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Women and Politics in Thailand: Continuity and Change

edited by Kazuki Iwanaga This edited volume, including contributions from some of the leading scholars in the field, addresses the challenges, obstacles and opportunities for increased women’s political representation in Thailand. Will Thai politics be different with an increase in...

The Comfort Women of Singapore in History and Memory

Shortlisted for the 2024 Singapore History Prize!Winner: Singapore Book Award for Best Non-Fiction Title 2023 by Kevin Blackburn "Comfort women" or ianfu is the euphemism used by the Japanese military for the women they compelled to do sex work in...

The Authority of Influence: Women and Power in Burmese History

by Jessica Harriden Why is it that, although Burmese women historically enjoyed relatively high social status and economic influence, for the most part they remained conspicuously absent from positions of authority in formal religious, social and political institutions? This is...

Women in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements

Edited by Susan Blackburn and Helen Ting Books on Southeast Asian nationalist movements make very little - if any - mention of women in their ranks. Biographical studies of politically active women in Southeast Asia are also rare. Women in...

Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia

by Sylva Frisk In recent decades, Malaysia has been profoundly changed both by forces of globalization, modernization and industrialization, and by a strong Islamization process. Some would argue that the situation of Malay women has worsened but such a conclusion...

Remembering the Samsui Women: Migration and Social Memory in Singapore and China

By Kelvin E.Y. Low Immediately recognisable by their hong tou jin or red headscarves, Singapore's Samsui women immigrants from the Samsui region of Guangdong, China have become icons of Singapore's twentieth century economic transformation. Working in construction, in factories and...

Indonesian Women and Local Politics: Islam, Gender and Networks in Post-Suharto Indonesia

By Kurniawati Hastuti Dewi In an important social change, female Muslim political leaders in Java have enjoyed considerable success in direct local elections following the fall of Suharto in Indonesia. Indonesian Women and Local Politics shows that Islam, gender, and...

Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641−1699

By Sher Banu A.L. Khan ebook available at: and  The Islamic kingdom of Aceh was ruled by queens for half of the 17th century. Was female rule an aberration? Unnatural? A violation of nature, comparable to hens instead of roosters crowing...

Victorious Wives: The Disguised Heroine in Nineteenth-Century Malay Syair

By Mulaika Hijjas In Victorious Wives, Mulaika Hijjas uses tools drawn from literary criticism and gender studies to look at a previously neglected corpus of Malay literature in a new light. The relatively equal gender relations in Southeast Asia have...

Gendered Inequalities in Asia: Configuring, Contesting and Recognizing Women and Men

edited by Helle Rydstrom Global processes with flows in money, commodities and people have made it increasingly varied and blurred what it means to be a female or male in Asia today. Socio-economic and cultural patterns in Asia intersect with...

Beyond the Singapore Girl: Discourse of Gender and Nation in Singapore

by Chris Hudson The branding of Singapore International Airlines with the image of a beautiful, petite and servile 'Oriental’ woman dressed in figure-hugging sarong-kebaya is one of the world’s longest running and most successful advertising campaigns. But this image does...

Gender Politics in Asia: Women Manoeuvring within Dominant Gender Orders

edited by Wil Burghoorn, Kazuki Iwanaga, Cecilia Milwertz and Qi Wang This book examines cultural complexities of gender by focusing on gender politics in Asia, with case studies from China, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia. It is a...

Cultivating Gender: Means of Place and Work in Rural Vietnam

by Cecilia Bergstedt 'The husband ploughs, the wife transplants, the buffalo harrows.’ In rural Vietnam, this ancient saying has survived communist revolution, land reforms and the recent rise of market-oriented household farming. And yet, even if this trinity still pictures...

Wanderlust: The Amazing Ida Pfeiffer, the First Female Tourist

Shortlisted for the SBPA Singapore Book Award for Best Digital Marketing Campaign 2020.John van WyheeBook available from:    and Wanderlust is the true story of Ida Pfeiffer (1797–1858), one of the most remarkable female travellers who ever lived. It is the story...

Cantonese Society in Hong Kong and Singapore: Gender, Religion, Medicine and Money

By Marjorie Topley, Edited by Jean DeBernardi The volume collects the published articles of Dr Marjorie Topley, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the postwar period and also the first president of the revived Hong...

China's Left-Behind Wives: Families of Migrants from Fujian to Southeast Asia, 1930s-1950s

By Huifen Shen In China's Left-Behind Wives, Huifen Shen tells the extraordinary story of an overlooked group of women who played an important role in one of the largest waves of migration in history. For roughly a century starting around...

Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions

edited by Jenny Hedström and Elisabeth Olivius Although the February 2021 military coup brought an end to a decade of far-reaching political, economic and cultural change in Myanmar, the attempt to restore a masculinized, military dictatorship has met widespread popular...

