menuGender and Politics Reimagined
1
Interrogating What Is Known About Gender and Politics: Vantage points from Oceania and Asia
The series of conversations that culminated in this edited volume began with the reading of a report in late 2020. Women Political Leaders: The Impact of Gender on Democracy (Cowper-Coles 2020) was produced in partnership by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL), King’s College London. The report is a valuable resource. Based on an analysis of more than 500 pieces of research published over 25 years (1995–2020), it distils key lessons about women’s political careers and the impact of their leadership on the quality of democracy and policymaking. A traffic-light system indicates findings for which the evidence base is solid (green), those for which further evidence is needed (amber) and remaining gaps in our understanding (red). The report hence provides a beneficial roadmap for research, including my own.
As a comprehensive review of the gender and politics literature, however, the report had notable absences. The number of studies from North America and Europe outnumbered those from all other regions put together. Only English-language evidence was synthesised. Tellingly, Cowper-Coles (2020) had to draw on area studies and development studies to fill the gaps in regional representation, revealing the underrepresentation of the ‘majority world’1 in political science journals. Apart from these disciplinary detours, most of the texts were from political science or sociology. Ethnographic writing on women in politics had been my primary resource as an anthropologist. The focus on everyday political practices and processes of sense-making and self-making within the political field provides incredibly rich insights into how politics and democracies work. These insights, and those of other disciplines such as history, law, geography, cultural studies and more, were largely missing. These limitations—which were acknowledged by the author—reflect the lopsided nature of scholarship and are not a deficiency of the report per se (see Medie and Kang 2018; Shim, Chapter 2, this volume).
Euro-American centrism and disciplinary parochialism are arguably stifling advancements in our understanding of gender and politics. We have at our disposal a toolbox of concepts, theories, methodologies and interpretative frames to examine the gendered nature of political institutions and the mechanisms that sustain male domination. Yet, despite this relative bounty, we remained caged by the dominance of particular geographical and disciplinary frames. Theories, concepts and analytical tools are overwhelmingly developed from studies in Euro-America and applied to other regions (for exceptions, see, among others, Bjarnegård 2013; Rai and Spary 2019; Piscopo and Kenny 2020; Baker and Palmieri 2021). Rarely is the majority world seen as a site of theory development that can illuminate the political institutions of the North Atlantic. Our imaginative resources are further constrained from citational practices that centre political science in studies of gender and politics. Insights from other disciplines may touch the margins, yet their capacity to advance the literature is dulled by their being corralled in disciplinary or area studies journals.
This volume seeks to offer a corrective of sorts by centring research from Oceania and Asia from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. We are not interested in simply presenting case studies that exhibit differences in countries outside the North Atlantic. Our ambitions are to make critical interventions in the literature, unearth fresh insights, develop innovative conceptual and theoretical tools and explore new research practices and sensibilities. In doing so, we aim to:
- Demonstrate the value in epistemologically decentring Euro-America by theorising from the majority world in research on gender and politics.
- Contribute to the re-envisioning of Asian Studies and Oceanic Studies by revealing the relevance of knowledge about these regions beyond them.
- Practise knowledge as social action (Collins 2019) through inclusive learning practices and critically interrogating knowledge hierarchies.
In this opening chapter, I examine each of these ambitions in turn, paying respect to the scholars who have made these ambitions urgent and outlining our contributions to broader agendas.
The primary methodology for this project was a workshop held over three days at The Australian National University (ANU) on 13–15 July 2022. It was a collaboration between four ANU entities: the School of Culture, History and Language within the College of Asia and the Pacific; the ANU Gender Institute; the sister institute of GIWL at The Australian National University; and the Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership. Three principles guided the event. First, we wished to revalue not only research from Asia and Oceania, but also researchers. Our invitation list targeted key scholars and activists located in institutions in these two regions. Second, we brought together two communities of practice: those studying gender and politics in Asia and/or Oceania, and those doing so in Australia. We aimed to show the possibilities for theorising from Asia and Oceania to address the deficiencies of political representation in multicultural settler states like Australia, while also providing a forum to discuss and strategise within these two communities. Our third principle was to break down the silos and hierarchies between ‘scholarly’ and ‘practical’ knowledge. We therefore invited people working in nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and government departments and elected representatives to speak alongside academic researchers. Our aim was to co-produce rich knowledge with greater potential for social impact.
The different sets of participants at times added a certain frisson or productive discomfort. We aim to capitalise on the creative energy such tension unleashed at the workshop within this edited volume. This volume is a starting point, a call to action to provincialise, de-parochialise and decolonise knowledge production in gender and politics, but it merely scrapes the surface of its possibilities. In the conclusion to this volume, we draw out common lessons that are suggestive of new ways to advance gender and politics scholarship.
Centring Oceania and Asia
Ours is not the first edited volume to centre Asia and/or Oceania in the study of gender and politics. In 1992, a seminar held in Seoul resulted in the publication Women in Politics in Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP 1993). More than 100 participants, including academics, Members of Parliament, ministers and representatives of women’s organisations, attended, resulting in country papers and the adoption of the ‘Seoul Statement on Empowering Women in Politics’. The Konrad Adenauer Foundation ‘Political Dialogue Asia’ office in Singapore carries on this important work to narrow the gender gap in politics through dialogue across sectors, with the resulting edited volumes valuable resources (Echle and Sarmah 2021; Joshi and Echle 2023). Regular academic events have resulted in several edited volumes that are classics in the study of gender and politics in Asia (Iwanaga 2008; Fleschenberg and Derichs 2012). Oceania has relatively fewer edited volumes, yet is often represented in chapters in books that take a global perspective (Howard et al. 2023; George 2020). Here, we outline how we are building on these volumes and what is distinct about our own.
First, what we do not do. This introductory chapter does not provide an overview of the state of women’s political participation across Oceania and Asia, or globally. In part, this is because recent reviews exist (Prihatini 2021; Och 2023; Howard et al. 2023). But it is also due to the tendency of statistics to foreground phenomena that can be measured, while flattening what are complex pictures of women in politics within and across countries (see Batilabasi et al., Chapter 7; Vijeyarasa, Chapter 8, this volume). Data are more readily available in the minority world, with questions relevant to the United States prominent in comparative politics (Piscopo and Kenny 2020; Teele 2019). Statistics can also overlook the influence of women in political activities outside the formal political sphere that are less easily observed or enumerated, thereby perpetuating a deficiency narrative (Phua 2018; Waylen 1996). Nor is descriptive representation indicative of influence (Prihatini 2021), a sign that women’s interests are being addressed (Vijeyarasa 2022) or fully explanatory of the conditions for obtaining political power. For these reasons, we have aimed for complexity and specificity in our stories of women’s political participation, rather than broad statistical overviews.
