East Asian Gender Studies Research Paper

2. The Policies Of Gender

Gender is modern political policy. Presently it forms an element of the post-Cold War global governance goals disseminated through the United Nations, so-called nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and donor or civil society organizations. This post-1989 neo-liberal gender policy is juridical. It argues that all states should adopt the position that women’s rights are universal human rights. Gender as state policy, however, is older and more historical than current rhetoric would have it. In the twentieth century, industrialized and late industrializing states have cast citizenship in gendered terms.

2.1 Contemporary Gender Policy, Global Go ernance, Women’s Human Rights, 1979–

The importance of gender as policy emerged in the initiatives for global governance over the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is an aspect of the international human rights law movement. Its cornerstone is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which seeks to abolish ‘gender-based violence’ and is a 1979 revision of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United Nations, donor agencies (like the Ford Foundation), and a newly arisen civil society sector began advancing gender-sensitive programs during the United Nations Decade for Women (1975–85) and during subsequent United Nations Conferences on Women, culminating in the 1995 Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women and its resulting ‘Platform for Action.’ As a whole, these institutions and the World Bank’s investments promote the view that gendered difference is an important axis of inequality. Many advocates in the United States blame non-Western states for gendered inequality. They seek to use gender as a development index to force perceived noncompliant states to redress the relative poverty and vulnerability of female citizens. Loans, investment, education, and outreach into semi-official social service agencies are the instruments of global governance. Though a lack of clarity prevails about whether these attempts are effective or a US form of triumphalism, Charlotte Bunch and Hillary Clinton are the movement’s best-known leaders.

3. Historical Gender Policies Of Modernizing States In ‘East Asia’: The 1840s To The 1980s

The novelty of contemporary uses of the gender analytics tends to obscure the longevity of gender modernization policies throughout Asia-Pacific. Scholars working in the framework of the ‘East Asia’ area studies during the 1980s and 1990s have established that much. It can be said that colonialism itself advanced the rationalization of gender by bureaucratizing social modernity or (in some cases) by directly exploiting the bodies of women. During the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the forces of imperialism, colonialism, and sub-imperialism propelled late industrializing states toward expeditious efforts of political modernization and capital accumulation. States pursued this objective in various ways, although interstate relations meant that events in one state (e.g., Japanese imperialism in Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan) contributed to the shape of gender policy in other states.

3.1 Colonial Gender Policy In Modern Korea

Between the 1870s, when its traders arrived in Korea’s overwhelmingly agricultural economy, and 1945, when Japanese colonial administration evacuated and the neo-colonial United States occupation began, the peninsula took on the classic colonial configuration of a political economy twisted to serve Japanese imperial expansionism. Japan’s colonial authorities reordered Korea’s rural economy, instituting modern concepts of ownership to expedite taxation. The new system placed tax gathering and relations of production in the hands of a semi-colonial and semi-feudal native elite, ‘landlordizing property rights’. This industry led to a widespread shift from peasantry to tenancy as the primary relation of production. Agricultural productivity rose, but so did rural immiseration. Poverty, occupation, and assimilation policies flowered into a widespread licensed military prostitution industry (see Choi 1997). This, and particularly Japanese family law, burdened Korean gender and class relations and helped to shape a male-centered style of nationalist anti-colonial struggle, involving women and men of all classes (see Park 1998, Fujime 1997).

In divided South Korea after the Pacific War, a state-compelled development that Alice Amsden calls ‘late-industrializing’ (and argues is a global model) reconfigured Korean social relations of gender (Amsden 1989). The incorporated Cold War state inherited a Europeanized, Japanese, colonial civil code. As Hyunnah Yang has shown, along with the modern legal regulation of domestic relations the civil code supported an imaginary ‘Korean tradition’ that naturalized female subordination. Consolidation of Japanese domestic civil statutes and modern family law into Korean jurisprudence in the Korean Republic (during and after the partition of the nation) also ratified a gendered modernity, heavily weighted to the nuclear, patrilineal, small family unit. The now constitutional doctrine of patrilineality triggered waves of feminist intervention into state-sanctioned subordination of women and women’s labor power under the US-supported military regime (Yang 1998). Feminist and labor movement successes have led to revisions of the family law in 1962, 1977, and 1989. However, the fact remains that the modern state—more perhaps than the dynastic regime—consolidated domestic property, family jurisdiction, domestic labor, and legal claims in the hands of the patriline and restricted the claims of female kin. Little is known of the gendered state policy of North Korea, but it appears to be modeled on that of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).

