Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia (review)

130Book Reviews Trans-Status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization ofSouth andSoutheast Asia. Edited by Sonita Sarker and Esha Niyogi De. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 344 pp. A collection ofessays on gender in the experiences ofcolonialisms and globalizations, Trans-Status Subjects explores the gendered dynamics of women's status across South and Southeast Asia. The contributions map women into places ofthe region, spaces ofeconomic subjection under regimes ofcolony and nation, and the times ofboth colonialism and its contemporary aftermath. The introductory essay shows how gender is engaged across the region by a diverse series ofmaterial technologies (urban planning, food production) and discutsive strategies (fiction, film) to produce or limit mobility, both physical and social, for women. Through time, these engagements of gender have created and then disrupted mappings of centre and periphery and moved people, with and without their consent , into new places, experiences, and understandings of themselves. Sarker and Niyogi De describe these processes as creating "trans-status subjects" — subjects whose mobility, through either geography or discourse , has created for them a new and contradictory experience ofsocial status. From this essay, the editors then go on to draw several substantive arguments from the contributions they have collected. They describe how trans-status subjects come to understand themselves as inhabiting spaces where their gender brings discursive constructions and experiential understandings ofplace and time into conflict. Colonialism, nation building, and globalization make use of gender to position women either as the "lacking and lagging" native subjects of colonial development or the problematic diasporic others, both urban and rural, tied to old ways and other places. Incorporating contributions drawn fromThai urban studies to diasporic South Asian biography allows the editors to illustrate how intersections of space and time differ across colonialist, nationalist, and transnationalist discourses. The editors name this spatially and temporally discrepant experience ofsubjectivation with a new term "placedme" that marks the ways subjects resist and accommodate Book Reviews131 imposed definitions ofplace. Personal and community placetimes both resist and engage the new uses to which discourses of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization have put concepts of time and space. Thus, following this temporal taxonomy ofdiscourses, the contributions are divided into three sections, each describing the placetimes produced to counter the dominant discourse engaged. Chapters in the first section, "Figuring Genders in the Colony and Nation: Native and Foreign", explore the work gender has been made to do in the imaginative constructions ofcolonies and then nations. This is accomplished through a series of engagements with the themes of post-colonial studies. The chapteis in this section cover colonial Borneo, Burma, and Sri Lanka, and then post-colonial Indonesia and Vietnam. These contributions share a focus on the policing of urban space as, symbolically, nation space and the representation ofwomen in the arts. The second group of chapters appears under the theme of "Transporting Genders between the Village and the City: Representations and Resistances". This section has a more grounded geographical flavour, engaging with the use ofgender in the practical technologies ofmodern nation-building. Contributors here focus on the gendered practicalities ofpublic architecture in Singapore, gender and the making ofplace in rural Thailand, the spaces occupied by female food vendors in Bangkok, and the gendered movements of indigenous groups in the Indian Himalayas. These contributions show how the work ofgendering moves between urban and rural communities, spatializing the dialogue between urban nationalist modernity and the rural past. Lastly, the chapters in the third section, "Gendering Local-Global Circuits: Labor, Capital and Subject of Social Change", explote more personal and community narratives of diaspora. The chapters address both the South Asian and Asian Jewish diasporas, setting them within the creation oflocal-global circuits. Here, the contributing scholars and activists offer the reader vivid personal narratives drawn from oral histories and biographical sketches. These offerings give voice to the gendered patterns of globalization and describe the contemporary outcomes ofthe historical processes outlined in previous sections. Throughout all the chapters, personal experiences ofboth space and 132Book Reviews time are described as relational and contextual by engaging women's quotidian experience, whether in contemporary film or colonial history. This ethnographic approach offers the reader a chance to apprehend the dizzying diversity and complexity ofgendered lives within the...