2020, Vol.12, No.1

SUVANNABHUMI 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.03

pISSN : 2092-738X / eISSN : 2799-7839
https://journal.kci.go.kr/svn

This article is a sub-section of a comparative analysis of depictions of violence in Jakarta’s Museum of the Indonesian Communist Party’s Treachery, Ho Chi Minh City’s War Remnants Museum, and Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. In comparing these public history sites, I analyze how memories of mass violence were central to state formation in both Suharto’s anti-Communist New Order (1966-1998), the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (1976-present), and Cambodia since the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea (1979-present). While this comparison points out specific distinctions about the role of the military, the nature of revolution, and conceptions of gender, it argues for a central similarity in the use of a mythology of victimization in building these post-conflict nation-states. This article focuses on my gendered analysis of the use of images of women and children in each museum. Depending on context and political purpose, these museums cast women as tragic victim, revolutionary heroine, or threat to the social order. My analysis of gender places stereotypical images of violence against women (the trope of women and children as the ultimate victims) in conversation with dark fantasies of women as perpetrators of savage violence and heroic images of women liberated by participation in violence.

Two utilitarian and symbolic objects associated with womanhood in Cambodian culture are the stove and the pot. The pot is a symbol of both the womb and female sexuality; the stove is a symbol of gendered feminine labor. This article argues that the sexist representations of the Khmer female body by modern Cambodian male artists demonstrate an inherited legacy of Orientalist stereotypes. These images were formed : under French colonialism and often depict Khmer women as erotic/exotic native Others. Starting in the 1970s, however, if not earlier, Cambodian women began to question the gendering of social roles that confined them to domestic space and labor. This form of social questioning was especially present in pop songs. In recent years, contemporary Cambodian woman artists such as Neak Sophal and Tith Kanitha have made use of rice pots and stoves in their art as freighted symbols of femininity. Neak created an installation of rice pots from different households in their village, while Tith rebelled against this gendered role by destroying cooking stoves as an act of defiance against patriarchy in her performance art.

Singapore and Thailand have been rapidly ageing. There has been a growing demand for eldercarers in the home-setting for which migrant domestic workers have filled the role. This paper examines the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Consensus governing women migrant workers entering the eldercare sector. It argues that because the ASEAN Consensus is not legally binding, it only serves to reinforce the sovereignty of states in the treatment of migrant workers instead of member states acting in unison to ensure labour protections for this group; as a result, Singapore and Thailand do not feel the need to step up protections for this group of workers according to national labor laws and hence low-skilled women migrant workers entering the eldercare sector continue to be vulnerable to labour abuses. Thus as with globalization, the ASEAN Economic Community manifests the paradox of borders: that while states are economically interconnected and interdependent, they are simultaneously disconnected and independent from each other.