Paving the road ahead: Women in (post) colonial Southeast Asia

This Forum reflects the stimulating conversations we had as participants in a roundtable at the 2023 Boston meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. The discussion centred on the position of women (as both contributors and subjects) in competing visions of modernity in Southeast Asia. Our overall goals were to explore how women contributed to these visions and the extent to which their hopes were realised. In the process, numerous questions arose: What were women’s experiences in these modernities? How were their roles influenced by class, ethnicity, religion, and age? And, finally, how do analyses of women-centred involvement inform broader understandings of social, cultural, economic, and political transformations in the region? The contributors reflect on their own trajectory in the study of women’s history, the sources they have been able to leverage, the intersection between ‘modernity’ and nationalism, the related issue of women’s position in postcolonial nation-states, and the question of how ideas of sexuality (in the family, society, politics) were changing. Throughout the Forum, we argue that the experience of women, and their (often but not necessarily agentic) contribution, is necessary to fully grasp the region’s multiple entanglements with ‘modernity/ies’ in a variety of fields.