3.2 Colonial Modernity, Imperialist Economy, National Gender Policy In Modern Japan

Historians are agreed that the Meiji state (1868–1912) was preoccupied with gender policies from the outset of its drive to modernize Japan on the European model (under threat of Western imperialism) (see Bernhardt 1991, Sievers 1983). The Meiji civil code of 1898 ideologically reformulated the patriarchal family and its relation to the state, emphasizing the political obligation of scientific housewifery, or ‘good wife, wise motherhood.’ Severe restrictions on women’s political rights were coupled with the statist argument that the labor of women should be considered a civil service to the nation. Deliberate gender policies like these persisted, toward varying ends, throughout the twentieth century. First, the new state-sponsored industrialization policy willfully and strategically regendered the household division of labor by moving men out of domestic production into heavy industry. Second, policy affecting men and children led to the official drive in the late nineteenth century to ‘reshape conceptions of womanhood’ (Uno 1991). Fostering smaller family formations, female education, young women’s heavy participation in waged light industrial production, instituted bans on female public political participation, as well as campaigns encouraging feminine virtues in household and reproductive labor affected growing sectors of the national population. A twenty-year effort to bureaucratize the policy on women culminated in the 1898 implementation of Japan’s prewar civil code.

Capital accumulation through industrial production and constitutional state formation in Japan rested on colonial expansion onto the Asia mainland, into Korea and Taiwan, and eventually throughout the Asian Pacific. Despite its best efforts, the state had never been able to contain female wageworkers from moving into the labor market. As militarization and colonial administration drained off increasing numbers of men into service, state policy began gendering the notion of national sacrifice. Men were to provide military or colonial service. Militarized policy on women sought to rework the family into a feminine sector of the public sphere. The onset of glorification of national motherhood is datable to this era. It resurfaced (in altered form) in immediate postwar policies.

After 1945, state policy sought to emphasize domestic reproduction and super-exploit male labor in an economic drive to recover Japan’s regional supremacy under the umbrella of a US-dominated Cold War containment policy. Adjunct to this was an effort to limit female participation in Japan’s national labor market while increasing (after 1956) women’s responsibility to undertake domestic consumption responsibilities.

As in the Korea case, the history of gender and the nation sometimes precludes an emphasis on the Japanese women’s rights movement, to say nothing of a transnationally influential, Japanese feminist critical theory that arose with colonial modernization and state formation. Nonetheless, as Mariko Asano Tamanoi noted in her study of rural women and nationalist ideology, the term ‘national woman’ is too simplistic and does not convey the full import of gendered social change in the twentieth century (Tamanoi 1998).

3.3 Sub-Imperialism, Colonial Modernity, And Policies Of Gender Revolution In Modern China

The Chinese record of state-mandated gender policy is intricate. That is due to its enormous size vis-a-vis other East Asia nation-states, its semi-colonial status after 1842, a full half-century of multiply sited civil wars, and the high priority which the Chinese Communist Party accorded to women’s liberation. As early as the compromised Republican era (1911–49), the state was initiating gender and development policies that were later absorbed into influential Party state policies associated with Maoism and the revolutionary mobilization policies of the PRC.

National gender policy first appeared in the form of state-mandated reforms of education, female dress, and foot-binding practices. A juridical modernization indebted to both continental European and Japanese models was instituted in the 1929–31 modern civil code and, under the Nationalist or Republican Party state (1911–49), mobilized women into participatory forms of citizenship. A further link exists between the weakly instituted republican civil code (organized around a liberal divorce law) and campaigns during the 1940s and 1950s to propagate the Chinese Communist Party’s Marriage Law (Bernhardt 1994).

