1st Edition

Women Warriors in Southeast Asia

Edited By Vina Lanzona, Frederik Rettig Copyright 2020
    332 Pages
    by Routledge

    332 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book brings together a wide range of case studies to explore the experiences and significance of women warriors in Southeast Asian history from ancient to contemporary times.

    Using a number of sources, including royal chronicles, diaries, memoirs and interviews, the book discusses why women warriors were active in a domain traditionally preserved for men, and how they arguably transgressed peacetime gender boundaries as agents of violence. From multidisciplinary perspectives, the chapters assess what drove women to take on a variety of roles, namely palace guards, guerrillas and war leaders, and to what extent their experiences were different to those of men. The reader is taken on an almost 1,500-year long journey through a crossroads region well-known for the diversity of its peoples and cultures, but also their ability to creatively graft foreign ideas onto existing ones. The book also explores the re-integration of women into post-conflict Southeast Asian societies, including the impact (or lack thereof) of newly established international norms, and the frequent turn towards pre-conflict gender roles in these societies.

    Written by an international team of scholars, this book will be of interest to academics working on Southeast Asian Studies, Gender Studies, low-intensity conflicts and revolutions, and War, Conflict, and Peace Studies.

    List of figures

    List of contributors

    Preface

    Acknowledgements

    Glossary and abbreviations

    PART I

    Introduction and background

    1 Introduction: women warriors, palace guards, and revolutionaries in Southeast Asian history

    VINA A. LANZONA AND FREDERIK RETTIG

    PART II

    Women warriors in ancient and early modern Southeast Asia

    2 ‘Lady Sinn’ (Xian Fu-ren ¿¿¿) and the sixth-century Chinese incorporation of a Southeast Asian region

    GEOFF WADE

    3 Querulous queens, bellicose brai: Cambodian perspectives toward female agency

    TRUDE JACOBSEN

    4 The Regio Femarum and its warrior women: images and encounters in European sources

    CHRISTINA SKOTT

    5 Geisha warriors? The incomparable prajurit estri at the court of Mangkunegara I

    ANN KUMAR

    PART III

    Southeast Asian women warriors and revolutionaries in the modern period

    6 Heroines and forgotten fighters: insights into women combatants’ history in Aceh, 1873–2005

    ELSA CLAVÉ

    7 Women in the early Vietnamese communist movement: sex, lies, and liberation

    SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE

    8 Recruiting the all-female Rani of Jhansi Regiment: Subhas Chandra Bose and Dr Lakshmi Swaminadhan

    FREDERIK RETTIG

    9 Women guerrillas of the Communist Party of Malaya: Nationalist struggle with an internationalist experience

    AGNES KHOO

    10 Love and sex in times of war and revolution: women warriors in Vietnam and the Philippines

    VINA A. LANZONA

    PART IV

    The United Nations, Security Sector Reform (SSR), and the gendering of Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR)

    11 The aftermath for women warriors: Cambodia and East Timor

    SUSAN BLACKBURN

    12 Brave warriors, unfinished revolutions: political subjectivities of women combatants in East Timor

    JACQUELINE A. SIAPNO

    PART V

    Conclusion

    13 Rethinking the historical place of ‘warrior women’ in Southeast Asia

    BARBARA WATSON ANDAYA

    Index

    Biography

    Vina A. Lanzona is Associate Professor of History and the Former Director of the Center for Philippine Studies (2011–2015) at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Author of Amazons of the Huk Rebellion: Gender, Sex and Revolution in the Philippines (2009), she is currently working on two book projects: on the participation of Filipinos and Filipino Americans in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the social history of marriage in the Spanish Philippines.

    Frederik Rettig is co-editor of Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2005) and Armies and Societies in Southeast Asia (2020). He has published in the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and in South East Asia Research, including a special issue in the latter. From 2007 to 2013, he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University.