East Asian Studies: Gender

Abstract

Gender, like all ideological terms (e.g., civil society), is political policy and an analytic category. Here gender in East Asian studies will be understood historically. A concern of anthropologists, sociologists, and political economists since the 1970s, the use of a gender analytics was contested when it entered East Asian area studies in the 1990s Conceptually (and particularly after several historians refined and popularized the term), gender offered a social explanation for cultural variation in sexual and social practices previously either attributed to anatomical difference or simply ignored. It also offered a mode of general cultural analysis. Approximately when gender was accepted into area studies, ‘East Asia,’ an artifact of Cold War area studies in the United States, began to be questioned. In post-1989 re-regionalized area studies the preferred scholarly term is ‘Asia-Pacific.’ Factors contributing to re-regionalization are common: unequally experienced neoliberalist economic globalization processes; intrastate capital development projects; transnational flows of Chinese gendered labor and capital; and, the new global division of labor linking South East, East, and North Asia. While regional states retain sovereign regulatory powers, the national welfare policies that during the twentieth century provoked and circumscribed national gender stereotypes and development policy are changing. In ‘new metropolises’ that form the skeleton of the Asia-Pacific, neoliberal economic policies still shape national or race, ethnic, gender-coded citizens. However, driving ideologies of gendered social difference now are commodified, consumption-oriented, lifestyles. New policies, practices, and critical theories in turn are reshaping how area scholars and government officials employ the gender analytics now.