Gender Pluralism

In this ambitious book, Michael Peletz sets out to explore how and under what

conditions “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 are

granted legitimacy. By “gender pluralism” he refers in particular to instances in which

forms and degrees of legitimacy are granted to culturally recognized inclinations,

behaviors, roles, relationships, and expressive forms associated with concepts that go

beyond 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 and

history. In the course of his analysis, he draws on a wide array of cases from across the

region and across the centuries. He establishes a baseline in the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries—the first half of the early modern period—to identify dimensions of gender

pluralism that existed in the region before European colonial influences became a

significant factor. He identifies a series of conditions supportive of the forms of gender

pluralism thereafter discussed in the book. These include the prevalence of bilateral

kinship systems that do not favor the male or the female line; dualistic cosmologies

with complementary female and male elements; roles for women in agricultural, life

cycle, and healing rituals; women’s participation in politics and trade; tolerance of

premarital sex; initiation of divorce by either party; and a relatively high degree of

autonomy and agency afforded to women.

Peletz posits that the transgender themes in the hegemonic forms of state ritual and

courtly practice built on and afforded legitimacy to behavior in the wider society. He

explores how polymorphic patterns of gender in the region were melded with and

reinforced by Southeast Asian forms of cosmology and statescraft, strongly inflected by

the Saivite and Tantric traditions of South Asia over the course of two millennia.

Importantly, he argues that transgender ritual practices were not transgressive

exceptions to societal conventions, but rather were consistent with gender pluralism in

society at large. Gender pluralism in this era included legitimate sexual relations

between same-sex partners who were differentiated genderwise by markers such as

dress, occupation, and ritual roles. Ritual practitioners, for example, included

anatomical males who performed in women’s dress and married other anatomical

males. Such specialists had a place in royal courts as well as in the villages and

countryside.

The importance of legitimation by hegemonic structures and ideologies is a point

developed carefully across historical eras. In his chapter on the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries, Peletz introduces accounts of two populations in Borneo—the Iban and the

Ngaju Dayak—for whom documentation is lacking until the latter half of the

nineteenth century. With appropriate caveats, he reviews the evidence concerning

transgendered ritual practitioners in these two stateless societies and compares them to

the well-known bissu, transgendered ritual specialists who have played a well186

Jane Monnig Atkinson

documented role in the ritual and political life of the Bugis of South Sulawesi for

centuries. As keepers of the lontar-palm manuscripts that contain the royal

geneaologies, chronicles, and charters, bissu were closely affiliated with political

authority. 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 do

have sex with same-sex partners.

This three-way comparison of Iban, Ngaju Dayak, and Bugis is pivotal for Peletz’s

argument that gender pluralism is affected by the relationships of a social group to the

structures of class and power within the wider polity. Peletz returns to these cases in

the second half of his book, where he makes the case that the decline of transgender

ritual practice among the Iban and the Ngaju Dayak is connected to the increasing

marginalization of these populations within the nation-state, domination by more

economically and politically powerful neighboring populations, and the growing

influence of hegemonic world religions. And in the case of the Iban, urban migration

and 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 for

women, thanks to their economic clout, political influence, and reputation as staunch

Muslims. Peletz is sensitive to the risk of imposing an overly deterministic and

unilinear model on historical transformations. In the Bugis case, for example, he

highlights the fluctuations within the last six decades, a period which saw both

persecution of bissu in the early years of the Indonesian Republic and a re-florescence

of bissu in the post-Sukarno era.

The second half of the early modern period—the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries—was a time of profound economic, political, and creedal transformations in

Southeast Asia, with the intensification of trans-regional commerce, political

centralization fueled by increased wealth and competition, and the rise of religious

orthodoxies (i.e., Buddhist, Christian, and Muslim). With these changes came

dislocations and delegitimization of older cosmological and sociopolitical forms. Peletz

traces the displacement of transgendered and female ritual practitioners in this era, as

well as factors contributing to a decline in women’s cultural, political, and economic

standing.

Peletz draws on Barbara Andaya’s important work concerning the retrenchment of

women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including her study of how

“temporary marriage,” once a respectable form of alliance between elite families and

foreign traders in which the female partners exercised a high degree of agency,

devolved into stigmatized forms of concubinage and prostitution as elites abandoned

the practice, and foreign men entered into relationships with women of lower classes

who could bring only sex and domestic services, not powerful political and trade

alliances, to their unions.1

In addressing the effects of European colonialism on gender pluralism, Peletz

engages Stoler’s important work on gender, race, and class, pointing out its failure to

1 Barbara W. Andaya, “From Temporary Wife to Prostitute: Sexuality and Economic Change in Early

Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Women’s History 9,4 (1998): 11–34.