The reader will also not find a historical narrative of gradual improvements in the status of women. Not only has this task been accomplished elsewhere, but also global accounts tend to privilege the story of women in the minority world (Celis et al. 2013; Och 2023). Often historicity is not extended to women in the majority world—most evident in the use of the term ‘traditional’ to refer to cultural barriers to women’s political participation (Och 2023). Curiously underemphasised in both the global narrative and the defining of ‘tradition’ is the role of colonialism in transforming gender relations and hence enabling male dominance, even when the relatively recent nature of women’s exclusion from the public sphere is acknowledged (Celis et al. 2013; see Hawkesworth 2012; Segato 2018). Colonialism’s legacy extends beyond formerly colonised countries; the imperial project required and established gender relations at ‘home’ to contrast with the ‘uncivilised’ ‘Other’, with long-term effects for the position of women in these countries (Chakrabarty 2000; Hawkesworth 2012). We foreground the ongoing impact of colonialism on women’s political participation through several chapters (Anna Kwai, Chapter 3; Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence, Chapter 5; Margaret Jolly, Chapter 6; Novadona Bayo, Chapter 10), and in the afterword.
A valuable contribution of many edited volumes is a framework or analytical focal point that speaks to the commonalities of women across a region. Fleschenberg and Derichs (2012) centre the question of when women can be a springboard for democracy, seeking connections between gender exclusion, modalities of inclusion and how these shape democracies. Iwanaga’s (2008) framework builds on the common categorisation of institutional, cultural and socioeconomic barriers by identifying ‘facilitators’ from the case studies to explain how women seek and gain political office in Asia. A challenge remains, however, that in attempting a regional overview of factors, certain features are inevitably highlighted. Such analysis often falls within a ‘common denominator’ frame of identifying what women have in common, which privileges the issues of the more powerful within a universal framework (Ciccia and Roggeband 2021). Conversely, privileging the experiences of women in the majority world bears the risk of presenting a unitary and essentialised ‘woman’, doing violence to the differences across and within places (Mohanty 2002; Waylen 1996), replacing one universalism with another without contending with transferability and partiality (Hawkesworth 2012).
Instead of a singular framework or orienting question, we therefore aim for dialogue across the different studies. It bears resemblance to a ‘recognition of difference’ approach, which eschews the search for commonalities in favour of recognising that differently positioned groups will have certain issues or ways of looking at issues (Ciccia and Roggeband 2021). Comparison remains central to the project, as differences and commonalities are the basis of analysis. As Chandra Mohanty (2002: 505) writes, ‘specifying difference allows us to theorize universal concerns more fully’. Several comparative volumes achieve such a rich analysis. Commendable is the volume edited by Mariz Tadros (2014) that examines the informal repertoires of power for women across the majority world, identifying measures to increase women’s political representation that are as valid in Australia as they are in Bangladesh. Other volumes that are more than the sum of their parts include the study of grammar and performance in politics edited by Rai and Reinelt (2014), of women and dynastic politics in Asia edited by Derichs and Thompson (2013) and the interrogation of substantive representation of women across Asia edited by Joshi and Echle (2023). We take inspiration from these volumes that extend our understanding of concepts or phenomena through comparative studies but revert to a bird’s-eye view to identify the missing questions, theories and concepts that become visible when we privilege Oceania and Asia.
Texts from Oceania and Asia have, of course, already made important theoretical contributions to the gender and politics canon. The contributions in this volume build on excellent work in Thailand by Elin Bjarnegård (2013), the Pacific by Kerryn Baker (2019), Fiji by Nicole George (2012), Indonesia by Kurniawati Hastuti Dewi (2015) and India by Tarini Bedi (2016), among others. Nor is it true that disciplines outside political science and sociology have had no influence in shaping the field, with particular mention to anthropologist Emma Crewe (2021), historians J. Devika and Binitha Thampi (2012) and Shirin Rai (2017), whose disciplinary influences include performance studies. In bringing together texts with a particular regional or disciplinary focus, we seek insights across them, thereby contributing to the development of theory through the comparative project. In so doing, we aim to overcome several deficiencies in practices of knowledge production.
Disrupting canons; dismantling hierarchies
Demands to confront the hierarchies, absences and privileging within systems of knowledge production are rightly asserted in Australia and globally. Participants at the workshop shared their experiences of inequities and exploitation within academia and practice, directly confronting researchers whose voices are privileged. The resulting discomfort is necessary. To take even minor steps in the dismantling of knowledge hierarchies, it is not enough to provide space for researchers from the majority world. Minority-world researchers, especially ‘white’ researchers, must be wary of how they perpetuate these inequities. Naming and addressing racist and colonial systems of knowledge production are required for just and fair treatment of researchers. More importantly, failure to do so is one of the greatest impediments to advancing knowledge.
Raewyn Connell’s (2007) book Southern Theory outlines the limitations of ‘grand theory’ produced from, and largely about, the ‘metropole’. She argues that dominant theories in the social sciences are based on the experiences of Europe and North America, yet are presented as universal frames through which ‘all societies are knowable’ (Connell 2007: 44). Connell’s observation that ‘data gathering and application happen in the colony, while theorising happens in the metropole’ (Connell 2007: ix) is relevant to the field of gender and politics. A review of article titles in leading journals shows how articles about the majority world inevitably include location—and hence their specificity and limited generalisation—while studies on Europe, and particularly the United States, are left unbound to particularities.2 The experiences of the majority world are erased in the grounding of theory in the empirical, while knowledge of these places is framed through the theoretical problems and concepts of European society—the universal (Chakrabarty 2000; Morris-Suzuki 2020). Theory thus produced results ‘not in minor omissions but in major incompleteness, and a profound problem about the truthfulness of arguments framed as universal generalisations’ (Connell 2007: 226). To advance theory, we must not only include the ideas and experiences from the majority world, but also ‘provincialise’ knowledge produced in and about Euro-America (Chakrabarty 2000).
