Migration and Gender Politics in Southeast Asia

Abstract

As a region that has experienced major socio-political and economic transitions in recent decades, Southeast Asia provides a rich and variegated terrain to explore the gendered lives and experiences of men and women in a globalizing world of increased migrations and mobilities. Relations of equality and complementarity between Southeast Asian men and women have long been thought to be a regional characteristic (Andaya 2007) but much has changed in recent times. Deeper incorporation of the region into the global world order provides a mobile context shaping the gendered experiences and micropolitics that men and women sustain in reproducing and resisting socio-cultural change and economic development. By the closing decades of the twentieth century, Southeast Asian women, in particular, have seen their lives transformed by rapid but uneven economic growth and development, the penetrating reach of global capital and international business, the strengthening of economic-cum-cultural nationalisms, the accelerated pace of urbanization, downward trends in fertility, and the increasing feminization of labor migration in the region (Yeoh, Teo and Huang 2002). At the same time, Southeast Asian men are also experiencing pressures to perform masculine subjectivities differently or more flexibly, even if deep-seated transformations in gender ideologies or scripts are more resistant to change (Hoang and Yeoh 2011; Ford and Lyons 2012).