 236, 243, 248, 270n.10 policy(ies), 339, 346; development, 202–203; on economic zones, 221; editorial, 324; educational, 24, 35n.5; environmental, 9; on gender, 93; in global north, 266; on human rights, 12n.6; on migration, 10, 219, 254, 256–257, 266, 345; military, 296, 297, 306, 308, 309, 313, 322, 324, 346; neoliberal, 87, 196–197, 321, 343, 347, 348; residency, 215, 219, 233, 343; structural adjustment, 183, 261, 321; on trafficking, 234, 239, 241, 248, 254–257, 258–261, 265–267, 346; transformations in, 4, 87, 92; on terrorism, 295; on women in China, 3, 86–87, 92, 93, 343, 344; on women in Philippines, 10, 343, 355. See also Family Code of the Republic of the Philippines; hukou politics: in Belau, 322; coalition, 270n.9; colonial, 319; of development, 197; feminist, 28, 80, 346; gender, 87, 93; of global gay paradigm, 59–63, 69, 76, 338; of globalization, 67, 71–72; of joint ventures, 278; of militarism, 322; sexual, 31, 33n.1, 59, 61–62, 71, 76, 338 pornography: in back rooms, 64; and commercial sex work, 250n.1, 258; foreign, 130–132, 137; objectification of women in, 121, 131–132; women watching, 137n.2 Port Trust Act, 196 postcolonial societies: displacement in, 16; intellectual landscapes of, 268, 285; nationalism in, 73; novels from, 16, 22; state in, 74; theory of, 21, 352; and war, 355 poverty: and development, 196, 203, 256, 325; and globalization, 18l, 210, 263, 321; and migration, 7, 183, 217, 219, 255, 259, 261; and military, 297, 325; and prostitution, 236; and schools, 185, 216, 222; and technological change, 203, 210, 295; and traf-

416

Index

ficking, 262; and two-income families, 194n.6; and women’s work, 198–199, 344 Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects. See United Nations progress: and the city, 215; and economic zones, 221; and mechanization, 344; nationalist rhetoric of, 144, 147; western representations of, 17, 49, 336. See also discourse; modernization progressives, 95, 136–137, 211n.3, 288, 319, 322–323 prostitute(s): and “girl lessons,” 28; global, 348; and human rights, 238, 240; as migrants, 238, 245, 345; and missionaries, 46; and nonprostitutes, 239, 241; organizations for, 270n.10; rescue of, 241, 252n.12, 259, 261, 345; as sinners, 242, 244; as subjects, 243; in Thailand, 235–236, 251n.6; trafficked, 269n.1, 270n.2, 348; young Asian women as, 143 prostitution, 251n.1; and agency, 238–239, 243, 246; anxiety about, 9, 345; degradations of, 237–238; in Hawai‘i, 46; juvenile, 142, 144; legalization of, 240–241, 251n.11; and male domination, 243; and militarization, 299, 347; and nation, 157n.88; and public morals, 158n.13; and state, 5, 238–239, 263, 270n.10, 348. See also enjo kōsai; trafficking Protestant, 38, 39, 45, 49, 286 Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons. See United Nations “Purple Heart” Battalion. See “Go for Broke” Battalion Queer: as abject, 155; identities, 61, 339; and nationalism, 72–73; theory, 60, 64, 352 “R & R” (rest and recovery), 251n.6 rape: of girls, 28, 30, 256; by soldiers, 252n.12, 305, 311, 315n.9, 347; and western media, 136 Recommended Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking. See United Nations recruiters, 199–200, 221, 262, 289 recruitment: for construction work, 199; for