Doing so requires us to disrupt the canon of gender and politics—‘a privileged set of texts, whose interpretation and reinterpretation defines a field’ (Connell 2007: 4). That such a canon exists in gender and politics is evident in the repetition of names in the bibliographies of leading journals, as well as the rejections authors face when they dare not give due reverence. ‘Reading from the centre’—that is, referencing and positioning their own work in relation to other ‘metropolitan theoretical literature’ (Connell 2007: 45)—leads to a limited framing of problems and conceptual tools. Teele (2019: 15) highlights the problem in comparative politics of the ‘unreflexive importation of hypotheses from the American context’ elsewhere without contextualisation. Lack of acknowledgement of the specificities of the United States’ political system can lead to pursuing the wrong questions, being bogged down in details or overlooking other connections (Teele 2019; see also Liu 2018; Piscopo and Kenny 2020). Too often literature on gender and politics from Asia and Oceania also relies on the conceptual apparatus and analytical tools imported from Euro-America. Doing so can advance understanding, and authors in this book also draw on ‘the concepts and techniques from the metropole’ (Connell 2007: 223). Yet, theory is incomplete and limited in its empirical grounding and imaginative resources if it largely derives from the minority world.
In this volume, we aim to disrupt the canon or, in the least, expand it through theories and concepts developed in the majority world. As we outline below, and as elaborated in the chapters, this includes: historicisation that centres colonialism and decolonisation (see Hawkesworth 2012; Kauanui 2008; Teaiwa 2006); different ways of understanding and practising intersectionality, including recognising its long genealogies in feminist action (Ganesh 2016); processual understandings of democracy that excavate the importance of political subjectivities, cultural values and idioms (Michelutti 2007; Ciotti 2017); and reframing motherhood and domesticity in ways that revise conventional categorisations (Segato 2018; Waylen 1996). This ambition was realised in the selection of plenary speakers and presentations celebrating the work of overlooked feminist scholars from Oceania and Asia (see also Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence, Chapter 5; and Margaret Jolly, Chapter 6, this volume). The theoretical resources in the work of these underappreciated women are rich, providing new frames to not only understand the experiences of women in Oceania, but also approach the study of gender and politics more generally. Further, as many of our authors are fluent in at least one Asian or Oceanic language, they have access to scholarship beyond English texts or translations. While authors could draw on the texts that most resonated with them, standard citational practices of ‘reading from the centre’ were discouraged.
In highlighting the value of overlooked scholars, the violence wrought by the absence of voices from the majority world becomes apparent. Mignolo (2011) shows how epistemological projects are also projects of control, not least of which is the project of ‘modernity’. Knowledge is central, as it is ‘the enactments of certain types and spheres of knowledge that frame the praxis of living’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018: 137). The theories of economics and politics came to produce economic and political institutions. Democratic institutions—a key part of modernity and an object of study in gender and politics—are part of modernising projects. Yet, the reverberations of colonisation and decolonisation in today’s gender unequal politics are not a dominant theme in the literature. Focusing on many formerly colonial countries, these impacts are unavoidably foregrounded. Several chapters examine how processes of creolisation through the colonial encounter have led to political cultures and styles that privilege men, often obliterating more gender equal or feminine political cultures (Jolly, Chapter 6; Mostuga and Howard, Chapter 9; Novadona Bayo, Chapter 10, this volume). Political leadership has become more masculine, more hostile to women and embedded within racialised systems. Revealing these processes not only helps to understand the ongoing nature of coloniality, but also provides insights into how male dominance is produced anew over time (Segato 2018).
No discussion of hierarchies in systems of knowledge production would be complete without a discussion of ‘whiteness’. The feminist values underpinning the identification of problems and priorities in gender politics too often end up being white feminist values (Mohanty 2002; Moreton-Robinson 2020). The initial framing of the workshop that centred leadership and representation was rightly taken to task for its narrow envisioning of what political participation is and the modalities through which change can happen. More so, racial hierarchies are all too present in our research practices. Some of the most powerful moments in the workshop came when participants such as Anna Kwai and Jennifer Kalpokas Doan called out the inequities: the tendency to juniorise researchers from Oceania and Asia; to under-recognise the value of PhD students from the region beyond being objects of ‘capacity-building’; treating local collaborators as merely instruments for data collection rather than contributing expertise that would otherwise be missing. Nor are racialised hierarchies only evident in ‘North–South’ collaborations and relationships. Racialised and feminised bodies navigate invisibility/hypervisibility, marginalisation and discrimination within higher education systems where ‘white’ researchers are privileged (Barthwal-Datta 2023; Bhopal 2018). White academics have an obligation not only to renounce their privilege, but also to actively take part in dismantling white racial domination within knowledge institutions and practices (Leonardo 2004).
Scholars from Asia and Oceania have provided tools to challenge knowledge practices founded on racial domination and marginalisation. Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s influential text Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples laid bare ‘the complex ways in which the pursuit of knowledge is deeply embedded in the multiple layers of imperial and colonial practices’ (2005: 2). A decolonising methodology requires that Indigenous people lead the research process: the questions, the approach, the uses. This disruption of the ‘regular rules’ for research is not only an ethical and political necessity; it is also crucial for producing richer and more truthful knowledge.3 Anna Kwai (Chapter 3) shows how research on minority gender and development approaches applied in Solomon Islands by external researchers were driven by Orientalist discourses that fitted within a global development discourse of the Pacific as ‘backward’. Misrepresentations were based on false evidence and an exclusion of Solomon Islands women from knowledge-making practices. Indeed, including the lived experiences of women is another way in which we should disrupt the canon of gender and politics. Workshop participants spoke of the need to make visible the generations of women who have been seeking change and elevate them in our theorising. Their lived experiences of movement and solidarity-building may not have achieved the hoped-for transformations, but they are uncovering inequalities and forging new places from which women can seek change (see Ruby Lai, Chapter 12; Rachael Diprose et al., Chapter 13; Serena Ford, Chapter 14).
