Women in Asia

A comprehensive coverage of all the major Asian countries by experts in the field.

Gender and Power in Affluent Asia is the first major study to provide analysis of the relationships between gender and power that have accompanied the rise of Asian affluence. Prompting a series of questions about the links between gender, modernity and globalization in the region, the contributors pursue two major themes: the centrality of gender relations to the making of the middle classes and modernity in the region; and the centrality of representations of gender in the contests about meanings and identities accompanying these processes. This is an innovative work that provides coverage of a complex topic that has often been neglected. It gives more than just an analysis of Asian women, demonstrating the central importance of gender in the modernizing and globalizing of Asia.

The essays in this volume explore women's working and family lives in contemporary East and Southeast Asia, focusing on conflict between family and work roles, structural obstacles in the workplace, and the impact of state policies on women's well-being. It also discusses strategies that women employ in response to structural contraints provided in the context. This volume covers a particularly wide range of societies, some of which were rarely studied, in contemporary Asia. By comparing these ten Asian economies that are at different stages of economic development, the volume demonstrates the way in which gender relations transform in the course of development. The book is particularly important for sociologists and anthropologists who are interested in gender and economic development.

South Asian women have frequently been conceptualized in colonial, academic and postcolonial studies, but their very categorization is deeply problematic. This book, informed by theory and enriched by in-depth fieldwork, overturns these unhelpful categorizations and alongside broader issues of self and nation assesses how South Asian identities are 'performed'. What are the blind spots and erasures in existing studies of both race and gender? In what ways do South Asian women struggle with Orientalist constructions? How do South Asian women engage with 'indo-chic?' What dilemmas face the South Asian female scholar?With a combination of the most recent feminist perspectives on gender and the South Asian diaspora, questions of knowledge, power, space, body, aesthetics and politics are made central to this book. Building upon a range of experiences and reflecting on the actual conditions of the production of knowledge, South Asian Women in the Disapora represents a challenging contribution to any consideration of gender, race, culture and power.