A Thai foodseller on the streets of Bangkok, a cyclo driver in a Vietnamese village, a Pahari migrant laborer in the Himalayas, a Parsi-Christian professional social worker shuttling back and forth between London and Calcutta—
Trans-Status Subjects examines how these and other South and Southeast Asians affect and are affected by globalization. While much work has focused on the changes wrought by globalization—describing how people maintain foundations or are permanently destabilized—this collection theorizes the complex ways individuals negotiate their identities and create alliances in the midst of both stability and instability, as what the editors call trans-status subjects. Using gender paradigms, historical time, and geographic space as driving analytic concerns, the essays gathered here consider the various ways South and Southeast Asians both perpetuate and resist various hierarchies despite unequal mobilities within economic, social, cultural, and political contexts.
The contributors—including literary and film theorists, geographers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—show how the dominant colonial powers prefigured the ideologies of gender and sexuality that neocolonial nation-states have later refigured; investigate economic and artistic production; and explore labor, capital, and social change. The essays cover a range of locales—including Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Borneo, Indonesia,
Chapter
Introduction: Marking Times and Territories
Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De
I
FIGURING GENDERS IN THE COLONY AND NATION:
NATIVE AND FOREIGN
Designing Woman, Designing North Borneo
Susan Morgan
The Cordon Sanitaire: Mobility and Space in the
Regulation of Colonial Prostitution
Philippa Levine
Feminizing the City: Gender and Space in Colonial Colombo Nihal Perera
Failure of the Imaginary: Gendered Excess of the
Indonesian Nation
Sylvia Tiwon
Gender, Paradoxical Space, and Critical Spectatorship
in Vietnamese Film: The Works of Dang Nhat Minh
Kathryn McMahon
II
TRANSPORTING GENDERS BETWEEN
THE VILLAGE AND CITY: REPRESENTATIONS
AND RESISTANCES
Traveling High and Low: Verticality, Social Position,
and the Making of Pahari Genders
Karen K. Gaul
Nurturing, Gender Ideologies, and Bangkok’s Foodscape
Gisèle Yasmeen
Place and Displacement: Figuring the Thai Village
in an Age of Rural Development
Andrew McRae
The City between the Global State: Architecture and the
People in Singapore’s Gendered Imaginations
Esha Niyogi De
III
GENDERING LOCAL-GLOBAL CIRCUITS:
LABOR, CAPITAL, AND SUBJECTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE
South Asian Women in the Gulf:
Families and Futures Reconfigured
Karen Leonard
Diasporic Alienness and Belonging: Selected Indian-American Cultural Expressions Ketu H. Katrak
Jewish Diaspora through Colonial Spaces:
Negotiating Identity and Forging Community
Jael Silliman
Unruly Subjects: Cornelia Sorabji and Ravinder Randhawa
Sonita Sarker
Immigrant Dreams and Nightmares:
South Asian Domestic Workers in North America
in a Time of Global Mobility
Anannya Bhattacharjee
Trans-Status Subjects
：Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia
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