domestic employment, 161, 166, 171, 174–175; to economic zones, 221; military, 10, 325, 347; in trafficking, 235, 253, 261 Reformists, 237, 240–241, 242, 244–246, 249–250, 252n.11, 345–346; moral views of, 238–239 regimes, 5, 23, 133, 254, 258, 266, 278, 283 remittances: agencies for, 194n.12; and dependent economies, 22, 176, 178, 182; and state, 6, 10; from women, 183–184, 189–190, 194n.9, 218, 256, 277 representation(s): of Asian-American women, 101, 114–117; colonial, 39, 41; of gay men’s sexuality, 339; of gender, 90; and globalization, 67, 340, 341; of missionaries, 341; movement of, 3–5, 335, 340; of Pacific, 327, 337; and power, 3, 335; self, 139–140, 153–156, 341; of young men, 123; of young women, 135, 149, 153, 158n.12; and voices, 7, 17, 20, 31, 34n.1 reproduction(s): of Hawaiian newspapers, 34n.3; linguistic, 7, 335; of social relations, 161–162, 179; and the state, 93, 181, 256; and women’s work, 342. See also sex Republican Party, 283, 317n.25, 345 residency, 163, 165, 215–216, 217, 343, 344 resistance: by “bad girls,” 139, 148–150; and globalization, 8, 122; indigenous, 5, 51, 336–337; in melodrama, 104; to militarism, 296, 308, 312, 331; by peasants, 188; strategies of, 21, 186, 245–246, 248–249, 277, 309, 311; to women in construction, 205; in workplaces, 197. See also activism revolution(s): Cultural, 214, 224; global industrial, 253; green, 196; in meaning, 90, 92; stalled, 189; and women, 287, 293n.23 rifle(s), 276, 291; Kalashnikov, 283–284, 292n.14; and masculinity, 277; women traders of, 276 rights, 140; of activists, 308, 311–312; civil, 71; to define sexuality, 147; discourse of, 75, 77; equal in China, 86, 93; gay and global discourse on, 69, 73; human, 5, 12n.6, 234, 238, 241, 246–250, 253–254, 255, 257, 258, 260–261, 263, 265–269, 270nn.3, 4; indigenous, 26; non-citizens’, 260, 270n.7; organizations, 298; of residency, 215; sex workers’, 236, 237, 239, 240–241, 244, 245–250, 251n.11, 254, 258, 259, 270n.10,



Index

346; women’s, 238, 239, 246–247, 251n.8, 258, 277; workers’, 209, 240 ROTC, 327–328 rural/urban relations, 6, 63, 213–217, 219–222, 342, 343, 348. See also urban Sakura, 101; American bodies in, 107–108, 111–112, 119nn.13, 15; gaijin in, 111, 114; gender in, 109–110, 116–117, 119n.11; hardships of immigrant life in, 112–113; Hawai‘i in, 116, 119n.16; Japanese nationalism in, 6, 114, 349, 355; male chauvinism in, 106–107; relations of characters to Japan in, 105–106, 108–109, 116–117, 119n.12; as soap opera, 102–105, 340; viewership of, 105, 113–114, 118n.9. See also Nikkei; shōjo same-sex sexualities. See gay; homosexuality; lesbian Samoa: anthropology about, 33n.1; Christianity in, 16, 21, 28–29; and colonialism, 16–18, 19, 21–25, 29, 321, 355; education in, 9, 15–16, 21–25, 30–33, 336; global forces in literature of, 8, 337; indigenous knowledge in, 11, 15–16; language of, 21, 332n.7; remittances to, 22; sexualities in, 9, 16–17, 19, 28–33; traditional stories in, 15–16, 18–19, 21, 27, 29–30, 32–33, 353; travel of ideas to and from, 4, 17–19, 21; and U.S. militarism, 11, 22, 324–332, 355 scholarship: and activism, 70, 335; feminist, 12n.3, 60, 84, 269; globalization, 5; Hawaiian, 40; Pacific Island cultural studies, 21, 320, 322; western, 2, 82, 124 “Second Generation Trafficking Paradigm” matrix, 262, 265 security, 1; apparatus, 335; in correctional facility, 140; emotional, 190, 192; environmental, 294, 314; Fijian, 326; and globalization, 10; job, 185, 219, 343; within marriage, 126; material, 192; military, 294–295, 313; national, 9, 170, 245, 257, 283, 294, 298, 308; private forces, 277, 290, 291n.6, 326, 332n.2, 347; redefining, 296; social, 208, 251n.11; women’s, 315n.3 segregation: occupational, 204, 206; sex, 176, 187; social, 43 Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), 206, 351

