Transgenderism and gender pluralism in Southeast Asia since early modern times

This article develops the concept of "gender pluralism" to analyze historical and ethnographic material bearing on Southeast Asia since early modern times. Deployment of this concept in the context of an analysis that approaches transgenderism as an optic through which to view such pluralism entails an intervention against the grain of much writing on gender and sexuality. This intervention involves an interpretive framework conducive to the comparative historical investigation of culturally interlocked domains that are often separated or ignored in scholarly accounts, as occurs when "gender" is construed as a code word for "women" and is thus stripped of much of its significance before research has begun or when transgender practices or certain modalities of sexuality are examined in relative isolation from other salient components of the more encompassing sex/gender and cultural-political systems of which they are a part. It is argued that for this region and period transgenderism provides a valuable window on gender pluralism partly because the vicissitudes of transgendering are broadly indexical of the greater formalization and segregation of gender roles, the distancing of women from sources of power and prestige, the attenuated range of legitimacy concerning things erotic and sexual, and the constriction of pluralistic gender sensibilities as a whole.