These necessary changes to our research practices come up against the neoliberal and neocolonial university. With universities as institutions of knowledge authority, academics are rewarded for being the experts, made legible through the number of first or sole-authored publications. Collaboration is encouraged—particularly when it brings in grant money—but the redistribution of resources and devolving of power/authorship are not. Nonetheless, and with no easy answers, contributors have explored ways to conduct research more ethically, with a focus on the quality of knowledge, not individual accolades. Chapter 7 by Camilla Batalibasi, Chandy Eng, Melissa MacLean, Donna Makini, Vani Nailumu, Sonia Palmieri and Geraldine Valei most explicitly addresses this issue, outlining a collaborative, non-hierarchical model of sense-making around their common experience of interviewing women political leaders in Asia and Oceania. In questioning research practices and seeking new forms of collaboration, we argue that fresh insights, new conceptualisations and theoretical contributions are possible.
Thinking anew about area studies
Our ambition to rethink how we do scholarship extends to studies of Asia and Oceania. The value of Asian and Pacific studies is particularly pertinent to three of the co-editors and an additional four authors, all of whom have their institutional home in the College of Asia and the Pacific (CAP) at The Australian National University. The college is critical to The Australian National University’s special status as producing knowledge and expertise about the regions in which we are situated. Institutional survival depends, in part, on demonstrating the value of this enterprise—narrowly in terms of Australia’s national interests and broadly in terms of global scholarship. The workshop aimed to take advantage of the critical mass of scholars working on gender and politics in Asia and the Pacific located in CAP, but also to bring fresh ideas about where the value of this scholarship lies. We aimed to do so by disrupting the boundary between area studies and knowledge produced for, and about, Australia (and, by extension, other countries).
But first, an explanation on our approach to defining the regions. We are mindful of the relegation of the Pacific as an add-on to the Asia-Pacific: a hyphenate descriptor popular among policymakers. Often the countries of the Pacific are almost entirely absent in maps of the Pacific Rim, which show a vast, empty ocean at its centre (Jolly 2007). We therefore use, where appropriate, ‘Oceania’, which more accurately reflects the relations and connections across the ‘sea of islands with their inhabitants’ (Hau‘ofa 1994: 153). Further, we treat neither Asia nor the Pacific as natural entities, but recognise their constructed, fluid and contested boundaries (Morris-Suzuki 2020). The Australian geopolitical imaginary has strong framings of the two regions: Asia as the future promise of capitalism; the Pacific as an object for development intervention (Jolly 2007). The developmentalism discourse that simplifies and generalises the Pacific (Teaiwa 2006) is particularly present in knowledge institutions in Australia, where government funding rewards the production of solutions for the ‘development’ problems of near neighbours. We hence want to be very clear that neither the Pacific nor Asia is the focus of this volume because they have an unusually acute problem of women’s marginalisation in politics. Rather, we see male dominance of politics as a global phenomenon, with experiences from Asia and Oceania valuable in expanding our knowledge of this shared problem.
To achieve this potential, studies of Oceania and Asia must overcome some of the problems of area studies. Area studies has been critiqued for being part of the modernist project of the colonial era and thereafter providing intelligence for Cold War governments (Goss and Wesley-Smith 2010). From our perspective, however, the most pressing problem is that the theories that inform the interpretation of ‘the diverse complexities of the particular region’ remain driven by the ‘West’ (Morris-Suzuki 2020: 15). As Tessa Morris-Suzuki (2020: 15) argues, this reliance on Western frameworks dulls understanding and frustrates the necessary task of ‘rethinking of the vision of “Western civilisation” as interpreter of the world, and as crucible of the modern’. Yet, in more recent iterations, area studies can be an antidote to Euro-American dominance in grand theory. Scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Arif Dirlik have drawn on ‘non-Western discourses, epistemologies, societies and cultural formations to critique Euro-Amerocentrism and to develop more comprehensive theories of global phenomena’ (Jackson 2019: 57). If a major criticism of grand theory in the social sciences is its erasure of the experiences of most of humankind, then rich empirical studies grounded in deep cultural and linguistic familiarity with Asia and Oceania can correct its inadequacies.
The interdisciplinarity of area studies further overcomes the limitations of knowledge produced within the narrow confines of one discipline. Peter Jackson (2019) argues that disciplinary studies are based on Euro-American intellectual and political hegemony. He pinpoints political science as one discipline that is so narrow in its geographical focus that it could be considered a disguised Western area studies. With the failure of discipline-based studies to explain ‘globalizing processes beyond the West’ (Jackson 2019: 58), area studies’ cross-disciplinarity is a strength. Teresia Teaiwa (2010: 116) similarly sees the value of Pacific studies to ‘the humanities and social sciences [as] a space for conscientious interdisciplinary engagement’. She notes that the field of Pacific studies enables cross-pollination across the stacks of single-discipline monographs and theses on the Pacific, with different disciplinary viewpoints brought together for a more holistic account. For our purposes, the need for cross-disciplinarity arises not to know a region, state or peoples, but to address a complex and shared problem of male political dominance.
So, while Asian studies and Pacific studies are valued for their production of rich knowledge of regions crucial to Australia’s interests, we argue that their greater contribution is in advancing empirical, conceptual and theoretical resources to understand common research problems. While not all authors in this volume would identify as a scholar in Asian and/or Pacific studies, all contribute to developing a wider empirical basis for grounding theory. Unlike the cursory treatment of countries to find generalisable patterns in comparative social science, these studies are grounded in deep familiarity and specificity. Against the argument that depth results in endless particularity with limited relevance beyond the locality, it is this attention to detail that enables the unearthing of hidden processes and avoids the missteps of misinterpretation (Ingold 2018; van der Veer 2016). Our cross-disciplinary approach allows us a wider range of methodological, theoretical and conceptual tools to understand the problem of male dominance in politics, and to reveal the processes that lend it remarkable durability across geographical contexts.
