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Michael G. Peletz is Professor of Anthropology at Emory University. His specialties include social theory, gender, sexuality, Islam, and modernity, particularly in Southeast Asia. He is the author of Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton, 2002), Reason and Passion: Representations of Gender in a Malay Society (California, 1996), A Share of the Harvest: Kinship, Property, and Social History among the Malays of Rembau (California, 1988). He is also the co-editor with Aihwa Ong, of Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (California, 1995).
In this ambitious book, Michael Peletz sets out to explore how and under whatconditions “gender pluralism” may develop and thrive in a society or nation-state.Peletz uses “pluralism” to refer to instances in which certain types of diversity aregranted legitimacy. By “gender pluralism” he refers in particular to instances in whichforms and degrees of legitimacy are granted to culturally recognized inclinations,behaviors, roles, relationships, and expressive forms associated with concepts that gobeyond a dualistic opposition of maleness and femaleness to include hermaphrodism,androgyny, and other transgender possibilities.Peletz locates his study in the broad coordinates of Southeast Asian geography andhistory. In the course of his analysis, he draws on a wide array of cases from across theregion and across the centuries. He establishes a baseline in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies—the first half of the early modern period—to identify dimensions of genderpluralism that existed in the region before European colonial influences became asignificant factor. He identifies a series of conditions supportive of the forms of genderpluralism thereafter discussed in the book. These include the prevalence of bilateralkinship systems that do not favor the male or the female line; dualistic cosmologieswith complementary female and male elements; roles for women in agricultural, lifecycle, and healing rituals; women’s participation in politics and trade; tolerance ofpremarital sex; initiation of divorce by either party; and a relatively high degree ofautonomy and agency afforded to women.Peletz posits that the transgender themes in the hegemonic forms of state ritual andcourtly practice built on and afforded legitimacy to behavior in the wider society. Heexplores how polymorphic patterns of gender in the region were melded with andreinforced by Southeast Asian forms of cosmology and statescraft, strongly inflected bythe Saivite and Tantric traditions of South Asia over the course of two millennia.Importantly, he argues that transgender ritual practices were not transgressiveexceptions to societal conventions, but rather were consistent with gender pluralism insociety at large. Gender pluralism in this era included legitimate sexual relationsbetween same-sex partners who were differentiated genderwise by markers such asdress, occupation, and ritual roles. Ritual practitioners, for example, includedanatomical males who performed in women’s dress and married other anatomicalmales. Such specialists had a place in royal courts as well as in the villages andcountryside.The importance of legitimation by hegemonic structures and ideologies is a pointdeveloped carefully across historical eras. In his chapter on the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies, Peletz introduces accounts of two populations in Borneo—the Iban and theNgaju Dayak—for whom documentation is lacking until the latter half of thenineteenth century. With appropriate caveats, he reviews the evidence concerningtransgendered ritual practitioners in these two stateless societies and compares them tothe well-known bissu, transgendered ritual specialists who have played a well186Jane Monnig Atkinsondocumented role in the ritual and political life of the Bugis of South Sulawesi forcenturies. As keepers of the lontar-palm manuscripts that contain the royalgeneaologies, chronicles, and charters, bissu were closely affiliated with politicalauthority. Peletz argues that the bissu complex has lent legitimacy to calabai and calalai,anatomical males and females in Bugis society who are not ritual specialists, but dohave sex with same-sex partners.This three-way comparison of Iban, Ngaju Dayak, and Bugis is pivotal for Peletz’sargument that gender pluralism is affected by the relationships of a social group to thestructures of class and power within the wider polity. Peletz returns to these cases inthe second half of his book, where he makes the case that the decline of transgenderritual practice among the Iban and the Ngaju Dayak is connected to the increasingmarginalization of these populations within the nation-state, domination by moreeconomically and politically powerful neighboring populations, and the growinginfluence of hegemonic world religions. And in the case of the Iban, urban migrationand female prostitution, he argues, have seriously eroded women’s standing as well.By contrast, the Bugis, who number three and a half million in South Sulawesi alone,have sustained a higher degree of gender pluralism and a stronger social position forwomen, thanks to their economic clout, political influence, and reputation as staunchMuslims. Peletz is sensitive to the risk of imposing an overly deterministic andunilinear model on historical transformations. In the Bugis case, for example, hehighlights the fluctuations within the last six decades, a period which saw bothpersecution of bissu in the early years of the Indonesian Republic and a re-florescenceof bissu in the post-Sukarno era.The second half of the early modern period—the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies—was a time of profound economic, political, and creedal transformations inSoutheast Asia, with the intensification of trans-regional commerce, politicalcentralization fueled by increased wealth and competition, and the rise of religiousorthodoxies (i.e., Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim). With these changes camedislocations and delegitimization of older cosmological and sociopolitical forms. Peletztraces the displacement of transgendered and female ritual practitioners in this era, aswell as factors contributing to a decline in women’s cultural, political, and economicstanding.Peletz draws on Barbara Andaya’s important work concerning the retrenchment ofwomen during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including her study of how“temporary marriage,” once a respectable form of alliance between elite families andforeign traders in which the female partners exercised a high degree of agency,devolved into stigmatized forms of concubinage and prostitution as elites abandonedthe practice, and foreign men entered into relationships with women of lower classeswho could bring only sex and domestic services, not powerful political and tradealliances, to their unions.1In addressing the effects of European colonialism on gender pluralism, Peletzengages Stoler’s important work on gender, race, and class, pointing out its failure to1 Barbara W. Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in EarlyModern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Women’s History 9,4 (1998): 11–34.Gender Pluralism 187account for the significance of homosexuality in these intertwining discourses.2 To hiscredit, Peletz freely acknowledges the same omission in his previous books onMalaysia. He argues that, by going beyond the archival records, it is possible to findrich documentation regarding sexual diversity in the writings of travelers,missionaries, ethnographers, and novelists, as well as in artistic work of this period.These sources document European reactions to sexual diversity in local cultures andilluminate the development of stereotypes concerning the “feminized and degenerateEast”; racialized accounts of societal evolution and human sexuality; policies thatpromoted female concubinage and prostitution as a deterrent to interracial homosexualrelations between colonial (European) workers and local men; and transformations inthe labor markets, including the sex trade, with far-reaching consequences for thehealth and livelihoods of women and men.The overarching point of Peletz’s analysis regarding this transformation ofacceptable behavior is that transgendered and female ritual participants once played asignificant role in the symbolic, ritual, and political structures of precolonial SoutheastAsian states. As such, they gave legitimacy to a range of transgender behaviors thatexisted within the tolerances of Southeast Asian kinship, family, and social systems aslong as that activity did not violate the heterogender framework of those systems.Through much of the region, the ties between transgender ritual practice and politicalauthority have been severed in recent centuries. What is more, world religions, withnew and reformed orthodoxies, have displaced older cosmological frameworks andoften stigmatized their transgender elements. Female participation, let aloneprominence, in rituals of statehood has been similarly displaced. Although populartolerance continues through most of the region for same-sex sexual relations, suchrelations are less likely to be validated through state ideologies and institutions.In the second half of the book, Peletz explores the changing dynamics of SoutheastAsian gender pluralism as they are playing out in the postcolonial era. Prominent inthis section are in-depth analyses of Burma and Malaysia in the contemporary era. (TheBurmese government, since the 1962 coup, has resisted modernity and participation inthe global economy, in contrast to Malaysia, whose leadership has sought to combineaggressive economic development and growth, Islamic values, and a distinctiveapproach to modernity.)Burma has sustained an agriculturally based society in which local religioustraditions—including propitiation of nat spirits and transgendered ritualpractitioners—retain their salience. Peletz reviews a 1996 study of Burmeseterminology for transgender categories and sexual behavior by George Van Driem.3For a Burmese man who is sexually attracted to same-sex partners, the choices havebeen to become a transgendered ritual specialist married to a nat spirit (acault), tomarry such a specialist himself, or to live a “heteronormative” life as a husband andfather while having sex with men on the side. For women, the choices have been morelimited still. In recent years, however, with the development of a gay and lesbian rights2 See: Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order ofThings (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); and Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power:Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).3 George Van Driem, “Lexical Categories of Homosexual Behaviour in Modern Burmese,” Maledicta 12(1996): 91–110.188 Jane Monnig Atkinsonmovement, new options are available. Peletz explores the career of Aung Myo Min, aprominent leader of this movement, who has sought to create space for a secularmasculine gay male identity. This liberating assertion of masculine possibilities hascoincided with other less laudable changes in Burmese gender politics.Peletz cites Ward Keeler’s recent study of Burmese performance genres thatdocuments a shift in masculine musical and theatrical styles away from classical motifsof aristocratic refinement to angry and aggressive presentations of self that echoconventions of Western rap music.4 Significantly, the feminine has no place in thesedisplays—and, indeed, Keeler reports that women fade into the background. Keelersuggests that this new masculine stance is heavily inflected by the economic andpolitical impotence of Burmese audiences that respond to fantasies of aggressivelyangry men. As for women, newly marginalized in popular performance, the economicconditions they experience under the junta are particularly cruel. By one