Men and Masculinities in Southeast Asia

This book brings together extensive recent innovative research on the study of men and masculinities in Southeast Asia. Drawing on rich ethnographic fieldwork from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia and Timor-Leste, the book examines both dominant and marginal constructions of heterosexual masculinity and the ways in which these are performed in different localized contexts in insular and mainland Southeast Asia. Through the presentation of detailed ethnographic studies on topics ranging from the professional practices of Filipino merchant seafarers to the sex lives of Thai migrant workers to the stand-over tactics of Indonesian gangsters, the authors in this collection challenge the idea of emerging globalizing forms of masculinities. Where existing studies of gender in Asia tend to concentrate on women, East Asia and gay men, this book fills a significant gap and demonstrates, overall, how gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality and nationality shape contemporary understandings of what it means to be a ‘man’ in contemporary Southeast Asia.

"Given the widely acknowledged lack of studies of masculinity in Asia, the edited collection Men and Masculinities in Southeast Asia makes a welcome and timely contribution to the field... As an edited collection, this book on masculinities in the region demonstrates an admirable consistency in the standard of writing and preservation of key themes. The reader is shown how Southeast Asian men construct their masculinities in the migrant context, in leisure and sex tourism, in the military, in race relations, and in urban gangs. The merit of the book lies in the diversity of masculine identities portrayed. Southeast Asia is a region in which gender relations are changing at an unprecedented rate. While many accounts of the changing roles of women have been produced, this book is one of few to look at the dynamic gender identities of men."- Pam Nilan, University of Newcastle, Australia; Inside Asia

Michele Ford is Associate Professor of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the co-editor of Women and Work in Indonesia and Women and Labour Organizing in Asia: Diversity, Autonomy and Activism (both published by Routledge).  Lenore Lyons is Honourary Professor in the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of A State of Ambivalence: The Feminist Movement in Singapore.