Borders of Being: Citizenship, Fertility, and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (review)

The editors of this well-researched volume ingeniously call our attention to certain specific sex/gender connections between the "borders" of persons, countries, regions, and the world. Such bodies and boundaries are entangled with various forms of power, ranging from personal intimacy to nationalism. The stated goals of this volume are to "offer an account of sexed subjectivities in the states of Asia and the Pacific by exploring the power of nation-states and the claims of citizenship in the realms of sexuality and reproduction" and to "consider the way state power is accommodated and resisted, complicit with, and contested by, other powers grounded in relations of kinship, ethnicity, religion, and class" (1-2).

This book makes an important contribution to our knowledge by analyzing citizenship over time through a sex/gender lens. The ten chapters, including an introduction, in which Margaret Jolly insightfully lays out the themes of the book and the positions of the authors, work together against a genderless account of subjectivities and agency. Kalpana Ram points out that citizens "practice" not only in the public sphere of citizenship but in virtually every area of everyday life, including the spheres of sexuality and reproduction. In India, for instance, a state-driven notion of reproductive rationality deeply marginalized women. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin also reveal that India's particular nationalistic and religious concerns deeply informed the construction of the categories "war widows" and "abducted women" in the late 1940s. The state presented itself as the guardian and savior of its female citizens while actually controlling the women's sexuality and training them for productive work and nation building. Women had to negotiate both with and against the nation-state to protect their own best interests. Christine Dureau, Margaret Jolly, Kathryn Robinson, and Andrea Whittaker also demonstrate that modern contraception involves such overwhelmingly female methods that it redefines female sexuality. In some countries, modern contraception displaced conventional methods that placed responsibility on the man, for example, by requiring him to be abstinent or practice noncoital sex.

In her chapter on the formation of Catholic nuns as Filipino citizens, Anne-Marie Hilsdon shows how these nuns experience a dual construction, as female citizens and as "clerics" who are excluded from taking part in basic Church policy decisions. Located at the intersections of political struggle and religious regulations, these radical nuns organized to do "God's work" by helping the poor. They adopted "masculine" civic roles, heading organizations, evacuating villages, sheltering communist suspects, confronting the military for human rights violations, and leading protest rallies and demonstrations (167). They transgressed the boundaries of female citizenship by subverting the ways in which we think of sex/gender. By emphasizing their celibacy and doing God's work, the nuns empowered themselves, negotiating with Church authorities, nation-states, and the military. How these nuns experienced a dual political and religious process of making female citizenship is absorbingly captured by the ethnography.

This volume goes a long way toward helping us understand how the "natural" hierarchy of the family and the categories "men" and "women" are projected onto the nation-state, not just as familial metaphors but in bureaucratic practices and policies that impinge upon sexed bodies. Kathryn Robinson convincingly argues that family planning is not just a family matter but also a global one, a position supported by other authors' work in this volume. Robinson shows us that the politics of family planning reflect the power relations between the "First World" and "Third World." Women in the "Third World" are seen as the means to an end and are not given the same degree of information or provided with the same degree of health scrutiny and maintenance as is regarded as the norm for users of technical contraceptives in the "First...