Gender at the margins: Paradigms and peasantries in Rural Malaysia

Abstract

Synopsis This article looks at the difficulties facing feminist scholars in conceptualising the fate of women caught up in agrarian transformations and passages to modernity throughout the world. It is argued that while the dominant discourses dealing with peasantries have been able to marginalise or exclude gender, the attempts to displace those discourses have proved more problematic than feminists might have hoped: a deconstruction of the received categories leaves scholars facing the awkward and difficult task of reconstructing and reclaiming gender from the edifice of concepts that implicitly include it but exclude any real consideration of its workings. Against a background of ethnographic research in Rembau, Negeri, Sembilan, Malaysia, the article explores the implications of these issues for ‘peasant studies’, with special attention to the debates about the application of western mainstream/malestream and feminist theories to the ‘periphery’. Arguing that merely adding women to the classical debates about the processes subsuming peripheral agrarian forms, demonstrating ‘effects on women’, will not necessarily advance our understanding of the operations of gender in history, it suggests that we need to show how gender relations have been part of such agrarian transformations and to detail the linkages between local level and larger political and economic forces. But to do that we need to rethink many of the categories used in such analyses to overcome the obfuscation produced by gender absence.