417

self-injury, 153–155 semiotic, 342; level of analysis, 1, 336 September 11, 2001, 173, 318, 330 servicing: of aircraft, 301; of clients, 235; of debt, 256; of men, 279; sexual, 238, 240, 347–348 sex: and disease, 42, 251n.11; and gender, 80–81, 89, 95–96, 337; and missionaries, 43, 45; reproductive, 144–145, 148, 180, 337, 354; segregation in labor market, 176, 187, 208, 256 sexuality, 33, 66, 354; “civilized,” 39, 337, 33n.1; in feminist theory, 80–81, 89, 95, 352; girls’, 35n.6, 142–143, 145, 147, 149, 154, 157n.4, 341, 354; in globalization, 1–3, 9, 12n.3, 12n.4, 59, 62, 67–68, 77; male, 131, 299, 345; in media, 117, 124, 131–132, 135, 341; and migration, 162; nonnormative, 11, 145–146, 354; in the Pacific, 16; in Sakura, 108, 112; in Samoa, 21, 30–32, 35n.6; state and, 74, 76, 144, 146, 180, 194n.7, 348; translation of, 81. See also gay; heterosexuality; homosexuality; trafficking sexualization: of girls, 143, 145; of Polynesian women, 16–17, 30–31 shehui xingbie, 89–92, 95 shōjo: commodification of, 143, 145; Nikkei as, 110, 112–113, 116–117; Sakura as, 107, 110, 117. See also girls Silva, Noenoe, 34n.3 Siniva: critique of colonialism by, 17, 18, 21; death of, 33; as intellectual, 15, 27; on Samoan traditions, 19–20, 29, 31; as student, 15, 23; as village madwoman, 16 skill. See training slavery, 264; domestic, 268; global war on sex, 267; human, 260; and international corporations, 264; prostitution and, 239; and sex trafficking, 236, 238, 244; and “slavery-like practices,” 262, 264; sexual, 258, 261. See also exploitation; prostitution small arms, 291n.1, 292nn.14, 15; global trade in, 275–277, 284–285 Solomon Islands, 35n.5, 326 South Korea, 2; activists in, 3, 11, 295, 306, 308–312, 314, 355; enjo kōsai in, 157n.4; feminists in, 287; firms from, 220, 279–281, 300, 342; ideas traveling to and from, 89; labor organizing in, 278, 291n.8; migrants from, 175n.2, 255; militarism in, 3, 278,

