Introduction

Margaret Jolly

What does it mean to reframe the narrative, to reclaim the space for women in politics? The four chapters in this section show how the stories we tell are grounded in place, and how reconceptualising how we think about place is fundamental to reclaiming the space for women’s political agency and telling different stories about women and leadership at several scales.

Ramona Vijeyarasa’s Chapter 8 provocatively asks what is ‘Asian’ and what is ‘global’ in conventional stories about the many women who have led Asian nations. This builds on her book The Woman President (2022), which interrogated what women who assumed executive office did for other women and revealed how some synergised with powerful women’s movements while others did not. She asks whether what has been seen as distinctively ‘Asian’ is so different to elsewhere (for example, dynastic politics whereby daughters, wives or widows of male leaders assume power). Growing up in a politically engaged family everywhere confers advantages, she suggests. Moreover, she shows how similar presumptions pertain globally, naturalising male and denaturalising female power and privileging a woman’s appearance and clothing over her intellectual acuity and policies. So, Vijeyarasa argues, we must erase the boundaries of conventional thought and what characterises a region such as ‘Asia’. Still, insights from Asia can contribute by offering exemplary case studies of what difference women leaders make to women’s lives, by helping to strengthen global solidarities among women presidents and prime ministers and by offering Asian lessons for global practice and theory—still utterly dominated by examples and authors from the minority world. In exploring the depths of gender in politics, we must transcend Asian exceptionalism as well as the alleged universalism of the minority world.

Mema Motusaga and Elise Howard’s compelling Chapter 9 moves to a more intimate scale in analysing gender and politics in Samoa, where, by contrast with Asia, the first woman Prime Minister, Afioga Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa, assumed power only in 2021. In re-storying the narrative of gender and politics, they point to contests about whether there is gender equality in Samoa. In Samoan gender ideology, the balance between women and men is celebrated, especially in that the sister is seen to have a complementary power in relation to her brother, according her a spiritual power in contrast to his temporal authority. But this has not translated into gender equality in parliamentary politics—a fact that most foreign observers and development agents privilege. Motusaga and Howard reveal how the brother–sister relation (the feagaiga) was radically transformed by Christianisation. This sacred covenant and women’s spiritual power passed to the male pastor while Christian missions celebrated the husband–wife relation in a novel monogamous marriage. Moreover, the introduced Westminster parliamentary system privileged masculine rather than feminine sources of power and rank and thus parliament became gendered in a way that excluded women. The authors suggest that the Samoan concept of vā—a sacred space between people or other entities, which celebrates respectful relations across difference—offers an ideal from which to further enable women’s political participation. They advocate seeing politics as more than contest and conquest and through a different ontological lens, which values relationality and reciprocal responsibility, spiritual as well as secular authority and the long-term life of all creatures over generations.

Longgina Novadona Bayo consummately reframes conventional narratives about women and politics in Malaka, West Timor, in Chapter 10. She suggests that domesticity, rather than being a sequestered, apolitical space for women, is in fact full of political potential for creating affective bonds. She reveals how Indigenous ideologies of gender were diarchic, balancing power between outer masculine and inner feminine realms. Women were ‘housemasters’, wielding strong divine authority over the flow of life in expansive matrilineal clans. The combined effects of foreign colonial rule, missionary maternalism and Indonesian state ibuism (‘motherism’) promoted a gender hierarchy in which women were ideally selfless housewives not interested in pursuing public power. Timorese women adeptly navigate these divergent ideologies. Women political leaders, and especially those of noble rank, consummately use domestic spaces and communal cooking to create and sustain affective ties to constituents and win elections.

Deepak K. Mishra and Aparimita Mishra in Chapter 11 take us to Arunachal Pradesh, a frontier state in northern India. They show how women have been marginalised in both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ governance structures, which, alike, have been overwhelmingly patriarchal. They observe how the political economy of the contemporary state creates ethnicised forms of belonging and political alliances. Women are increasingly finding a place in grassroots governance, in Panchayati raj institutions, but in so doing must be mindful of several interconnected frontiers—that of the state itself, the frontiers separating different ethnic territories and the everyday frontiers created between their domestic and public political lives. The ecology and colonial and postcolonial history of this state are distinctive while its remoteness on the border with China makes for an anxious security situation. Ethnic differences, including some inhabitants who are seen as outsiders and cannot elect representatives, mitigate against a sense of shared citizenship, although there are some signs of pan-tribal civic movements emerging. Women are subject to pervasive ideals of feminine domesticity. And, although women are finding a place in grassroots governance, partly through special measures such as reserved seats, they are often only included in nominal or patronising ways; they are thought to be less capable than men, their voices are not heeded and they are often seen as proxies for their husbands. Thus, the authors develop the concept of ‘exclusionary inclusion’.

All four chapters highlight the importance of challenging hegemonic ideas of gendered space in reframing narratives of women in politics. Two chapters show the importance of reclaiming Indigenous gender ideologies that often differed from those promoted during colonisation and the formation of nation-states, such as the gendering of the domestic as feminine and the public as masculine. The authors occupy diverse subject positions in their research, offering fertile dialogues between insider and outsider perspectives.