GENWITRA 2019 : GENDER & WOMEN’S ISSUES AND THE RISE OF ASIA

INTERNATIONAL AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE
Paris, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, March 13, 2019
Le Havre, Université Le Havre Normandie, March 14-15, 2019
www.bandungspirit.org/
[email protected]

CALL FOR PAPERS
The conference is open to individual and group paper presentations. Those willing to present their papers are invited to submit their proposals from November 1, 2018 to January 31, 2019. The selected proposals will be communicated to their authors between December 2018 and February 2019.

INTRODUCTION

Gender proposes its fundamental approach to explain and examine the identity’s formation and reformation of the gendered subjects. Operating as a cultural and social mode of constitution and means of signification of both social and power relations, gender is politicised, making it an essential ground for particular historical and critical, local and individual subject formation. Although gender is principally meant to signify sexual difference, implicitly it implies a social, economic, political, cultural and historical one. Gender is indeed both an empirical fact and a constitutive mechanism working both on individual and social levels. Gender features consequently serve as one of many manifestations of a subliminal gender system operative throughout the cultural and social domain a subject belongs to.

What is most important about all the debates on gender is that it always includes women’s issues in public discourses. In discussing and debating women’s issues, it is pivotal to remember that such issues are highly politicised creating a women’s politics demanding public recognition. Those advocates of women’s rights often use feminist perspectives to locate women’s issues as an integral part of national social issues. Thus, they are endeavouring to deconstruct the various normative notions of gender relations that are commonly used by the patriarchy to sustain hegemony.

In this perspective, gender has become a strategic basis of social movements in this present era of globalisation. During the era of industrialisation, social movements were based mainly on “economic interest” and “class struggle”, represented by trade unionism. Now, in the era of globalisation, new types of social movements play a more and more important role: the identity-based social movements. Their claims are characterised by “cultural concern” and their reference is to “identity”: religion, spirituality, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference and nationality (ethnicity and locality). They do not claim for the improvement of their socio-economic conditions, but for their right to exist, to be treated without discrimination, to decide on their own life, to control their environment, to maintain their cultural identity etc. In other words, they do not defend “what they do” but “what they are”, their “self”, and their “meaning”. Gender-based social movements start their activism from the fundamental rejection of one of the foundations of the contemporary society: the patriarchy.

Asia as the most populated continent in the world offers an exciting perspective of gender-based social movements. A human being of four is Asian woman. The most important patriarchy-based belief systems in the world were born and elaborated in Asia: Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam. They continue to characterise Asian societies today. What are the impacts of the rise of Asia on Asian social structures? What lesson we may learn from the men-women inequality in that region? Are we in a progressive period of women’s status or in the contrary? Is there anything in common between a Chinese businesswoman, a Japanese housewife, an Indian woman farmer, an Indonesian woman minister, a Vietnamese woman worker? Is there any common characteristic, common goal, common strategy, or common action between Asian Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Hindu and Muslim women’s movements? What is the place of “non-violence” in women’s movements? Is “non-violence” inherent in women’s movements?

This special session on gender in the Rise of Asia 2019 conference will attempt to discuss how women and gender are perceived and manifested in many walks of life in Asia and in other parts of the world in relation with Asia. (Diah Ariani ARIMBI, Associate Professor, Cultural Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Universitas Airlangga, Surabaya, Indonesia).

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