418

Index

291n.8, 295, 297–304, 306, 308–309, 313, 315n.5, 316nn.17, 18, 317n.27, 349; nationalism in, 286–287, 311; Others from, 115; and relations among men in power, 283; sex workers from, 269, 271n.10 South Pacific/South Seas, 16, 319 sovereignty, 5, 7, 257, 302, 319, 323, 348, 349, 356n.4 Spivak, Gayatri, 59, 67, 76, 77n.2 Sri Lanka, 204, 255, 256, 286, 292n.20, 317n.30 stalled revolution, 189 state(s): control of military in, 292n.11; demands on the, 206; and economic zones, 220, 227; ethnicity in Hawai‘i and, 116; and family law, 177; and female body, 145–147; and Filipino family, 178, 181, 193; gendered moral economy of, 177, 188; and gender in China, 90, 93; and global labor, 6; and hukou system in China, 219; and human rights reform, 5, 248, 268; and hypernationalism, 286; investment in India by, 196; maintenance of, 6; and mechanization, 197, 206, 210, 344; and media, 351; modernization plans of, 216; and nationalism, 7; neo-liberal policies of, 87, 196, 343, 348; regulation of brothels by, 74; role in the economy of, 214; and samesex sexualities, 74, 76–77; and sexual social order, 145; and social prejudice, 206; sovereignty of, 5, 348; and trafficking, 259; and transnational households, 193; and urban/rural China, 215–217, 221, 343; and women, 178–179, 181, 183, 187, 189, 193n.3, 223, 252n.11 Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs), 297–299, 308, 312–313, 315nn.5–7 strike(s), 119n.17, 269, 271, 278, 291n.5; strikebreaking, 277, 347 subaltern, 8, 222, 245, 353 Subic Bay Naval Base, 279, 296, 301, 304, 312 subject(s), 72, 76, 94, 118, 155; abject, 141, 154–155, 156; collective, 97; Euro-American, 69; gay, 63, 66–67, 70, 76; global, 8, 260; migrant, 245, 258, 266–268; position, 1, 8–9, 355; research, 349, 350, 352, 353, 355; sexual, 9, 59, 60–61, 69, 71, 74–76, 77n.1, 144, 155, 339; sex workers as, 239, 243, 245; stigmatized, 157n.3 subjectivity(ies), 68, 70, 82, 148, 154, 156,

234, 247; as “bad girls,” 139, 148, 150; Euro-American, 71; gay, 73, 76; queer, 61; sexual, 74–76. See also identity subjugated knowledge, 76 Sugar Shirley, 17, 27; as fa‘afafine, 16, 32; and “girl lessons,” 30–31; and performance, 32 superfund, 300, 315n.11 superpower, 281, 320, 325 Taiwan, 192, 220; capitalists from, 279–281, 300; consumer goods from, 29; enjo kōsai in, 157n.4; film from, 154–155 Tamil Nadu: State Construction Workers Union (TMKTS), 208, 212n.8; state of, 208–209, 212n.8 technology(ies), 122, 201, 203–204, 296; and economic zones, 220; and mechanization, 195, 197; nuclear, 315n.10; sustainable, 202, 211 teenagers, 108; in India, 129, 135; institutionalized, 138, 350, 351, 356; in Japan, 147–148, 156; and self-injury, 155; in sex industry, 235. See also girls television, 339, 340; in China, 217, 223; daytime, 102–104; in India, 65, 122–130, 132–133; in Japan, 116, 118nn.9, 10, 154; military on, 325, 327; in Samoa, 18, 22, 24 terrorism, 170, 258; nonstate, 346 Thailand, 63, 89, 158n.12, 204, 224, 248, 259, 292n.12, 296; and sex trafficking, 234–236, 238, 243, 246–249, 255, 251nn.6, 7, 9, 252nn.12, 13; and tsunami, 282 theory: dependency, 291n.9, 321; feminist, 3, 80–81, 88, 91–94, 96, 269, 352; of liberalization, 200; Marxist, 85–87, 92, 95, 97, 213; and methodology, 349; performance, 226; and practice, 139, 351; queer, 60, 64, 352; traveling, 79, 82–83; western, 82 Tonga, 22, 25, 326, 332n.5; education in, 24; transgender performances in, 32 tourism, 15, 22, 64, 68, 116, 248, 254, 300, 320, 327; sex, 77n.3, 233, 248, 251nn.6, 9, 279–280 traders: long-distance, 276, 291n.3; financial, 321 traffickers, 233, 238, 243, 245, 248, 252n.12, 255, 259, 262 trafficking, 3, 5, 7, 9, 233, 237; definition of, 234–237, 253, 260, 262–263, 265, 348; demand for, 262; discourses of, 239–250,



