Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (coedited with Stephen J. Collier); Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America; and Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, winner of the Association for Asian American Studies' Cultural Studies Book Award and also published by Duke University Press.

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"This book by a leading scholar in development studies clearly documents the fact that governments and institutions have a more decisive role than markets in the successful experiences of development in the new global economy. It will become mandatory reading for students and policy makers around the world."--Manuel Castells, Wallis Annenberg Chair of Communication Technology and Society, University of Southern California

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NEOLIBERALISM as EXCEPTION

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgement..........................................................................ixIntroduction: Neoliberalism as Exception, Exception to Neoliberalism.....................11. Sisterly Solidarity: Feminist Virtue under "Moderate Islam"...........................312. Cyberpublics and the Pitfalls of Diasporic Chinese Politics...........................533. Graduated Sovereignty.................................................................754. Zoning Technologies in East Asia......................................................975. Latitudes, or How Markets Stretch the Bounds of Governmentality.......................1216. Higher Learning in Global Space.......................................................1397. Labor Arbitrage: Displacements and Betrayals in Silicon Valley........................1578. Baroque Ecology, Evervescent Citizenship..............................................1779. A Biocartography: Maids, Neoslavery, and NGOs.........................................19510. Reengineering the "Chinese Soul" in Shanghai?........................................219Notes....................................................................................241Bibliography.............................................................................261Index....................................................................................279

Chapter One

In the aftermath of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, many internationalist feminists felt triumphant as they headed for home. Bina Agarwal, an Indian economist, declared, "Many Northern women today are finding common ground with Southern women.... This is not to argue that the North-South gap has disappeared. But among women's groups there is growing recognition of the importance of forging strategic links. One could say 'romantic sisterhood' is giving way to 'strategic sisterhood' for confronting the global crisis of economy and polity."

Strategic Sisterhood

Strategic sisterhood is a new mechanism to confront the entangled issues of globalization and women's rights. The term implies a contingent North-South feminist partnership for intervention in countries where the gender gap is huge. Because of their participation in a transnational feminist public, feminists can draw on their international alliances to hold their own government to account.

Yet a lacuna remains in this strategic sisterhood intervention. Cosmopolitan feminism focuses on the unequal distribution of gender rights across the world, but its focus on feminist individualism comes into direct conflict with alternative ethics that are rooted in collectivist norms and goals. Strategic sisterhood is a concept that seeks to disseminate democratic principles of gender equality throughout the world. Drawing on Kantian democratic liberalism, the strategic sisters' notion of gender citizenship is conceptualized in absolute, universalistic terms of individual freedom and equality, regardless of the geopolitical inequalities and diverse ethical systems. Mantras from the North like "women's rights are human rights" propose global human standards without regard to other moral systems and visions of ethical living. While feminists may think their challenge is to find a universal solution to the plight of women across the world, we need to ask how these messages will be received in places that have emerged from Western colonial domination and are just now forging their own postcolonial identities and ethico-political future. Northern feminists and many of their elite Southern counterparts often skirt the issue of how to improve women's conditions without being seen as the new imperialists. Besides being more sensitive to an imperialist logic in promoting their transnational system of civic virtue, internationalist feminists may also recognize that their own self-image as autonomous individuals depends on their "liberation" of oppressed sisters in the Third World.

In internationalist feminist discourses, women in postcolonial situations are framed as the dual victims of age-old cultural traditions and postcolonial nationalism. This formulation is supported by the view that the women's question is inseparable from national emancipation in emerging countries. In countries like India, women and the home represent "the original site on which the hegemonic project of nationalism was launched." Because colonial and postcolonial struggles have been based on national ideologies of community, any discussion of the women's issue is always framed in terms of the national project and collective interests. Postcolonial scholars maintain that outsiders talking about women's rights are tampering with "the inner spaces of community" and thus "the life of the nation." We need to understand, therefore, how a national discourse of community is able to negotiate with subaltern ones on its "own terms for the purposes of producing consent." Narratives of nation and community position women within special conditions for expressing their moral agency. For instance, a patriarchal dimension in the rise of Asian tiger countries mobilized young women as a cheap labor force for multinational corporations. For postcolonial leaders and their citizens, women's emancipation, far from just being a question of individual rights, is fundamentally about the national project and the nationalist prestige of cultural difference. These issues are especially potent at the historical juncture when many postcolonial countries are finally emerging as economic competitors to the West, and they are especially sensitive to having women's rights ideology imposed from the West.

But postcolonial situations are dynamic sites of change, and over time the local and transnational variables have shifted in relation to each other. Because postcolonial milieus are constantly unfolding, the question of women's emancipation is becoming less of a stark choice between universal feminist values or domestic political agendas. Instead of a dichotomy between feminist internationalism and female-dominated nationalism, the postcolonial milieu in Southeast Asia is shaped by the intersection of nationalism, capitalist development, and religious institutions. The women-state patriarchal link is itself undergoing change, thus creating an opening for feminist claims against religious patriarchy. In the Malaysian case to which we will now turn, the state exception of "moderate Islam" promotes public conditions of possibility for women's status to be problematized in relation to Islamic patriarchy. This triangulated nexus between nationalism, women, and religion shapes the ground for feminist articulation of claims and their transformation into rights.

Women Wrestling with Ethics

Across the Islamic world, Muslim feminists are struggling against both Islamic patriarchy and authoritarian governments that have been unwilling or unable to support women's quest for gender equality. Malaysia, a developing country dominated by a Malay-Muslim majority, seems to be an exception. Malaysia is considered the most affluent and progressive Islamic (but resolutely multicultural) nation, one that has positioned itself as a bastion of...