Our engagement with Asia and Oceania is therefore not as a region or regions per se, but for the potential of studies grounded in places outside Euro-America to advance understandings beyond these regions. Bringing these regions together is not with an ambition to produce a grand narrative with disproportionate weight on commonalities in histories and experiences. Our approach to comparison is more anthropological than sociological, aiming for the ‘elucidation of complex phenomena through comparison without “generalism” or modelling of “social systems”’ (van der Veer 2016: 148). In this way our ambitions align with what Morris-Suzuki describes as an ‘anti-area studies’ that does not use ‘modern Western academic theories to elucidate the peculiarities of places in Asia or elsewhere’ (2020: 22), but instead ‘uses knowledge of a variety of places and a variety of disciplinary approaches to elucidate problems that cross boundaries’ (p. 23). In so doing, we also question the validity of theories from the minority world and interrogate the knowledge practices that produce them. This involves interrogating the borders of artificial constructs such as Asia and Oceania. Ramona Vijeyarasa (Chapter 8) takes on the task of seeing what and how we can learn across the regions, urging us to challenge our sense of boundaries and borders rather than compartmentalise and categorise in ways that lose sight of experiences and the lessons to be learnt.
As demonstrating the relevance of studies of Oceania and Asia beyond the regions was central to our aims, a key measure of success of the workshop was the dialogue between researchers working in these regions and those in Australia. Conventionally, research from and about Oceania and Asia is seen as relevant to Australia only in as much as it satisfies the national interest to know its neighbours. When Australia seeks to know itself, it turns to the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. There are good reasons to do so. Australia is a settler state, a multicultural nation and has a Westminster-style democracy. Yet, to ignore the rich insights from Asia and Oceania is to limit the creativity with which we tackle fundamental problems. Particularly pressing is the problem of the underrepresentation of people of non-European ancestry in our political institutions, especially Asian Australians (Song 2023; Pietsch 2018). By bringing together two communities of practice—those working in Asia and/or Oceania and those working in Australia—we aimed to show the possibilities for theorising from these regions to address the deficiencies of political representation in countries like Australia.
These possibilities come in two shapes. The first operates at the meso-level of theory development, with the claim that theories developed from Asia and Oceania provide tools for understanding beyond these regions, as outlined above. The second answer responds to Australia’s status as a multicultural nation. While the influence of the United Kingdom on Australia’s political system is widely accepted, less so are the influences of diasporas on emergent political styles and cultures. Zappala (1998) notes the different political cultures of minority ‘ethnic groups’ compared with those of Anglo-Australian ethnicity (see also Sheppard et al. 2020). He argues for greater understanding of the way ethnic communities have changed the political culture in Australia, including in more mainstream ways. Nonetheless, such research remains rare, perhaps due to the focus in political science on formal political institutions—which remain British influenced—compared with the more informal institutions and political cultures. Without ignoring the dangers of reifying and essentialising fragmented and diverse ‘ethnic groups’ (Ang 2014), and of the way naming a diaspora ‘stamps it with ethnic, national or racial characteristics that survive despite all differences’ (Dirlik 2005: 166), understanding the styles of political engagement across Asia and Oceania can help us understand Australia’s political cultures (in the plural), their dynamics and complexities.
These are the kinds of possibilities that we sought to explore in the workshop. Whether we succeeded in this aim is a different matter. The workshop split largely into two groups and, while some participants attended the entire three days, the majority kept to their own communities of practice. A special issue that presents the research from the papers on Asian Australian leadership and cultural citizenship has been published by Peril magazine, edited by three leading scholars of this field: Mridula Chakrabarty, Olivia Khoo and Jacqueline Lo. While these volumes are notable outcomes from the workshop, more must be done to bring this parallel scholarship into greater conversation.
Knowledge as social action
A final ambition of the workshop was to break down the false distinction between theory and practice. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins (2019), we conceived the workshop as a form of social action in two senses. First, we theorise not for theory’s sake, but to see academic practice as an integral part of social change. As Stuart Hall (2016) encouraged and practised, theory provides a map to navigate the world so that we may intervene in ways that effect positive change. As the world is messy and dynamic, so too must our theories capture complexity and be forever contingent. Collins (2019) also advocates theory oriented to criticising social inequalities and changing the world from what it is. In this respect, theory—and perhaps especially the ‘grand theory’ that promises overarching and durable explanations of the world—can help maintain, as much as challenge, the status quo. We must therefore be not only attentive to how our own knowledge projects act on the world, but also critical of the knowledge projects that perpetuate injustices (Collins 2019).
The second sense is that social action is itself a form of knowledge production (Collins 2019). Subordinated groups have rich knowledge of systems of oppression and vast experience in navigating and labouring to transform the status quo. Their vested interest in understanding and resisting oppression makes their theories and experiences crucial resources. Patricia Hill Collins proposes intersectionality as a methodology that goes beyond academia. She writes: ‘Rather than rejecting experience and social action as dimensions of its critical theorizing, I suggest that intersectionality would do better to redefine social action as a way of knowing that, because it valorizes experience, potentially strengthens intersectional theorizing’ (Collins 2019: 13). In recognition of the value of social action for theorising, we invited to our workshop people working in nongovernmental organisations, feminist organisations, government departments and elected representatives. Our aim was to co-produce rich knowledge with greater potential for social impact.
Social activists were some of the most committed participants, with their questions and responses to research papers particularly productive. My favourite moment was when a ‘culturally and racially marginalised’4 female political actor challenged the critical analysis of ethnic politics in Australia. Her inflamed response provided not only a correction, but also experiential knowledge of the power relations that prevent women from racialised backgrounds from progressing in politics. We also convened two panels comprising people in roles focused on practical changes on the ground. Their insights help us see how we can achieve knowledge as social action through partnerships. It became clear that development agencies are as attuned as academics to rethinking knowledge practices. Panellists spoke of the need to learn from lived experience, be that the lived experience of their own relative privilege or that of the women with whom one is working. While they acknowledged the challenge of different motivations and constraints between practitioner–academic partnerships, open dialogue can ameliorate the threat. While much needs to be done in thinking creatively and reflecting critically about how we collaborate in knowledge projects, the workshop and chapters that explore these questions (Lawrence, Chapter 5; Batalibasi et al., Chapter 7) give us much food for thought.
