Women warriors in Southeast Asia

333 Pages·2020·11.61 MB·English

by  Vina A. Lanzona, Frederik Rettig (editors)

Women Warriors in Southeast Asia
This book brings together a wide range of case studies to explore the
experiences and significance of women warriors in Southeast Asian history
from ancient to contemporary times.
Using a number of sources, including royal chronicles, diaries, memoirs
and interviews, the book discusses why women warriors were active in a do-
main traditionally preserved for men, and how they arguably transgressed
peacetime gender boundaries as agents of violence. From multidisciplinary
perspectives, the chapters assess what drove women to take on a variety of
roles, namely palace guards, guerrillas and war leaders, and to what ex-
tent their experiences were different to those of men. The reader is taken on
an almost 1,500-year long journey through a crossroads region well-known
for the diversity of its peoples and cultures, but also their ability to cre-
atively graft foreign ideas onto existing ones. The book also explores the
re-integration of women into post-conflict Southeast Asian societies, includ-
ing the impact (or lack thereof) of newly established international norms,
and the frequent turn towards pre-conflict gender roles in these societies.
Written by an international team of scholars, this book will be of interest
to academics working on Southeast Asian Studies, Gender Studies, low-
intensity conflicts and revolutions, and War, Conflict, and Peace Studies.
Vina A. Lanzona is Associate Professor of History and the Former D irector
of the Center for Philippine Studies (2011–2015) at the University of
Hawai’i at Mānoa. Author of Amazons of the Huk Rebellion: Gender, Sex
and Revolution in the Philippines (2009), she is currently working on two
book projects: on the participation of Filipinos and Filipino Americans
in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the social history of marriage in
the Spanish Philippines.
Frederik Rettig is co-editor of Colonial Armies in Southeast Asia (Routledge,
2005) and Armies and Societies in Southeast Asia (2020). He has published in
the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and in South East Asia Research, including
a special issue in the latter. From 2007 to 2013, he was an Assistant Professor
in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University.
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Edited by Vina A. Lanzona and Frederik Rettig
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com
Women Warriors in
Southeast Asia
Edited by
Vina A. Lanzona and
Frederik Rettig
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Vina A. Lanzona and
Frederik Rettig; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Vina A. Lanzona and Frederik Rettig to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lanzona, Vina A., editor. | Rettig, Tobias, editor.
Title: Women warriors in Southeast Asia / edited by Vina A.
Lanzona and Frederik Rettig.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Routledge studies in the modern history of Asia | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019032590 (print) | LCCN 2019032591 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138829350 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315737829 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781317571858 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781317571834 (mobi) |
ISBN 9781317571841 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Women soldiers—Southeast Asia—History. |
Women guerrillas—Southeast Asia—History. | Women in war—
Southeast Asia—History. | Women in combat—Southeast Asia—
History. | Women and the military—Southeast Asia—History.
Classification: LCC UB419.S644 W66 2020 (print) |
LCC UB419.S644 (ebook) | DDC 355.0082/0959—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032590
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032591
ISBN: 978-1-138-82935-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-73782-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents
List of figures vii
List of contributors ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgements xvii
Glossary and abbreviations xix
PART I
Introduction and background 1
1 Introduction: women warriors, palace guards, and
revolutionaries in Southeast Asian history 3
VINA A. LANZONA AND FREDERIK RETTIG
PART II
Women warriors in ancient and early modern Southeast Asia 29
2 ‘Lady Sinn’ (Xian Fu-ren 冼夫人) and the sixth-century
Chinese incorporation of a Southeast Asian region 31
GEOFF WADE
3 Querulous queens, bellicose brai: Cambodian perspectives
toward female agency 48
TRUDE JACOBSEN
4 The Regio Femarum and its warrior women: images and
encounters in European sources 64
CHRISTINA SKOTT
5 Geisha warriors? The incomparable prajurit estri at the court
of Mangkunĕgara I 87
ANN KUMAR
vi Contents
PART III
Southeast Asian women warriors and revolutionaries
in the modern period 107
6 Heroines and forgotten fighters: insights into women