Gender Practices in Contemporary Vietnam

Edited by Helle Rydstrom and Lisa Drummond Confucianism, colonialism and socialism have all contributed significantly to gender relations in Vietnam. More recently, political and social change associated with modernization and globalization have also had an impact. How do the Vietnamese...

Follow the Maid: Domestic Worker Migration from Indonesia

by Olivia Killias This fascinating study unveils the workings of the Indonesian migration regime, one that sends hundreds of thousands of women abroad as domestic workers each year. Drawing on extended ethnographic research since 2007, the book literally follows migrant...

At a Moment's Notice: Indonesian Maids Write on Their Lives Abroad

edited and translated by Jafar Suryomenggolo Life abroad for Indonesian women hired as domestic workers is more than the job. In their spare time, some will plan a better life back home when their work contract ends. Others will venture...

Southeast of Now Vol. 3, No. 1

The first issue of the third volume features: Editorial: Gender in Southeast Asian Art HistoriesYvonne Low, Roger Nelson, Clare Veal Articles Making Line and Medium May Adadol Ingawanij Art on the Back BurnerEileen Legaspi-Ramirez Picturing FemininityEksuda Singhalampong Women, Tradition and...

Gendered Entanglements: Revisiting Gender in Rapidly Changing Asia

edited by Ragnhild Lund, Philippe Doneys and Bernadette P. Resurrección The overall objective of this volume is to revisit gender as a concept that can engage simultaneously with change and continuity in today’s Asia, but with greater intellectual reflexivity to...

Breast Cancer Meanings: Journeys Across Asia

edited by Cynthia Chou and Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen Breast cancer is now the most common cancer among women in most Asian countries. Many lives are at stake. Even in places where state-of-the-art medical services are available, thousands of women in...

Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870-1940

By James F. Warren Among the many groups of workers whose labor built Singapore in the 20th century, there may be none as marginalized in memory as the women who travelled from China and Japan to work in Singapore as...

It's a Living: Work and Life in Vietnam Today

Edited by Gerard Sasges Through 67 interviews and 59 photographs, It's a Living reveals the energy and struggle of the world of work in Vietnam today. A goldfish peddler installing aquariums, a business school graduate selling shoes on the sidewalk,...

Those Days in Muramatsu: One Woman's Memoir of Occupied Japan

By Yumi Goto, Introductions by Grant K. Goodman and Elizabeth Schultz ebook available at: and In the aftermath of the Pacific War and Japan's capitulation, Mrs Yumi Goto and her family lived in the small community of Muramatsu, where they...

Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures

edited by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and William F. Schroeder This book brings together some of the most exciting, original and cutting-edge work being conducted on contemporary queer China. The volume includes original essays by some of the most prolific and...

Lost Times and Untold Tales from the Malay World

Edited by Jan van der Putten and Mary Kilcline Cody How did the Komodo dragon influence Hollywood? What do Wanted posters reveal about the Wild Wild East? Was the hapless explorer a martyr to science or a gaseous windbag? Why...

Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882-1892

By Raquel A.G. Reyes Love, Passion and Patriotism is an intimate account of the lives and experiences of a renowned group of young Filipino patriots, the men whose propaganda campaign was a catalyst for the country’s revolt against Spain. José Rizal,...

Of Self and Injustice: Autobiography and Repression in Modern Indonesia

By C. W. Watson Since the downfall of Soeharto in 1998 many autobiographical writings have appeared in Indonesia from the pens of those who were marginalized by his so-called New Order regime. This book examines representative autobiographies of several such...

The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia

By Jean DeBernardi The Way That Lives in the Heart is a richly detailed ethnographic analysis of the practice of Chinese religion in the modern, multicultural Southeast Asian city of Penang, Malaysia. The study focuses on popular religious culture and...

Love, Money and Obligation: Transnational Marriage in a Northeastern Thai Village

Shortlisted for the ICAS Book Prize 2021 English - Best Book in the Social Sciences 2021.by Patcharin Lapanun Globalization means transnational marriages and intimacies become increasingly viable options for women and men. Patcharin Lapanun explores the marriages of Thai women...

Surviving Against The Odds: Village Industry In Indonesia

By S. Ann Dunham, Edited by Alice G. Dewey and Nancy I. Cooper President Barack Obama's mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an economic anthropologist and rural development consultant who worked in several countries, including Indonesia. When Dunham married Lolo Soetoro...

Love and Dread in Cambodia: Weddings, Births and Ritual Harm under the Khmer Rouge

By Peg LeVine For a decade, the author followed Cambodian men and women to former wedding and birth sites from the Khmer Rouge period (1975-79), filming their return to these locations. In the process she uncovered evidence of the way...

International Women's Day 2017

Will you #BeBoldForChange on International Women's Day 2017? This year’s campaign calls for action to drive change and progress for women and create a “more gender inclusive” working world. This comes in light of recent projections by the World Economic...

#BuySingLit Highlights (Part 2)

In part 2 of our series on #BuySingLit highlights, we shift our attention to the discipline of Sociology. In the words of C Wright Mills, “neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood...