Women's Studies in Southeast Asia
By Karen S. Rowan, Editor, On Campus With Women

Some people mistakenly think that women's studies is an exclusively Western idea. The reality is that women's studies programs have been emerging across the globe over the past three decades, but they are taking different shape and tackling different issues depending on their location. In this Global Watch column we will look at some of the specific concerns and expressions of women's studies in Southeast Asian countries.

Issues-Based Organizational Strategies
WARI, the Bangkok-based Women's Action & Resource Initiative, organizes their women's studies work by focusing on development issues through the lens of women and gender. They also deliberately work in a comparative framework across multiple national boundaries. For the past three years, for instance, WARI has organized a gender training course and international gender conference for policy makers, researchers, activists, NGO staff, and academics from Indochina and Southeast Asia.

WARI is coordinated by two former academics, Darunee Tantiwiramanond and Shashi Ranjan Pandey, both PhD's who, as a part of their work evaluating government and NGO projects, observed that such projects too often "lack familiarity with gender issues [and] capacity to carry out programs effectively." Seeking to fill these gaps, Tantiwiramanond and Pandey left their university positions and founded WARI to work more closely with governmental and non-governmental organizations on women and development issues.

WARI developed the annual six-day Women, Gender, and Development in Southeast Asia course as a way to reach out to individuals who want to learn more about how to integrate gender issues in their work. The organizers, along with other experts, facilitate sessions on gender socialization, gender roles, project planning, leadership and mainstreaming gender issues in programs and organizations. The two-day international conference, Emerging Issues and New Challenges: Human and Resource Development in Southeast Asia including Transitional Societies of Indochina (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar), immediately follows the gender course in order to reduce travel costs for participants and provides a forum for policy makers, activists, and researchers to report on their projects and to network with colleagues from across the region. In addition to these annual events, Tantiwiramanond and Shashi continue to conduct research in order to inform policy decisions about women and development across the region.

WARI's focus reflects a dominant theme in women's organizations and academic women's studies programs in Southeast Asia. According to Maila Stivens, women's programs in this region of the world tend to focus more on policy-oriented and utilitarian research than on theoretically oriented scholarship. In part, the focus on development issues and government policies can be traced back to women's programs' beginnings in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many women's programs were prompted by their governments' participation the UN Decade for Women: Equality, Development, and Peace (1975-1985) and the UN women's conferences, setting a precedent for close government ties and development-oriented research agendas.

For example, Stivens notes that the women's studies centers or pusat studi wanita at Indonesian universities are focused almost entirely on research rather than teaching, and that the research conducted there is closely linked to government policy. In Indonesia, as in many Southeast Asian countries, much of the funding for women's studies comes from international donor agencies such as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and UNESCO. While the funding these agencies provide helps support research on gender and women's issues, the agencies' agendas tend to result in policy-oriented research on development and family issues.

Theory-based Organizational Strategies
In contrast, women's studies programs in the Philippines tend to be more academically and theoretically focused. Several colleges and universities offer certificates or degrees in women's studies, some of which are more than thirty years old. These programs, observes Stivens, typically follow two main paths: integrating women's studies into established disciplines or developing autonomous women's studies programs. These programs have seen several theoretical shifts. They have moved from a "structural-functionalist focus on women's status and roles to Marxist and socialist feminist analyses in the 1980s and early 1990s and, in the late 1990s, to feminist postmodernism and poststructuralism." In the Philippines, then, research is not so closely bound to government policy, but the tension between academics and activists, especially concerning ties to the Western women's studies movement, is perhaps higher.

Tensions around Western influences stem from what some Southeast Asian scholars identify as "the difficulty for local scholars in escaping western intellectual and cultural domination and in developing alternative ways of knowing and acting." As a result, some researchers may lean towards development issues and policy-oriented research as a way to side-step Western influence. In other cases, women's studies scholars are working to establish mutually beneficial relationships with western scholars.

For instance, scholars at the women's studies program at the University of Indonesia have developed a relationship with women's studies faculty at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Memorial University sociology professor Dr. Marilyn Porter co-coordinated the CIDA-funded project, which sought to strengthen both universities' women studies programs through faculty exchanges, workshops, curricula materials development, and comparative research. Workshops focused on defining feminist programs and processes, pedagogy, and research methodologies. Porter commented that the goal of the project was not to impose a western feminist agenda on the University of Indonesia's women's studies program, but, rather, to support and learn from their colleagues as they develop a program that best suited their needs and goals.

References
Stivens, Maila. 2000. Women's studies: Southeast Asia. In Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender, eds. Routledge international encyclopedia of women: Global women's issues and knowledge. New York: Routledge, 2109-2113.