The ethos that infused revolutionary gender ideology came from the early twentieth-century Chinese Enlightenment: an anti-colonial, urban, nationalist movement led by modern intellectuals. The Chinese Communist movement, which incorporated feminist themes, was—relative to contemporary states—hospitable to policies that institutionalized women’s liberation. But, like other states, women’s liberation became an index of national modernity, particularly, perhaps, under Chinese Communism. What most distinguished the gender policy of the early Chinese communist states was their focus on mobilization as a means of institutionalizing political policy and their organization of gender revolution around a Marriage Law that put the conjugal couple at the center of jurisprudence (Gilmartin 1995).

Land reform and class war in the late 1940s and early 1950s and the state policy of rural communization in the early 1960s were no doubt two of the most transformative revolutions of the twentieth century. These revolutions consolidated the gains of Chinese state feminism by placing laws on the books that governed the social labor of women and granted women the rights to own (however briefly) land in their own names (Johnson 1983.) Socialist development policies, which were aimed at consolidation of state power and primitive accumulation for investment in late, socialist industrialization, rested on the nuclearization of family resources in the urban areas. They also proletarianized women and periodically used female labor as a reserve pool. The mobilization of peasant women into agricultural production furthered primitive capital accumulation as well as mechanisms to extract rural capital gains for use in urban development. Nonetheless, recent studies point to the ways that particularly poor peasants took advantage of the modern state institutions to further personal goals, particularly women seeking divorces. The socialist state’s welfare policies had a wide-reaching impact on several issues: the gendering of labor, domesticity, sexuality, and demography; civil rights and access to public space; and avenues of upward political mobility.

4. Economic Liberalization, The Displacement Of ‘East Asia’ As A Region, Gender Scholarship And Transnational Flexible Economies

Just as historically ‘modernization’ is usually linked to Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, neo-liberal ‘globalization’ is linked to Asia-Pacific in the last third of the twentieth and probably much of the twenty-first century. AsiaPacific is a laboratory of post-Fordist flexible capital accumulation inside a post-Cold War international state system. The Asian Pacific roots of this neo-liberal globalization lie in:

(a) the Chinese economic reforms of the 1970s;

(b) the hyper-development of newly industrialized countries (NICs) and city-states (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong);

(c) Japanese capital investment in Malaysia and other South East Asian countries;

(d) the rise of flexible Chinese diasporic capitalism;

and

(e) US sponsored neo-liberal policies of the World Bank and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) system.

Within intra-Asian political economies, in so-called transnational gendered labor flows, and outside it in interregional global trade, policy elites in Asia-Pacific states and national corporations are scaling back modernization strategies based on a state welfare logic (see Higgott 1999, Ong and Nonini 1997).

No longer central to development are the projects that had earlier supported the public ideology of a state or nation-typical, modern woman and domestic relations, although the use of maids among the middle class is stabilizing the elite family structure in some regions. It is premature to speculate what specific gendered configurations in subregions and specific locales will emerge in the future. However, gender is becoming a central concept in writing throughout the Asia-Pacific region and the United States. Scholars globally seek to explain how liberalization of economic life affects populations that are now defined in relation to their consumption power or their capacity to be absorbed into the flexible service sector (e.g., tourism, prostitution, travel) as well as their labor power. Heightening class differentials separating consumers and service providers, surging global inequality explained in cultural terms, ethnic and race-coded discriminations, systematic preference accorded flexibility in labor migration, and capital investment patterns across state lines (but within regional cores) are all having an impact on the way that the concept ‘gender’ (in Chinese usage ‘social gender’ or shehui xingbie) will be employed. Transnational corporations (TNCs) now recruit and market with the concept in mind. New social movement policy strategists, net- works of internationalist progressive scholars, United States feminist human rights lawyers, World Bank lending policy makers, United Nations monitors of prostituted labor and infectious diseases: all are incorporating the policy and analytics of ‘gender’ into their thinking.

