ABSTRACT
This paper briefly describes a Khmer politician's references to four women made during a 1993 campaign speech. It then reviews notions of the ideal woman from Khmer literature, and from life stories and ethnographic accounts. The politician manipulated gender symbolism, playing on multiple ambiguous notions of femaleness to prove his own powerful status and to comment on the current state of the Khmer social and moral order. In the face of the drastic changes of the last twenty years, he linked his own power and that of other men to their control over women's sexuality. While he was willing to allow for, indeed participate in playing on, the ambiguity inherent in gender conceptions to create new ideal types of strong women, he simultaneously used appeals to tradition to maintain male authority over women.
