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183 Chapter 11 Women of the Temple Burmese Immigrants, Gender, and Buddhism in a U.S. Frame  Tamara C. Ho The women of Burma are definitely superior to men in organizing skills. . . . In most Burmese families, it is the woman who manages and determines the family’s destiny, although they are careful to give the impression, due to age-old culture norms, that a woman is the “hind leg of the elephant,” faithfully following her man wherever he may lead. . . . However, facts belie this image. —Eugene Thaike Yawnghwe, “The Women of Burma: Holding Up Two-Thirds of the Sky” This perspective—from a respected scholar -activist whose father was the first elected president of independent Burma and whose mother was a member of the Burmese Parliament and founder of the Shan State Army—aptly introduces Burmese women as gendered subjectivities, overshadowed by myths and patriarchal traditions, yet recognized as adept managers of private and public affairs.1 Yawnghwe’s certainty that women are “definitely superior” reflects the discursive contours of Burmese femininity, too often rendered as noble “savage”/savior and tragic, debased victim. Southeast Asian scholarship , reportage, and popular representations offer vexed views of Burmese women’s status. Various accounts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mention how Burmese women had a remarkable degree of influence and control in the public arenas of finance and politics while also being despised as the “inferior sex.” While these claims of Burmese women’s “high” social status are supported by historical evidence, life in twentieth-century Burma,2 now called Myanmar, has been reshaped by a series of cultural “traumas”: the twilight of British colonialism , Japanese imperialist occupation, armed struggles for independence and ethnic sovereignty, economic mismanagement, protracted civil war, and repressive military dictatorship. Thus, human rights activists and Southeast Asian scholars argue that persistent institutions of masculinity, traditional beliefs, and the latetwentieth -century rise of militarization and poverty continue to keep Burmese women marginalized, abject, and silent.3 184 Tamara C. Ho Within (English-language) Buddhist studies, scholarship on gender is uneven. The tendency to highlight the lives of venerable male monks, or alternately , to focus on (white) Euro-American converts further marginalizes the contributions and experiences of Asian women in general, and Burmese women in particular. Within Asian American and transnational American studies, more recent attention has been focused on heterogeneous Southeast Asian populations settling in the United States since the late 1960s, and since 9/11, issues of spirituality , religion, and gender have become more urgent as categories of identification and action. Addressing these discursive trends and aporia, this ethnography explores the dynamics of gender within Burmese American faith communities by highlighting the roles and views of devout Burmese immigrant women who regularly participate in Buddhist networks in Southern California and who comprise the majority of regular devoted laity at U.S. Burmese temples. Given how Burmese culture purportedly keeps women “in the margins” and how Buddhist androcentrism restricts women to secondary roles in the temple, why do Burmese American women participate in such high numbers in Buddhist faith communities? How does Buddhism affect these women’s negotiation of “Burmeseness” and Americanization ? How does religion affect the possibilities for transnational and transethnic /interracial coalition or community building? Although these Burmese immigrants do not necessarily advocate a recognizably “feminist” position, they do function and survive through a creatively female-centered network. Despite the gendered “glass ceiling” in Southeast Asian TheravƗda Buddhism, these women rely on their religious beliefs, devotional work, and the support of their Burmese peers for fortitude, advice, and aid in situations of personal and social strife.4 The self-narration and literature of Burmese women —both in Burma and as immigrants in the United States—demonstrate how Buddhism operates not only as cultural paradigm but also as a counterhegemonic rhetorical structure. Buddhism provides an organizational framework through which Burmese women can reflect on institutions of power, critique master narratives of Western supremacy and patriarchy, and practice a contingent, open-ended relationality.5 Their apparent “lack” of feminist consciousness is not so much an acceptance of their supposed inferiority, but rather part of a nonegoistic endeavor to achieve better situations for themselves and their families in this life and future reincarnations. In the context of negotiating life in the United States, Buddhism provides these women with a means and an opportunity to “cross borders”—the social boundaries created by ethnic, religious, and class differences, and the actual geopolitical borders policed by the...

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