Index

250n.4, 258–259, 262–263, 351, 356; “Do No Harm,” 259; as feminist issue, 266–267, 345; gay sexualities and, 60; host nations in, 248; human rights and, 246–250, 346; laws regarding, 234, 236–237, 251n.8, 252n.13, 262, 265; matrix of, 262, 265; media representations of, 158, 261; and migration, 254–257, 259, 262, 263; moral legitimacy of, 237; and organized crime, 236; and prostitution, 263, 271n.10; and sex tourism, 251n.9; sexual slavery and, 261, 264; statistics about, 257–258, 269n.1; Thai Trafficking Study, 243–245; victims of, 239, 249, 250nn.2, 3, 251n.5, 252n.12, 257, 261–262, 265. See also Abolitionists; Reformists training: skills, 197, 204–206 translation, 3, 34n.3, 79–81, 83, 90; of concepts, 337, 338–339; cultural, 82–84, 339; of gender in China, 88–89, 91–92, 93, 94, 97 travel, 60, 71, 101, 109, 115, 116, 119n.11, 123–124, 340; of concepts, 3–4, 9, 79–84, 89, 93–97, 260, 335, 337–339, 340, 351; and prostitution, 215, 267; and security, 170, 173; and traffickers, 259; and war, 332n.6; and work, 199, 218, 277, 343 Trust Territories, 22, 24, 319, 324, 325 tsunami, 282 unemployment, 147, 184, 201, 204, 206, 210, 306 unequal distribution of wealth. See capitalism unions: and commercial sex work, 240, 260, 270n.10; in Hawai‘i, 119n.17; in India, 128, 197, 202–211, 212nn.6, 8, 9, 344; labor, 346, 347; in Okinawa, 305 United Nations (UN), the, 89, 264, 267, 297, 326; Convention on the Rights of the Child, 309; Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), 88, 255, 265; Development Programs (UNDP), 314; feminists and, 87, 276, 287, 351; Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW), 79, 80; human rights and, 309; Migrant Worker Convention, 267; Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, 291n.2; Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, 234–235, 237, 251n.8; Recommended Prin-

419

ciples and Guidelines on Human Rights and Human Trafficking, 265; Security Council, 292n.13; small arms trade and, 275–276, 291n.2; trafficking and, 233, 236, 259, 264, 265, 351; Trafficking Convention, 235, 242, 251n.8; trust territories of, 319 United States (US): alliances with, 6, 313; bombs dropped by, 17, 295; as colonial administrator, 24, 289, 297; concepts traveling to and from, 80, 88–89, 96, 97n.1, 142–143, 338; construction work in, 197, 201; correctional facilities in, 151; cultural models from, 6; Department of Defense, 308, 316n.13, 317n.25; Department of Energy, 295, 315n.10; developmental assistance from, 22, 332n.2; dual income couples in, 189; foreign bases of, 5, 279, 281, 294–308, 312, 315nn.6, 7, 11, 316n.13, 349, 351; fundamentalism in, 286, 345; in global economy, 59, 162, 220, 279, 338, 342; and global gay, 61–62, 63–64, 68, 71, 338; global militarization by, 281–284, 290, 291n.11, 292nn.13, 17; immigration to, 32, 102, 161, 164, 166, 167–172, 174–175, 194n.9, 259, 342, 344; labor protections in, 257; living with self-injury in, 154–155; media influence of, 152; military budget of, 315n.9; military families in, 290; military pollution in, 315n.10; and neo-colonial relations, 311; Nikkei in, 105, 114–117, 118n.5; in Pacific, 11, 34n.3, 35n.5, 318–319, 322–326, 331, 332n.8; Peace Corps volunteers from, 27; protests against, 11, 309–314, 315n.9, 316nn.13, 14, 317n.28; remittances from, 22; rescue missions by, 238, 259; in Samoa, 332n.7; security in, 9; soldiers, 327; standards of beauty in, 132; State Department Trafficking in Persons Report, 252n.13, 258, 270n.10; statistics on trafficking, 250n.2; and trafficked persons, 251n.6, 252n.12, 258, 261, 265–266, 270n.2; women of color in, 285. See also War on Terror university(ies), 108, 151, 165, 166; in China, 81, 95–96; and colonialism, 17–18, 22. See also education uranium: depleted, 294, 300, 303, 305, 314n.2; mining, 295, 315n.10 urban: boundaries in China, 6, 10, 214–217, 221–222, 343; boundaries in Japan, 141,

420

Index

144; and consumption, 224–225; and economic zones, 213, 348, 352; and education, 185, 216, 222, 226; and gay sexualities, 60, 70–71, 339; and gender, 218, 222, 223–224, 226, 227; and Japanese youth, 108; and media, 122, 223; and middle class, 123, 126, 166; and migration, 63, 198, 215, 217, 219–220, 222, 228; and modernity, 227, 345; and Nikkei, 113, 119nn.16, 18; and pornography, 132; warfare, 304–305; and work, 221, 342. See also city victim(s): agency of, 235, 239, 241–242; of capitalism, 148; of environmental damage, 295, 300; in films, 131; or heroes, 82, 342; new paradigms of, 254, 257; and normalization, 152, 155; of prostitution, 142–143; and rights, 246, 249, 259–260, 263, 265–266; of trafficking, 234, 236, 239–240, 245–246, 247, 251n.8, 252n.12, 257–258, 261–262, 269n.1, 270n.2, 345, 348 video(s): and body building, 129, 135; games, 19; and pornography, 64, 131–132, 137n.2; in workshops, 138–140, 144, 146, 149, 151, 153–154, 155–156. See also film, media Vietnam War, 251n.6, 294, 306, 307, 327 violence: and activism, 209, 258; and colonialism, 336, 337; domestic, 180, 186, 194n.7, 246, 287–288, 347; and drama, 103–104; and environmental factors, 303; epistemological, 26; and global arms trade, 284, 292n.11; and masculinity, 276; in media, 121, 129–130; and migration, 7, 171–172, 186, 292n.20; and militarism, 315n.3, 346–347; and poverty, 18; and prostitution, 238–239, 243–244; sexual, 19, 28, 30–32, 72, 137n.2, 315n.9, 347; and the state, 12n.6, 180, 194n.7, 246; structural, 250n.3; and trafficking, 249, 253, 262–263 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), in Philippines, 296, 298, 302, 316n.13. See also Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) voices, 2, 7, 8, 10, 335; of intellectuals, 15;

and media, 115, 152; of men, 11; of mothers, 290; of sex workers, 245; about trafficking, 345 wage gap, 176, 184–187. See also labor War on Terror, 295, 302, 315n.7, 317n.25, 318–319, 322, 326, 331, 332n.2, 348 wastes, toxic, 298, 312, 317nn.25, 28 wealth, 27, 150, 219; unequal distribution of, 167, 198, 233, 268, 342 weapons: and environmental destruction, 294, 295, 305, 314n.2, 315n.10, 347; in film magazines, 135; global trade in, 275–277, 284–285, 292n.15, 347; and private security forces, 277; relation of, to masculinity, 276. See also small arms; uranium welfare boards, 196, 206, 210, 212n.8 Western Samoa, 23, 24, 331 where we once belonged, 11, 15–17, 20, 22, 336 Woman Warrior, The, 20, 30 women’s studies, 281; and activism, 351; in China, 3, 79–80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87–90, 92–95, 97. See also scholarship Wordsworth, William: “The Daffodils,” 25 work: agricultural, 177, 198, 199, 209, 214, 215; ethic, 145, 147, 150, 337; and pollution, 300, 306; temporary, 170; testimonies about, 209; unit, 199, 216. See also labor workers’ associations, 196, 203, 208 World Bank, 183, 251n.6, 298, 321, 346 xingbie: consciousness, 86, 93–94; in relation to Marxism, 86–87; translation of, 89–95 Yaqona, 328 zones: conflict, 284; economic, 10, 219–221, 225–227, 228nn.1, 3, 280, 344–345, 348, 350, 352; export processing zones, 176, 183, 185–186, 291n.10; military, 308; national sacrifice, 295, 347. See also Dalian Economic Zone (DEZ)