Theorising gender, power and modernity in affluent Asia

This book is about women, new money and power in East and Southeast Asia. We do not aim simply to analyse the ‘effects’ on women of the dramatic economic and social changes sweeping the region, or to add women to the many mainstream accounts of these changes that so persistently exclude them. Instead, we hope to show that the modernising and globalising of Asia have been systematically gendered processes. The collection of articles presented here aims to document and analyse some of the relationships between gender and the shifts of power accompanying Asia’s new affluence ¹ by concentrating on the reworkings of ‘public’ and ‘private’. We are particularly interested in the contests around the links between femininities, public and private spheres and the changing shapes of class and nation in the countries examined. We have two central themes: first, that gender relations are central to the making of middle classes and modernity in the region and, second, that representations of gender occupy a central place in the contests about meanings and identities accompanying these processes.