But, like the other ambitions in this volume, breaking down the boundary between theory and practice has been only partially realised. Ideally, we would ask practitioners to review chapters and pinpoint actionable insights. Dialogue might identify models of partnerships in which the synergies across academia and practice could be realised. But time to review, comment and engage is in short supply in both sectors. We are reminded of the way neoliberal economies, with their audit culture and cost-cutting, have squeezed out time for the more impactful and arguably most satisfying parts of our work (Fleming 2021). Durable systems of value also present barriers. Among some disciplinary communities, the work of academic activists is looked down on and their careers stall. Nonetheless several chapters bring together practice and theory either through the composition of authors or by movement between sectors. Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence (Chapter 5) shows how she has brought deep decolonial thinking into the knowledge practices of the International Women’s Development Agency. Balitabasi et al. (Chapter 7) reflect on their experiences working across sectors in a research project. While knowledge as social action remains by necessity an incomplete project, we hope to have taken steps in showing its importance and potential in gender and politics scholarship.
This volume
Considering the aim and politics of this edited volume—centring knowledge and researchers from Oceania and Asia—it is of some regret that the four editors are Australian researchers based in Australian universities: Margaret, Sonia and Tanya at The Australian National University and Ramona at the University of Technology Sydney. The editorial team emerged from those most active in making the workshop a success, and who had the time and editorial skills required. Such a project can be a risk, and hence prior successful working partnerships were valued. Nonetheless, having an editorial home in Australia has consequences that we explore below. We achieved more regional representation among authors, with 15 of the 24 authors based in Asia or Oceania, with three of these currently holding positions (Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence) or pursuing PhD study (Anna Kwai and Longgina Novadona Bayo) in Australia. All knowledge is situated knowledge (Haraway 1988), and we encouraged authors to reflect on their positionality in their respective chapters. Here, we consider how the volume was shaped by it being edited from Australia.
Workshop participants from Oceania noted that they are overly determined by their positionality. They are assumed to be speaking from somewhere, whereas researchers from the minority world are free to speak from a disinterested position, to be experts of, and beyond, a region. Universities in Australia are filled with such ‘expert’ researchers, with their expertise sought by policymakers and high-ranking public servants. This is especially true of The Australian National University, with its historical role in advancing the nation’s interests and its location in Canberra—the seat of federal government. The different levels of authority afforded the voices of Australia-based researchers, particularly those not from the regions, was a reality that hung heavy over the workshop. We hope to have captured some of that tension in this volume, rather than smoothing over these inequitable realities.
That productive tension should prompt reflection among Australia-based researchers as to the value and costs of their doing research in Oceania and Asia. The workshop was held mid-2022 after two years of closed international borders and consequent reconfiguring of our research partnerships with international collaborators. The devolving of power and leadership to local partners was a logistical necessity, but also reflected the localisation agenda in development practice and efforts to decolonise the academy. What, then, is the role of country experts outside the country? What legitimacy do they have to direct efforts for change through the knowledge they produce? Will they expend the same efforts and bear the equivalent personal costs as those living the struggle? As Vijeyarasa (2022: 87) writes, in many countries, academics and researchers cannot avoid activism, as ‘there is always something going on which calls for intervention and protest’. Is the compulsion the same for academics working internationally? Questions remain about how they render themselves accountable to their countries of focus.
Australia occupies a curious place in global systems of knowledge production. It has the resources and ability to play the rankings game that allows its scholars a prominent voice in global scholarship. At the same time, being on the periphery of the Global North, separate from but still connected to the debates and theories that are dominant in Euro-America, lends the antipodes a unique perspective (Schech 2012). We are arguably less parochial in our scholarship and more outward-facing in our learning from other contexts. Forceful critiques by First Nations scholars have demanded introspection and provided the tools to reflect on, and be accountable in, our research relationships, even as epistemic violence remains an ongoing problem (Moreton-Robinson 2020; Watego 2021). At the same time, in claiming an antipodean perspective as privileged Australian scholars, we are mindful of distracting from ‘contributions to social theory from those who are more truly “Southern” in “our part of the world”, for example, Indigenous Australians … and Indigenous Pacific peoples’, as Margaret Jolly (2008) writes. Our positioning shapes the aims of this volume to decentre Euro-America and disrupt knowledge hierarchies, but we must be clear on our position of privilege within them, with its attendant limitations.
Remaining questions
Knowledge projects are always contingent and incomplete. As with the GIWL report that catalysed this project, ours also has limitations. Yet, the questions asked of the report remain valid. Would the starting questions and distillation of ‘common lessons’ look different from the ‘majority world’? Would we have the same core findings with the same degree of certainty? Would we prioritise different areas for future research? The answer in each case is yes. The key task now is to derive these common lessons, the strength of evidence and priority research areas. Yet, this volume is not an overview of all the literature that has come out of Oceania and Asia on gender and politics. It is a collective effort to add empirically rich and grounded studies that contribute an evidence base, from which we can develop new theoretical and conceptual lenses. We discuss the crosscutting themes in the afterword. Here, I provide my tentative responses to these questions based on what I have learnt from this exercise.
The centrality of the postcolonial experience5
As noted above, centring Asia and Oceania necessarily entails centring historical experiences of colonialism, decolonialisation and the forging of new political institutions. Many of the lessons gleaned through this volume come through comparing these experiences and their impact on gender and politics.
The footprint of past colonial and continuing neocolonial relations is visible in the very framing and naming of the countries of Asia and Oceania. There was a wide diversity of political forms across this region before the incursions of Euro-American and, in some cases, Asian imperialism. In many parts of Oceania, precolonial polities were small, stateless entities. This was true of what is now Papua New Guinea (PNG), Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and other parts of the Western Pacific, where there was and is extraordinary cultural and linguistic diversity. Both achieved and ascribed patterns of leadership tended to elevate men as big-men or chiefs, especially in relations of war and peace with other polities. Women exerted power through sacred kinship connections to place and through their potency in producing food and bringing forth new life. In eastern Oceania, in Samoa, Tonga and Hawai’i, for example, archipelagos were more culturally and linguistically homogeneous, more integrated hierarchical polities prevailed and here rank was more important than gender in exerting power and influence. Women could be high-ranking, titled chiefs (see Jolly, Chapter 6; Motusaga and Howard, Chapter 9, this volume).
Although the precolonial political patterns of Asia were far more diverse, with a range of princely states and Asian empires that pre-dated European imperialism, the borders of countries still largely bear the imprint of later colonial impositions and postcolonial processes—most visibly perhaps in the violent processes of the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and later the emergence of Bangladesh from what was East Pakistan. The crucial point here is that despite the diversity of cultures and histories, many of these political entities in Asia and Oceania, most of them parties to the international system of states through the United Nations, emerged from the turbulent cauldron of violent colonial histories and movements of anticolonial resistance and decolonisation. These histories influenced not just their shape and borders but also what constituted ‘politics’ and the masculinism that saturated state-based politics.
