About the time of the one-year anniversary of the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, a conversation about the politics of nuclear power started up among Japanologists, mostly political scientists, on a listserv I read daily. The original discussion emerged from the question of whether Japanese political leaders would push for restarting a number of the offline nuclear power plants across the country in order to cover expected gaps in Japan's electricity supply. At first the debate's participants took up the countervailing pressures Japanese policymakers face: the need to provide affordable power to Japanese companies in order to spur economic recovery, the inevitable increase in greenhouse gas emissions that would be produced by a shift from nuclear to fossil fuels, the polling data suggesting an overwhelming majority of Japanese citizens are opposed to restarting the plants (Mainichi Shinbun 2012). Then the listserv debate broke away from scholarly assessments of the electoral and policy dilemmas faced by the ruling Democratic Party into thinly veiled arguments between proponents and opponents of nuclear power. Some assertions were made about the nuclear power “phobia” and “emotional” opposition of those who, it was suggested, do not understand the science of it, and a debate commenced over the question of how many people the Chernobyl accident of 1986 had really killed.

When I was a child at the height of the Cold War, the press painted China in vivid primary colors—red menace, yellow peril, blue-clad masses. China was a back-burner story, however, compared to the Soviet threat, and my education through high school never touched upon it. A shift in public attention began with the 1971 China visit of the U.S. ping-pong team and Nixon's state visit in February 1972. Suddenly the mainstream U.S. press discovered beggar-free streets, healthy children, acupuncture anesthesia, and national optimism.

My comments in this essay focus on recent scholarship on gender, sexuality, and the state in Southeast Asia and include brief remarks on some of the literature regarding Southeast Asians in the diaspora. In the interests of transparency, I begin by noting that I am an anthropologist by trade and that many of my observations pertain to writings by anthropologists and historians, though I also engage work in other disciplines.

Attendees of the 2012 Association for Asian Studies (AAS) annual conference in Toronto were treated to two extraordinary speeches at the presidential address and awards ceremony. First, Charlotte Furth's acceptance of the AAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Asian Studies was a primer in the history of China-related gender studies (Furth 2012). Then, as Rachel Leow discusses in her paper in this forum, outgoing AAS President Gail Hershatter followed up with an inspirational critique (reprinted in this issue) of the current state of gender and sexuality studies in China. Taken together, these two speeches showed how far gender and sexuality studies in Asia have come in the last forty years, but also suggested that it is time for some fresh approaches. For example, Furth explained that when the Cambridge History of China volumes on Republican China were commissioned, she and others argued strenuously for the inclusion of a chapter on gender; but in the end, one could not be written because no one had yet done the scholarship on which such a chapter could be based. Fortunately, all of this has changed: the scholarship is there now. But Hershatter quite rightly pointed out that it is time to rethink many of the categories of analysis we have been using, because they are preventing us from asking questions we should be asking, and therefore making us miss the meanings of crucial social events and phenomena.

This paper argues that the new forms of communication have had a major impact on gender and sexual ideologies and practices across East Asia. In particular, it focuses on the impact that the new media had on Chinese masculinities in the post-Mao years, a period that coincided with the “Asian economic miracle” and the rise of China. This was also the time when women's studies became well established in the West and men's studies was becoming increasingly prominent in the academic arena. But throughout this time, research into Asian men has been very limited, although Asian women have been voluminously described, analyzed, and publicized. Men's studies scholars such as R. W. Connell were well aware that a large proportion of the world's men did not receive any attention in gender studies and that this neglect was a serious problem in the field. In the first article in the inaugural issue of Men and Masculinities, he called for a more global understanding of the world gender order (Connell 1998).

From the 1960s to the present, scholars of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional literatures and cultures have spelled out their differences with either their Freudian or Foucauldian counterparts on the articulation of love, desire, and embodiment in these literatures (Alter 1997; Benton 2006; Dimock 1966; Doniger 1973; Doniger and Kakar 2002; Kakar 1989; Kakar and Ross 1986; Ramanujan 1981; Ramanujan, Rao, and Shulman 1994; Stoler Miller 1977; Sweet 2002; Wujastyk 2005, 2009; Zysk 2002). The subcontinent's textual cultures, they argue, interrogate Freudian notions of human personality as rooted in the “truth” of sexual desire. These scholars placed the study of erotica and the sciences pertaining to human bodies within structures of teaching-learning with very long historical pedigrees.

Put simply, hair and clothing make a difference. To phrase the matter another way, the presence of these material and visual forms, or alternatively their absence from the human body, embodies potent cultural meanings and has concrete effects in the social world. To be sure, more-hidden body parts may lurk below the surface that signal our membership in certain social categories—gender, to give a prime example. In practical terms, however, when we see strangers walking toward us from a distance, we are in the habit of assuming they are a man or a woman not because we have observed their genitalia (it would be strange indeed if that were the case) but rather because we recognize and extract meaning from a more readily visible set of identity markers—primarily clothing-related (sartorial) and hair-related (tonsorial)—whose semiotic rules must be learned culturally and which vary across space and time.

Gail Hershatter's presidential address at the March 2012 Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) encouraged historians to regard gender as a tool with which one navigates a messy, fragmented historical terrain, rather than an enclosed house in which one can “sit back and enjoy the view from a single well-appointed location.” The paper that follows can be regarded as an enthusiastic endorsement. Gender history has made enormous inroads into mainstream academia; “gender is everywhere in the scholarship.” But, as Hershatter observes, “it is not the self-same thing wherever it is to be found.” Each of the stories she told illustrated a complex landscape of political change that was only partially visible or legible from inside the “house of gender,” hard-won though it has been. “Perhaps,” she commented wryly, “we need to get out of the house.” For Chinese historians, “disquiet in the house of gender” promises to be immensely productive, offering fresh views of the junctures in Chinese history in which large political projects affect changes in the smaller projects of everyday life, to arrive at an expanded notion of political change and a more complex understanding of what the revolution meant for Chinese women.

This article examines the rise of the chastity cult—the quintessential symbol of patriarchal suppression of female agency for modern reformers—during the sixteenth century. Despite the resultant stricter control over female sexuality, the growing dominance of the chastity cult cannot be simply construed as a product of top-down imposition. What made possible the penetrative power of chastity practice, this article argues, was a state indoctrination working in reverse. That is, the fast ascendance of the chastity cult in the late Ming was powered by various strains of activism that sought to protest and repair the failing system of chastity awards. The activist impetus greatly enhanced the centrality and influence of chastity practice in social life and, in doing so, opened the notion of chastity to contentious and sometimes subversive negotiations.

Embedded in early twentieth-century discourses on modernity, feminism, and nationalism, and written for the newly emerging woman reader, Rameshwari Nehru's Hindi account of Burmese women was an experiment in ethnographic writing. Along with the speeches she delivered in Burma (all reprinted in the Hindi women's periodical Stri Darpan), she also used the ethnography to call for the social and political mobilization of Burmese and Indian women. Nehru revisited the relationship between India and Burma in the gendered and elite terms of Indian (mostly Hindu) nationalism and social feminism. In describing a supposed intact social structure found in Burma, her motive was to portray a woman subject that was not modeled on prevalent conceptions of “the Western woman,” but that originated in the neighborhood of the colonial present. In the process, as this paper argues, Nehru appropriated colonial discourses on Indian and Burmese womanhood, while she also absorbed Burma into her vision of Indian nationhood and imagined sisterhood.

We provide evidence contrary to long-standing general expectations that before 1949 most Chinese women married up the social hierarchy and that footbinding facilitated this hypergamy. In our sample of 7,314 rural women living in Sichuan, Northern, Central, and Southwestern China in the first half of the twentieth century, two-thirds of women did not marry up. In fact, 22 percent of all women, across regions, married down. In most regions, more women married up than down, but in all regions, the majority did not marry hypergamously. Moreover, for most regions, we found no statistically significant difference between the chances of a footbound girl versus a not-bound girl in marrying into a wealthier household, despite a common cultural belief that footbinding would improve girls' marital prospects. We do find regional variation: Sichuan showed a significant relation between footbinding and marital mobility. Nevertheless, our evidence of the basic economic circumstances of rural women's marriages from several of China's regions, including Sichuan, supports a different cultural belief as relevant to the lives of most women: marriage among equals. These results have implications for understanding pre-1949 Chinese gender relations and rural life as well as for theorizing social causation.

This article examines the relationship between gender and Uyghur identity through the story of Nuzugum, the allegory of a Kashgar woman who kills an enemy outsider she is forced to marry rather than yield her chastity and bear his children. Tracing the story from its nineteenth-century roots to literary, artistic, and political incarnations in recent decades, the article argues that the story's prominence in the canon of Uyghur literature and its eponymous protagonist's place among Uyghur national heroes highlights the integral but overlooked role of gender in the construction of modern Uyghur identity. The resiliency of the story's gendered themes also underscores gender's importance in contemporary Uyghur political advocacy, especially advocacy about the transfer of Uyghur women to factories in China's coastal cities, an issue connected to the July 2009 protests and riots in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.