Gender Pluralism 187

account for the significance of homosexuality in these intertwining discourses.2 To his

credit, Peletz freely acknowledges the same omission in his previous books on

Malaysia. He argues that, by going beyond the archival records, it is possible to find

rich 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 and

illuminate the development of stereotypes concerning the “feminized and degenerate

East”; racialized accounts of societal evolution and human sexuality; policies that

promoted female concubinage and prostitution as a deterrent to interracial homosexual

relations between colonial (European) workers and local men; and transformations in

the labor markets, including the sex trade, with far-reaching consequences for the

health and livelihoods of women and men.

The overarching point of Peletz’s analysis regarding this transformation of

acceptable behavior is that transgendered and female ritual participants once played a

significant role in the symbolic, ritual, and political structures of precolonial Southeast

Asian states. As such, they gave legitimacy to a range of transgender behaviors that

existed within the tolerances of Southeast Asian kinship, family, and social systems as

long as that activity did not violate the heterogender framework of those systems.

Through much of the region, the ties between transgender ritual practice and political

authority have been severed in recent centuries. What is more, world religions, with

new and reformed orthodoxies, have displaced older cosmological frameworks and

often stigmatized their transgender elements. Female participation, let alone

prominence, in rituals of statehood has been similarly displaced. Although popular

tolerance continues through most of the region for same-sex sexual relations, such

relations are less likely to be validated through state ideologies and institutions.

In the second half of the book, Peletz explores the changing dynamics of Southeast

Asian gender pluralism as they are playing out in the postcolonial era. Prominent in

this section are in-depth analyses of Burma and Malaysia in the contemporary era. (The

Burmese government, since the 1962 coup, has resisted modernity and participation in

the global economy, in contrast to Malaysia, whose leadership has sought to combine

aggressive economic development and growth, Islamic values, and a distinctive

approach to modernity.)

Burma has sustained an agriculturally based society in which local religious

traditions—including propitiation of nat spirits and transgendered ritual

practitioners—retain their salience. Peletz reviews a 1996 study of Burmese

terminology for transgender categories and sexual behavior by George Van Driem.3

For a Burmese man who is sexually attracted to same-sex partners, the choices have

been to become a transgendered ritual specialist married to a nat spirit (acault), to

marry such a specialist himself, or to live a “heteronormative” life as a husband and

father while having sex with men on the side. For women, the choices have been more

limited still. In recent years, however, with the development of a gay and lesbian rights

2 See: Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of

Things (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 Atkinson

movement, new options are available. Peletz explores the career of Aung Myo Min, a

prominent leader of this movement, who has sought to create space for a secular

masculine gay male identity. This liberating assertion of masculine possibilities has

coincided with other less laudable changes in Burmese gender politics.

Peletz cites Ward Keeler’s recent study of Burmese performance genres that

documents a shift in masculine musical and theatrical styles away from classical motifs

of aristocratic refinement to angry and aggressive presentations of self that echo

conventions of Western rap music.4 Significantly, the feminine has no place in these

displays—and, indeed, Keeler reports that women fade into the background. Keeler

suggests that this new masculine stance is heavily inflected by the economic and

political impotence of Burmese audiences that respond to fantasies of aggressively

angry men. As for women, newly marginalized in popular performance, the economic

conditions they experience under the junta are particularly cruel. By one estimate, one

third of females of childbearing age in the Rangoon area were engaged in prostitution

in the late 1990s as a result of deteriorating economic conditions, and the growing

scourge of HIV/AIDs exacerbates their misery. Such trends only reinforce negative

stereotypes of women in Burmese society that are already buttressed by Buddhist

concepts of female spiritual inferiority. Peletz examines the harsh government attacks

on Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to show how Burma’s leaders make

use of such stereotypes to impugn her.

The infamous charges leveled by the Malaysian government against Anwar

Ibrahim, former deputy prime minister and minister of finance, offer a parallel

opportunity for exploring the deployment of sexually transgressive themes in political

character assassination in a very different context of nation-state politics and ideology.

Peletz traces how conditions for gender pluralism in Malay cultural traditions have

been severely constricted by a modernizing framework that recasts the Malay past as

feudal, rural, and backward, in contrast to a forward looking globalized future

buttressed by Islamic values.

Ironically, Malaysian development efforts have had the effect of promoting

urbanization and migration, conditions conducive to the heightened concentration and

visibility of transgender and same-sex sexual practices, not to mention the incubation

of political consciousness and advocacy regarding sexual rights. Peletz recounts the

repressive measures imposed on activities the government has labeled deviant and

immoral (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 to

supporting communities at risk from HIV/AIDs and sexual discrimination. This NGO

manages to function with government support for its outreach to AIDS patients,

intravenous drug users, and sex workers, but not for its support of transsexuals and

homosexuals. Peletz speculates as to whether economic opportunism will ultimately

win out over sexual conservatism in Malaysian policies given the attractiveness and

potential value of the “pink dollar,” i.e., money earned by marketing to gay tourists as

4 Ward Keeler, “But Princes Jump! Performing Masculinity in Mandalay,” in Burma at the Turn of the

Twenty-First Century, ed. Monique Skid