Against this background, this volume is in part a search for analytical lenses through which to read across studies of gender and politics in postcolonial states in Oceania and Asia. Why did masculinist states emerge and how is masculine dominance reinscribed over time? Answering this question foregrounds processes that are arguably underexamined within the gender and politics literature, with relevance not only for postcolonial countries, but also for settler states and former colonial powers. Within this volume these processes include knowledge practices (Kwai, Chapter 3), the introduction of novel gender ideologies (Jolly, Chapter 6), the framing of politics through borrowed cultural idioms (Bayo, Chapter 10) and the construction of the places of politics from masculinist repertoires (Howard and Motusaga, Chapter 9). Attentiveness to how history and sociocultural settings shape democracy as an unfolding cultural practice has revealed the mechanisms that privilege male political leadership in the majority world, but rarely have these theoretical tools been used to shed light on gender and politics in the minority world.
A distillation of common lessons from comparing Asia and Oceania suggests three research priorities. The first is to show the importance of history. How do the experiences of being a colonial power (and the loss of that power), the establishment of settler colonies and frontier wars resonate in today’s political institutions in the minority world? How have racial and gendered systems of power emerged that sustain white-male dominance? The second priority is to deploy the concepts and theories that elucidate these processes in the majority world to the minority world. How do discourses and ideologies produce the ‘political’ in ways that exclude, make invisible or diminish women’s political action? How do the cultural idioms through which we make sense of the political sustain male dominance? The final priority is arguably the most important: radically reimagining what democracy (or even politics) is and can be. Precolonial political systems remind us that there is nothing inevitable or sacred about electoral democracy, while the diversity of vernacular democracies invites a search for new cultural practices. What would a vernacular democracy look like as scripted by women? As our volume reiterates, these exercises in imagination must be led by Indigenous researchers in a decolonial praxis (Lawrence, Chapter 5) and involving women with diverse lived experiences. It is also worth reiterating that reimagining political systems is as necessary in Euro-America as it is in Asia, Oceania and the rest of the majority world.
Unsettling certainties
This volume also raises questions about the certainty of ‘common lessons’ arising from a Euro-American–dominated literature. I identify three ‘certainties’ (though admittedly I use the term lightly) that our volume challenges. The first is the certainty over what counts as a subject in gender and politics, and who is a political actor. Kwai (Chapter 3) notes the harm caused by a ‘spotlight’ that shines a light on remarkable women but casts a shadow over others and the work that they do. Intersecting axes of youth, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and disability push many ‘out of the spotlight’ to the peripheries of political action (Stephenson, Chapter 4). These peripheries can nonetheless be a space where women can exercise more informal, and at times less confrontational, forms of power, be that in village women’s groups and networks (Diprose et al., Chapter 13) or through democratic practices in domestic spaces (Bayo, Chapter 10). Other chapters highlight women’s political action that is largely overlooked in gender and political scholarship, including in church groups, regional organisations, NGOs and women’s activist groups (Jolly, Chapter 6; Ford, Chapter 14). While this political action deserves greater attention and celebration, the costs of its peripheralisation should not be overlooked, including reinforcing exclusionary structures (Stephenson, Chapter 4). These chapters also, however, show the limitations of a frame of exclusion for understanding male political dominance. These women are not excluded from political systems as much as adversely incorporated—that is, included, but in ways in which their political action is minimised, made invisible, appropriated or rendered marginal (see Jakimow 2024). Unsettling who counts as a political actor also means unsettling the dominant framing of ‘exclusion’ in gender and politics literature.
Several chapters also suggest the need to unsettle the common axes of intersectionality. Race, gender and, to a lesser extent, class have dominated understandings of how intersecting power relations influence political systems (Brown 2014; Crowder-Meyer 2020; Murray 2023). Stephenson (Chapter 4) is the most explicit in calling for greater attention to ethnicity, sexuality, age and disability in majority-world contexts, adding to the relatively smaller bodies of work exploring these axes of dis/advantage in minority-world contexts (Chou et al. 2021; Evans and Reher 2022; Meekosha 2006; Waltz and Schippers 2021). Other chapters point to the need to include other power relations within gender and politics scholarship. Jolly (Chapter 6) highlights differences in high-ranking and low-ranking women—a form of hierarchical differentiation requiring careful translation from Oceanic to other contexts, and vice versa. Mishra and Mishra (Chapter 11) note the significance of ethnicity as an enabler and disabler of women’s political participation. The relative absence of discussions of clan, caste and religion in intersectional readings of politics, despite their significance across much of Oceania and Asia, is a missed opportunity. In this context, Lai (Chapter 12) offers a valuable contribution by proposing a strategy of ‘intersectional specialisation’, living up to Patricia Hill Collins’s (2019: 2) ambition of ‘intersectionality as a tool for social change’.
The final certainty that I wish to unsettle is ‘what works’ to increase female representation. Female role-models, properly implemented quotas and political funding are the ingredients for women’s political careers in the Cowper-Coles (2020) report. Yet, the evidence is perhaps shakier than the ‘green light’ rating implies. Liu (2018) found that rather than the role-model effect seen in Western democracies, female political leaders in South-East and East Asia can create a backlash that depresses women’s political participation. While I have not encountered evidence that suggests political funding has a negative impact anywhere, it may not be a viable strategy in clientelist political cultures (Harahap et al. 2022). Contributions by Vijeyarasa (Chapter 8) and Mishra and Mishra (Chapter 11) point to the limitations of quotas, even when implemented properly. It is important to capture the potential negative consequences of quotas—such as a demand for women’s time and the perpetuation of narratives that minimise women’s contributions—alongside the positive impacts. Perhaps the uncertainty that is being unsettled is the ability to identify universal lessons of ‘what works’ at all. We need new ways to learn from the lessons of others, requiring cultural fluency (Lawrence, Chapter 5) and a nuanced appreciation of the lived experiences of women political actors (Batalibasi et al., Chapter 7).