estimate, onethird of females of childbearing age in the Rangoon area were engaged in prostitutionin the late 1990s as a result of deteriorating economic conditions, and the growingscourge of HIV/AIDs exacerbates their misery. Such trends only reinforce negativestereotypes of women in Burmese society that are already buttressed by Buddhistconcepts of female spiritual inferiority. Peletz examines the harsh government attackson Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to show how Burma’s leaders makeuse of such stereotypes to impugn her.The infamous charges leveled by the Malaysian government against AnwarIbrahim, former deputy prime minister and minister of finance, offer a parallelopportunity for exploring the deployment of sexually transgressive themes in politicalcharacter assassination in a very different context of nation-state politics and ideology.Peletz traces how conditions for gender pluralism in Malay cultural traditions havebeen severely constricted by a modernizing framework that recasts the Malay past asfeudal, rural, and backward, in contrast to a forward looking globalized futurebuttressed by Islamic values.Ironically, Malaysian development efforts have had the effect of promotingurbanization and migration, conditions conducive to the heightened concentration andvisibility of transgender and same-sex sexual practices, not to mention the incubationof political consciousness and advocacy regarding sexual rights. Peletz recounts therepressive measures imposed on activities the government has labeled deviant andimmoral (ranging from gay clubs to female beauty pageants).Peletz explores resistance to the government’s campaign against sexual deviance,with a special focus on the work of Pink Triangle, a Malaysian NGO dedicated tosupporting communities at risk from HIV/AIDs and sexual discrimination. This NGOmanages to function with government support for its outreach to AIDS patients,intravenous drug users, and sex workers, but not for its support of transsexuals andhomosexuals. Peletz speculates as to whether economic opportunism will ultimatelywin out over sexual conservatism in Malaysian policies given the attractiveness andpotential value of the “pink dollar,” i.e., money earned by marketing to gay tourists as4 Ward Keeler, “But Princes Jump! Performing Masculinity in Mandalay,” in Burma at the Turn of theTwenty-First Century, ed. Monique Skidmore (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), pp. 206–28.Gender Pluralism 189well as gay nationals with economic clout, as appears to be happening in neighboringSingapore.Peletz concludes his fascinating section on contemporary developments withreflections on King Norodom Sihanouk’s 2004 expression of support for the issuance ofmarriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in the United States by the City of SanFrancisco in February of that year. The embracing of same-sex marriage by anoctogenarian Cambodian king has the semblance of a benediction by the ancien regimeindochine for a contemporary transnational sexual rights movement.This remarkable book ends with a short epilogue that compares the experiences ofMalaysian and Cambodian immigrants to the United States who are struggling to finda way to adapt their identities as men who have sex with men to the legal, cultural,social, and economic world in which they find themselves. The Malaysians in questionare fourteen individuals during whose political asylum hearings Peletz served as anexpert witness after the Anwar affair. Not surprisingly, given their legal circumstances,these men painted conditions back home as threatening to them as “gay” men andtended to idealize their opportunities in America. By contrast, the Cambodians in LosAngeles, California, interviewed by Karen Quintiliani, tended to idealize conditions intheir homeland in contrast to the negative realities they face in the United States, wherethey encounter racism, heterosexism, denigration of the feminine in Cambodian-American communities, and the pathologies of poverty.5 No general conclusions can bedrawn from these limited samples about the experience of Southeast Asians adjustingto life as “gay” in America. Rather, the interest of the comparison has to do with howthe interviewees portrayed life in their country of origin, their negotiation of “gayness”in US culture, and the different trajectories individuals will experience depending ontheir opportunities and personal circumstances in dealing with the American classsystem.This book is a major contribution to Southeast Asian studies and to scholarship ongender and sexuality. Peletz’s thesis is theoretically sophisticated and compelling. Hisargument is tightly organized, meticulously developed, and densely detailed. True tohis Weberian roots, Peletz seeks to build his case historically, with thoughtful attentionto patterns and variations across time and space. The result of this approach is anintricately reticulated analysis of complex historical, societal, and cultural processes.Southeast Asianists will find this book compelling for the new light it sheds on history,politics, gender, and sexuality in the region. Readers unfamiliar with Southeast Asiamay find it a formidable challenge to grapple with the dense interweaving oftheoretical insights and historical and ethnographic detail. I would neverthelessencourage them to persist because of the valuable insights Peletz offers regarding thepolitics and possibilities of gender and sexual diversity, both past and present.The book is suitable for graduate level courses. I would be wary about assigning iteven in advanced undergraduate courses, although individual students with thescholarly aptitude and appetite—and a strong background in Southeast Asian Studiesand/or scholarship on gender and sexuality—may find the book immenselyrewarding. --Indonesia5 Karen Quintiliani, “One of the Girls: The Social and Cultural Context of a Cambodian American ‘Gay’Group” (MA thesis, California State University, 1995).
