Recovering Female Subjectivities: Writing History and the Politics of Gender in Southeast Asian Art

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

The panel will weave together some of the important issues related to the writing of gender and art history in Southeast Asian art: censorship and the female body, motherhood and the state, and the gendered experience of women art historians. The three papers will look at these aspects within the newly emerging area of Southeast Asian art history. Paper 1 proposes that female artists in Myanmar faced intense obstacles in building careers as professional artists as they not only had to navigate a censorship bureaucracy that promoted statist policies, but also had to contend with societal censorship. Paper 2 examines the works of contemporary Indonesian women artists as a potential for a feminist reading within Indonesian art history by looking at how of the experience of motherhood as central to, and inseparable from, their life as artists. Paper 3 considers the impact of gender on the fieldwork experiences of women art historians, specifically raising the issues of the relevance of gender in the production and writing of Southeast Asian art history. This panel will therefore examine how women currently working in the field of Southeast Asian art negotiate gender challenges through creativity, collaboration and critical intervention. Moreover, the panel aims to address the crucial issue of female subjectivities in the construction of history in Southeast Asian art.

Area of Study

• Southeast Asia

Session Organizer

• Wulan Dirgantoro, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore

Chair

• Wulan Dirgantoro, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore

Individual Presentations

• Painting Through the Cheroot Haze: Censorship and Female Artists in Socialist Burma - Melissa Carlson, Independent Scholar

• Searching for the feminine: Motherhood and Maternal Subjectivity in Indonesian Visual Arts - Wulan Dirgantoro, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore

• Smoking and Drinking with the Men: Gendered Experiences of Conducting Art Historical Research in Southeast Asia - Clare Veal, University of Sydney

Discussant

• Yvonne Low, University of Sydney