Particularly since the finance capital crisis of 1997–8, it has been increasingly apparent to observers that a new regional production of scholarship is on the rise. Produced by diasporic scholars from Asian locales resettled in the metropole, or writing from ‘new metropolises’ of Singapore, Hong Kong, Seoul, Jakarta, Tokyo, Beijing, and Sydney, ‘conscientized’ scholars in the First World, and expatriate Asians in the white nations of Europe and the US, this scholarship is eroding the boundaries of area studies, properly speaking. Whether we are speaking of scholarship on gender inequality which Women’s Federation scholars in Beijing produce in Chinese for national circulation, or studies produced in Tokyo and Seoul in English for international dissemination, or the steady translation of mainline US feminist and gender theory to a wide number of gender studies institutes throughout Asia, the full impact of localized scholarship on US-oriented area studies has yet to be registered. The trend toward globalized scholarship is exemplified in the work of the journal Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique which publishes research that questions strict national divisions on which conventional area studies have rested and also injects the gender analytics into scholarship. The appearance of pan-Asian or regional cultural studies journals like Inter-Asian Cultural Studies (Taiwan), the Asian Journal of Women’s Studies (Korea), and many others is also blurring the edges of area studies and area-oriented gender studies.

The effort to grasp the implications over the years 1970–2000 of re-regionalization (as well as the rise of flexible capital and gendered consumer markets) is producing significant lines of innovative global scholarship. The concepts of ‘transnational Chinese capitalism’ and ‘flexible citizenship’ allow Aihwa Ong, for instance, to propose the emergence of ethnicized capital flows which are not nationally grounded and which rest on the persistent powers of the state, opportunistically taking advantage of state forms (Ong 1999). Modern Chinese transnationalism, its distinctive strategies of capital accumulation, and gender analytics are all being studied empirically. Specialists consider gender as a significant axis among other axes, such as ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, racialization, and caste status. A special issue of the journal Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique (1999) on ‘Asian Transnationalisms’ has highlighted these dynamics in relation to ethnicity and sexuality.

Advocates and critics of liberal globalization alike recognize the enlarged opportunities for public sexual expression opening up in the new metropolises of Pacific Asia. Sexualized and commodified styles of self-presentation open fresh possibilities for new social movements of minority social groups, such as self-styled queers (Ho 1998). Minority sexual communities—gay, bisexual, non-procreative hetero- sexual—exist in most of the new metropolises. The centrality of the gender analytics to scholarship about these communities and cultural criticism from within them are very clear in queer social, cultural, cinema, and theoretical studies which presume trans-nationality and track how sexual expression is gendered among specific groups of queers (see Manalansan 1997, Hanawa 1994). It is premature to consider how crosscurrents between queer criticism and a retrenched or renaturalized market heterosexuality will play out. One critic has shown (in a field study of young, heterosexual, urban, upwardly mobile, Chinese women) that claims to sexual pleasure have led to enriched lives. Yet, sexual rights have proved consistent with authoritarian forms of governmentality (Erwin 2000).

Another avenue for innovation in gendered area studies of the re-regionalized Asia-Pacific has been the political economy of ethnic coding in intra-national, transnational and trans-border contexts. Diasporic ethnicities such as the Hmong are trans-Asian minorities whose communities are now globalized. Ethnic and national coding have been significant to studies of minority service work in tourism and in gendered, often sexed, labor flows of subaltern national citizens from the Philippines into the boom economies of Taiwan, South China, and Hong Kong. Ethnographers and theorists are pursuing a combined transnational and ethnic focus that promises to clarify the political complexity of the new Asia Pacific and its new social movements.

5. Conclusion

The analytics of gender offers increased penetration of markets as easily as it offers progressive scholars another significant index for gauging relative oppression and appropriately representing those who cannot represent themselves. Certainly advertising, cultural markets, and lifestyle expenditure in the ongoing consumer revolution refiguring the region are naturalizing heterosexual gender norms around anatomical sexual difference and the capacity to consume and produce what is appropriate to one’s ‘nature.’ Increasingly feminist critique has taken up the problems endemic in consumer society as well as extending its traditional concern for poverty, anti-sexism, and freedom from reproductive tyranny and disease. Undoubtedly, scholarship will look increasingly at the conjugal pair, partly in order to queer commercial norms and partly to expose the political culture’s reliance on a heterosexual mode of consumption.

