ICAS: 2-5 August 2007, Kuala Lumpur

From Indopedia

PLEASE NOTE THAT THERE ARE DIFFERENT CALLS FOR PAPERS BELOW:

• Call for papers on Southeast Asian masculinities for ICAS 2007, 2-5 August in Kuala Lumpur

-- CAPSTRANS and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Sydney plan to hold a series of panels on Southeast Asian masculinities. Topics will include: sexuality; fathering and families; religion and masculinity; masculinity and work; masculinithy and migration; masculinity and militarisation; and the construction of masculinity on the internet.

-- If you are interested in participating, please contact the panel organisers Lenore Lyons (lenorel@uow.edu.au) and Michele Ford (michele.ford@arts.usyd.edu.au) as soon as possible.

-- The institutional panel deadline is in December. The deadline for individual papers for ICAS 2007 is 15 November. ASAA urges members to consider attending to ensure that there is a significant Australian presence at the conference.

• Call for Papers: Women Warriors in Southeast Asia

-- Background: Female warriors in Southeast Asia come from a historical and legendary tradition of women leaders in their respective societies. Women who fought in the Vietnamese struggles against the French and the Americans looked to the Trung sisters (d. 41 C.E.), Lady Trieu An (d. 248 CE) and Thi Xuan when they heeded Ho Chi Minh’s call for all Vietnamese—men and women—to work together. In the Philippines, female revolutionaries are frequently seduced by the idea of following in the footsteps of Gabriela Silang (1731-1763), who became a female "general" after taking over the revolutionary army led by her slain husband against the Spanish. Mainland Southeast Asian states such as Cambodia, Laos and Thailand have their own legends of warrior queens riding on elephants during battles. In more contemporary times, women have been active participants in independence struggles, civil wars, and/or communist insurgencies in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. And yet, despite such common histories, no systematic or comparative study has been undertaken that examines these warrior women across the region. This is all the more surprising since Southeast Asia has the reputation of having relatively egalitarian male-female relations (Andaya 2006), with female training in the martial arts and participation in war ­ as leaders, combat troops, palatial body guards, or in supporting roles ­ appears well supported by recent scholarship. Comparisons across time and space (see also Andaya 2004) would be a good test for the relative male-female equality thesis. Most recent publications ­ most of them on Vietnam ­ have focused on a single country (e.g. Gottschang Turner and Phanh Thanh Hao 1998; Taylor 1999), army (e.g. Khoo 2004) or particular female leaders (Quinn-Judge 2000). With a few exceptions (Andaya 2004; Hong 2006), the focus has been on the 20th rather than earlier centuries. The predominance of close-up studies contrasts with several ambitious comparative attempts of a truly global study of the phenomenon from the perspectives of history (Fraser 1994), ethnology (Jones 1997) or international relations (Goldstein 2001), accounting for the recurrence of women in combat and/or their participation in war in a wide range of different social, cultural, regional, or historical settings. These truly global studies, however, often suffer from a lack of knowledge of the most up-to-date secondary literature and are sometimes factually inaccurate.

-- Aims and Scope of the Conference Panel: The conference panel (and related book project) on ‘Women Warriors in Southeast Asia, Past and Present’, aims to fill the perceived gap, the lack of a broader regional perspective, in the literature. It aims to break down barriers between country-specific studies, different eras, and academic disciplines to provide the first multidisciplinary, comparative, and longitudinal study of women warriors in SEA. The assembled contributions would therefore bring together studies from a wide range of societies/polities and eras (pre-modern, early modern, modern), and a wide range of disciplinary approaches (e.g. archaeology, philology, history, ethnology, psychology, gender studies). In addition to encouraging a better understanding of women warriors across time and space, the goal of the conference panel is to publish selected papers in an edited volume. The ultimate aim would be for different Southeast Asian scholars to learn from each other, and to raise academic and public awareness of this 'amazing amazon' phenomenon in Southeast Asia.

-- Abstracts of the proposed conference paper should be no longer than one-page (Times New Roman, Size 12, double lined) and be submitted by email as a MS Word document by Friday December 8, 2006 to the two organizers. All presentations will be considered for publication in an edited volume of essays.

-- Contacts: Please email your abstracts to Vina Lanzona and Tobias Rettig at: Vina A. Lanzona, Ph.D., Assistant Professor History, University of Hawai’i-Manoa, 2530 Dole Street, Honolulu, HI, USA / Tel: 808.956.6769 / email: vlanzona@hawaii.edu and Tobias Rettig, Ph.D., Practice Assistant Professor, School of Economics and Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Singapore 178903, Republic of Singapore / Tel: +65-68.28-08.66 / e-mail: tobiasrettig@smu.edu.sg