combatants’ history in Aceh, 1873–2005 109
ELSA CLAVÉ
7 Women in the early Vietnamese communist movement:
sex, lies, and liberation 136
SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE
8 Recruiting the all-female Rani of Jhansi Regiment:
Subhas Chandra Bose and Dr Lakshmi Swaminadhan 158
FREDERIK RETTIG
9 Women guerrillas of the Communist Party of Malaya:
Nationalist struggle with an internationalist experience 173
AGNES KHOO
10 Love and sex in times of war and revolution: women warriors
in Vietnam and the Philippines 200
VINA A. LANZONA
PART IV
The United Nations, Security Sector Reform (SSR),
and the gendering of Disarmament, Demobilisation and
Reintegration (DDR) 227
11 The aftermath for women warriors: Cambodia and East Timor 229
SUSAN BLACKBURN
12 Brave warriors, unfinished revolutions: political subjectivities
of women combatants in East Timor 246
JACQUELINE A. SIAPNO
PART V
Conclusion 265
13 Rethinking the historical place of ‘warrior women’
in Southeast Asia 267
BARBARA WATSON ANDAYA
Index 295
Figures
0.1 Paul (Nguyên) Van Thê sculpts the soon to be toppled
Trung Sisters Monument, Saigon, early 1960 xiv
1.1 The Dutch capturing of the distressed Tjut Nyak Dhien,
Aceh, late 1905 13
1.2 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai honoured as the face of
the Southern Uprising, commemorative stamp, issued on
23 November 2012 15
1.3 Captain Lakshmi and Subhas Chandra Bose inspect the
Rani of Jhansi Regiment, 22 October 1943, Singapore 16
1.4 At the intersection of oral history and public outreach:
Agnes Khoo and Lin Mei 18
2.1 Modern South Chinese representation of Lady
Sinn (c. 512–602) 32
3.1 Earth Goddess Neang Dharani standing guard at the
Ministry of Water Resources and Meteorology, Phnom
Phenh, Cambodia, 2007 52
4.1 Dutch traders served by female guards and staff at the
court of Aceh, 1603 73
6.1 Creating controversy online: Tjut Nyak Dhien without
jilbab, late 2014 110
7.1 Nguyen Thi Minh Khai as Tovarish (Comrade) Fan-Lan at
the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, Moscow, 1935 145
8.1 Rani nurses and soldiers enjoying a slightly less formal
moment, early (?) 1944 166
8.2 Captain Lakshmi seated and surrounded by Indian girls
and young women, c. 1943 167
9.1 Lin Dong, medical doctor of the dissolved Communist
Party of Malaya, and two other women, early 2000s 182
9.2 Cui Hong, CPM sharp shooter and loyal guerrilla
fighter, 2002 184
10.1 The solitary sculpture of Dr Dang Thuy Tram at the
clinic named after her at Duc Pho, Quang Ngai province,
southcentral Vietnam 201
viii Figures
10.2 The surrender of Huk Kumanders (commanders)
Linda de Villa (alias Leonora Hipas, aged 16) and
Oscar (alias Emilio Diesta, 21), October 1954 209
10.3 Reintegrating mainstream society: the wedding of
Leonora Hipas and Emilio Diesta, October 1954 211
11.1 Ex-combatant women in Takeo province, southwestern
Cambodia, 2005–2006 232
12.1 Mana Bilesa, in uniform and with assault rifle, East
Timor, 1995 249
13.1 Statue of Thao Suranaree, local heroine of Nakhon
Ratchasima (Korat), Thailand 271
Contributors
Barbara Watson Andaya is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of
Hawai’i at Mānoa and the author of The Flaming Womb: Repositioning
Women in Early Modern Southeast Asia. She is currently completing a
manuscript on gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia from early times
to the present.
Susan Blackburn is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Po-
litical and Social Inquiry at Monash University in Melbourne. She has
taught Southeast Asian Politics, and her research has focused mainly on
Indonesia, her best-known book being Women and the State in Modern
Indonesia.
Elsa Clavé is an Assistant Professor in Southeast Asian Studies at Goethe
University, Frankfurt, and an Associate Researcher at the Centre of
Southeast Asia in Paris. She works on the cultural history of Southeast
Asian sultanates (Indonesia, Malaysia, Southern Philippines) with a spe-
cific attention to the political cultures of these polities in the modern and
contemporary periods and on the memory of the 1965–66 violence in In-
donesia. From 2018 to 2019, she works as a postdoctoral fellow at the
Harvard Asia Center.
Trude Jacobsen is an Associate Professor of History and the Former Direc-
tor of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois Uni-
versity, where she teaches Southeast Asian history and thematic courses
on global violence and gender issues. She recently published her second
monograph, Sex Trafficking in Southeast Asia: Desire, Duty, and Debt
(2017).
Agnes Khoo is the author of Life as the River Flows: Women in the Ma-
layan Anti-Colonial Struggle (2007), a collection of oral histories from
women guerrillas of the Communist Party of Malaya. The book’s up-
dated e-version was published in January 2018. She is also the transla-
tor of the book, Our Stories: Moving and Labouring, Stories of Migrant
Workers in Taiwan (2011). As an activist and academic, she founded a
community- based poultry farm in Ghana, West Africa, with her husband