Heading east this time: critical readings on gender in southeast Asia

This essay intends to discuss some critical readings of fictional and theoretical texts on gender condition in Southeast Asian countries. Nowadays, many texts about women in Southeast Asia apply concepts of power in unusual areas. Traditional forms of gender hegemony have been replaced by other powerful, if somewhat more covert, forms. We will discuss some universal values concerning conventional female roles as well as the strategies used to recognize women in political fields traditionally characterized by male dominance. Female empowerment will mean different things at different times in history, as a result of culture, local geography and individual circumstances. Empowerment needs to be perceived as an individual attitude, but it also has to be facilitated at the macrolevel by society and the State. Gender is very much at the heart of all these dynamics, strongly related to specificities of historical, cultural, ethnic and class situatedness, requiring an interdisciplinary transnational approach.

Writing and living on the stage of history

This article studies the intercultural trajectory of a Portuguese female aristocrat of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Her trajectory of intercultural transition from a Portuguese provincial lady into an independent owner of a sugar mill in tropical Bahia is documented through family letters, which provide a polyphonic representation of a movement of personal, family, and social transculturation over almost two decades. Maria Bárbara began her journey between cultures as a simple spectator-reader, progressively becoming a commentator-actor-protagonist-author in society, in politics, and in history. These letters function as a translation that is sometimes consecutive, other times simultaneous, of the events lived and witnessed. This concept of intercultural translation is based on the theories of Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006, 2008), who argues that cultural differences imply that any comparison has to be made using procedures of proportion and correspondence which, taken as a whole, constitute the work of translation itself. These procedures construct approximations of the known to the unknown, of the strange to the familiar, of the ‘other’ to the ‘self’, categories which are always unstable. Likewise, this essay explores the unstable contexts of its object of study, with the purpose of understanding different rationalities and worldviews.