Southeast Asian Anti-Imperialist Feminism(s): Militant Feminist Movements

"Burton recalls the oral histories of Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, Nguyen Thi Dinh, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, and various Viet women active in the proliferation of the National Liberation Front. Significantly, women engaged in multiplicities of struggle on the frontlines, within conditions of south Vietnamese and American-backed imprisonment and torture, in maintaining home bases, agricultural communes, intelligence networks and caretaking, and were key to the defeat of French colonialism (regarded as the battle of Dien Bien Phu) and the American imperialism, leading to the reunification of Viet Nam in 1975."

"Pholsena discusses the motivations and work of women militants as essential "foundation-laying cadre", particularly from minority ethnic groups based in Southeastern Laos, under the Lao Issara post 1945. Their experiences expose the necessity of access to material resources such as study and mobility for organizing peoples to galvanize women's participation, the nuances of the internal development of "anti-imperialist feelings of anger and hatred" within cadres, and the complex development of post-revolution conditions and hindsight reflections."

"Wieringa contrasts the socialist, revolutionary feminist orientations of the Gerwani and their relations under Sukarno in the 1950s with the state-sanctioned PKI women's organization under General Suharto post-military coup in 1966. They also draw out the ways in which Gerwani encouraged and reimagined the women's role as social activists, as opposed to being confined to domesticated symbolisms, as they would under the PKI."

"In this article, the authors challenge the notion that feminism is antithetical to militarized nationalism. Conducting a case study analysis on the exiled Burmese women's movement, the argument is that feminist mobilizations and militant nationalist movements are interdependent and mutually transformative. The “merging of feminism and nationalism is a precise starting point for distinguishing non-Western feminisms from their Western counterparts,” as can be studied in anti-imperialist, decolonizing and national liberation movements in the Third World. The Thai-Burma borderlands have been a key site of armed ethnic liberatory struggles and self-determination in opposition to the Burmese military regime. By demonstrating how militarized nationalism provides a ground for feminist mobilization and agenda, it allows a deeper and more complex understanding of how feminist politics emerge and transform under conditons of war, armed conflict and nationalism. This text concludes with how Burmese women’s role and mobilization in exile “narrate the nation'' by articulating demands for equitable access to rights, opportunities, and power (9)."