It is not sufficient to acknowledge that we know more about Euro-America than the rest of the world; we must inquire into how this imbalance impacts the field of gender and politics (see Shim, Chapter 2). One impact is the missed opportunity for theoretical development. Another is overconfidence in certain findings derived from limited contexts and their extension in practice to others. In this final section, I have shared what I have learnt from reading the rich knowledge contained in this volume and how it responds to my discomfort with the existing gender and politics literature. My hope is that readers will also derive lessons from many, if not all, of the chapters; that they prompt new questions, draw attention to overlooked phenomena, suggest productive analytical lenses and refresh knowledge-making practices, regardless of the contexts in which they work.
Overview of chapters
This book is divided into four parts. Chapters in Part I each identify ways that the existing gender and politics literature is limited. Jaemin Shim provides evidence of publishing inequalities through a review of journal articles and book chapters on gendered media coverage in politics. He finds that most authors are based in Western Europe and English-speaking settler colonies. Studies from these areas are also overrepresented and have a disproportionate visibility in the literature. Anna Kwai offers a sharp critique of knowledge-making practices about Solomon Islands. She shows how Western-centric and uncorroborated portrayals of Solomon Islander women inaccurately make them victims of their own culture. She interrogates how such inaccuracies persist and their political effects. Elise Stephenson’s chapter focuses on the political pathways of gender-diverse young people in South-East Asia and Australia—a group that has garnered only sporadic attention in the literature. She shows how constructive gaps have emerged that provide space for diverse political participation, albeit in ways that do not fit conventional framings of politics. Through examining the limits of scholarship, these chapters also identify alternative ways of knowing and doing politics.
The chapters in Part II define, interrogate and practise decolonisation in gender and politics scholarship. Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence aims to recover the political potential of ‘decolonisation’ in development programs supporting women’s leadership. Through engagement with Pasifika women scholars, she introduces two concepts to make theoretical interventions in decoloniality relevant for practice: Indigenisation and cultural fluency. Margaret Jolly’s chapter continues the task of celebrating Pasifika women thinkers and activists who have regretfully remained external to the gender and politics ‘canon’. She shows how their work not only expands our understanding of gender relations in politics, but also offers alternative ways of thinking about the political project of decolonisation from a Pasifika standpoint. The chapter by Camilla Batalibasi, Chandy Eng, Donna Makini, Vani Nailumu and Geraldine Valei, with Sonia Palmieri and Melissa MacLean, puts words into action on the methodological challenges and opportunities of researching women’s political leadership in Cambodia, Bougainville, Fiji and Solomon Islands. Experiences as ‘local’ researchers reveal subtleties in how power works in and through gendered bodies, while, as a collective, they reflect on their collaboration through a decolonial lens.
Part III, ‘Reframing the Narrative, Reclaiming Space’, expands our imaginative horizons through fresh ways of looking at gender and politics. Ramona Vijeyarasa goes beyond the usual question of how women reach the top levels of power, to examine what happens when they do. In answering this question for women presidents in Asia, she both deconstructs the idea of ‘Asia’ as a distinct region and points to the possibilities of producing global theory from distinctly ‘Asian’ commonalities. Mema Motusaga and Elise Howard examine the discursive power of narratives to construct political spaces as gendered spaces that exclude women in Samoa. They propose ‘re-storying’ as a respectful process to reclaim and restore women’s political power, but in ways that challenge Eurocentric notions of politics. Longgina Novadona Bayo challenges assumptions that domestic spaces are apolitical, seeing them as sites for women to learn and practise political leadership in West Timor, Indonesia. She shows how domestic cooking sites are places where relationships are forged and affective investments made that support political ambitions. Deepak Mishra and Aparimita Mishra further interrogate the spatiality of gender and politics—in this case, by revealing the distinct possibilities for women’s political leadership in the frontier region of Arunachal Pradesh, India. They demonstrate how ethno-politics and patronage fundamentally shape these possibilities and present news ways of understanding the effects on women’s political participation.
Part IV turns to the movements and solidarities that are challenging male domination of politics. Ruby Y.S. Lai’s chapter introduces the concept of a ‘self-limiting movement’ to understand how feminist movements in Hong Kong have modified their advocacy to ensure their continuity in a shifting political culture. She points to the need to recognise women’s movements in their plurality and to theorise the ways they change in response to fast-moving conditions. Rachael Diprose, Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones and Ken M.P. Setiawan examine rural women’s practices of ‘networked collective action’ through the building of muti-actor coalitions of women’s groups in Indonesia. These networks of solidarity, mutual support and resource-sharing are a means for women from non-elite backgrounds to engage in decision-making spaces. Serena Eleonora Ford’s chapter shows how feminist activists can resist the depletion through social reproduction of Vietnamese trainees in Japan’s Technical Intern Training Program. Through acts of replenishment, activists across borders sustain women’s wellbeing within gendered systems of exploitation. These chapters centre the actions of feminist activists and women organisers, and thereby the knowledge with which they interpret and act on male political domination.
By way of conclusion, the afterword returns to the questions sparked by the Cowper-Coles report. Ramona Vijeyarasa, Sonia Palmieri, Margaret Jolly and Tanya Jakimow identify key insights and research priorities that emerge when we centre Asia and Oceania and take a cross-disciplinary approach to politics and gender.
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1 Following Alam (2008) and Lawrence (forthcoming), I use ‘majority world’ to refer to the countries outside Europe and North America. As my focus is on scholarly dominance rather than economic relations, majority world does not map onto prior problematic categories of ‘Third World’ or ‘developing countries’. I include all of Oceania and Asia (including West Asia or the Middle-East, Japan and South Korea), Latin America and Africa. A case can also be made for including countries in Eastern Europe that are marginalised in broader scholarship. Australia occupies a distinct position on the periphery that I explore below.
2 It is encouraging to see that the leading journal Politics & Gender now insists on the location in the title of all papers, including those from North America.
3 See Connell (2007) on questions of truthfulness in social sciences.
4 Following the Diversity Council of Australia, I prefer the term ‘culturally and racially marginalised’ to refer to people who are racialised in the Australian context, which often has a cultural element, especially religion.
5 Margaret Jolly wrote much of this subsection. I am grateful for her generosity in allowing me to use it in the introduction without co-authorship—indicative of her collegiality from which I have learnt and benefited.
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