Another task for gender analytics in Asia-Pacific area studies is to document the vast and increasing rifts that separate women in the same society, as well as the economic differentials between women and men affecting specific sectors. A related project will be to follow up on Li Xiaojiang’s comment (2001) that the struggle for gender equality is a long historical struggle for all sectors and subgroups, classes, and class fragments, and should be studied as such. A further probable area of new research may be the political economy of pan-‘Asianism’ and the cultural production of women in transition in many of the liberalized state economies (Barlow 1998). How the new social movements engaged in Asia-Pacific (as elsewhere) proceed in the years 2000–10 may have some impact on how the gender analytics is employed in state policymaking and that, in turn, will affect the problems taken up in academic venues.

Bibliography:

1. Amsden A 1989 Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and late industrialization. Oxford University Press, New York
2. Barlow T E 1996 Theorizing Woman: Funu, Guojia, Jiating. In: Scott J (ed.) Feminism and History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
3. Barlow T E 1998 Green blade in the act of being grazed: Late capital, flexible bodies, critical intelligibility. Differences 10(3): 119–58
4. Bernhardt K 1994 Women and the Law: Divorce in the republican period. In: Bernhard K, Huang P, Allee M (eds.) Civil Law in Qing and Republican China. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
5. Bernhardt G (ed.) 1991 Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
6. Butler J 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminisms and the Sub versions of Identity. Routledge, New York
7. Choi C 1997 (ed.) The comfort women: Colonialism, war, and sex. Special Issue of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5(1)
8. Erwin K 2000 Liberating sex, mobilizing virtue: Gender, family values, and transnational desires in Shanghai, China. Unpublished dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, CA
9. Fujime Y 1997 The licensed prostitution system and the prostitution abolition movement in modern Japan. In: Choi C (ed.) Special Issue of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 5(1): 135–70
10. Gilmartin C K 1995 Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
11. Gilmartin C K, Hershatter G, Rofel L, White T (eds.) 1994 Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
12. Grewal I, Gupta A, Ong A (eds.) 1999 Asian Transnationalities. Special Issue of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7(3)
13. Hanawa Y (ed.) 1994 Circuits of Desire. Special Issue of Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 2(1)
14. Higgott R 1999 The political economy of globalization in East Asia: The salience of ‘region building.’ In: Olds K, Dicken P, Kelly P F, Kong L, Yeung H W (eds.) Globalization and the Asia Pacific: Contested Territories. Routledge, London
15. Johnson K A 1983 Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China. Chicago University Press, Chicago
16. Manalansan M IV 1994 (Dis)Orienting the body: Locating symbolic resistance among Filipino gay men. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 2(1): 73–90
17. Mani L 1990 Contentious traditions: The debate on sati in colonial India. In: Sangari K, Vaid S (eds.) Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
18. Ong A 1999 Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke University Press, Durham, NC
19. Ong A, Nonini D M (eds.) 1997 Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. Routledge Press, New York
20. Park H O 1998 Ideals of liberation: Korean women in Manchuria. In: Kim E, Choi C (eds.) Dangerous Women: Gender and Korean Nationalism. Routledge Press, New York
21. Sangari K, Vaid S (eds.) 1990 Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ
22. Scott J W 1986 Gender: A useful category of historical analysis. American Historical Review 91: 1053–76
23. Sievers S L 1983 Flowers in Salt: The Beginnings of Feminist Consciousness in Modern Japan. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA
24. Tamanoi M A 1998 Under the Shadow of Nationalism: Politics and Poetics of rural Japanese Women. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, HI
25. Uno K 1991 Women and changes in the household division of labor. In: Bernstein G (ed.) Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
26. Li X 2001 From modernization to globalization: Where are Chinese women? Trans. Barlow T. Special Issue on Gender and Globalization. Signs
27. Ho J 1998 Kuier lilun yu zhengzhi. Special issue on queer politics and queer theory. Working Papers in Gender Sexuality Studies Zhongli guoli daxueh, Zhongli, Taiwan
28. Yang H 1998 Envisioning feminist jurisprudence in Korean family law. Unpublished dissertation. New School for Social Research, New York