SOAS Southeast Asian Studies workshops series: Materializing gender in Myanmar

Keynote Address

Gender theatre and the silver screen: Women and the motion picture industry

According to Burmese books, media and the Motion Picture History Museum, the historical arc of Myanmar film starts with the “Fathers of Burmese Cinema:” the earliest film directors, cinematographers and producers. At first glance, Burmese motion picture production is almost exclusively been controlled by men. However, Burmese women have been crucial to the industry throughout its 100-year history, both through their creative work and their economic influence. Women have acted in movies, written screenplays, directed films, performed as singers and musicians, and comprised large sectors of cinema audiences. 

Describing the expansion of Burmese film production and the advent of a local studio system in the 1920s, this presentation considers the role of women as workers in the Burmese creative industries as well as their influence as consumers of popular culture and entertainment. It will also consider the ways in which Burmese movies of the colonial era presented women’s agency . Through analysis of the 1934 film Mya Ga Naing, the oldest surviving Burmese film, I will consider the figure of Myint Myint, a bold and daring young woman who rides horses, climbs trees, and shoots guns.

Jane M Ferguson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, Southeast Asian History, and the School of Culture, History, and Language at the Australian National University with a PhD in Anthropology and Southeast Asian history from Cornell University. Ferguson’s publications include Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand, and a Nation-State Deferred (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and Silver Screens and Golden Dreams: A Social History of Burmese Cinema (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024).

Presentations

On-screen and behind the scenes: Filmmaking and LGBT advocacy in Myanmar, 2011-2021

Myanmar’s ‘democratic decade’ (2011-2021) marks a distinctive epoch in Burmese cinema. With its reopening, the country rejoined a Southeast Asian region where independent film was beginning to thrive. Simultaneously, activists were publicly mobilising human rights discourses within Myanmar for the first time, including discourses around LGBT identities.

Film scholars have pointed to some contradictions of independent cinema in the global south, especially concerning transnationalism and class: socially disenfranchised filmic subjects juxtaposed with an elite audience; purportedly local voices being supported through transnational infrastructure, and art cinema's enduring lack of local audience -- raising attendant questions about the possibilities of film for social transformation. 

Elsewhere, scholars have also drawn attention to the tensions and fissures between local conceptions of non-normative sexualities and genders and those of globalised LGBT discourses. Exploring the radical potential of ‘queer cinema’ in the Burmese context, my doctoral research considers how the production, distribution, and exhibition of films is imbricated with LGBT activism and investigates how Burmese filmmakers negotiated the ambivalences of globalised human rights discourses and frameworks. My research brings together scholarly engagement with human rights, as well as cinema studies and queer Southeast Asian studies, to ask how Burmese independent filmmakers mediated local LGBT voices during the democratic decade. 

This paper (an excerpt from my dissertation-in-progress) focuses on a series of short documentaries, "Rainbow Reels." It considers how filmmakers both resisted and reproduced the neoliberal logic of humanitarianism and human rights discourses in the context of Burmese LGBT activism and details the way filmmakers navigated the universalising tendencies of transnational concepts of queer desire and identities, to work towards a collective vision of Burmese modernity rooted in diversity.

Charlotte Chadwick is currently undertaking a PhD in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University, as an HKPFS awardee. Previously, they completed a BA with first-class honours in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and an MA supported by an APA scholarship at the University of Melbourne before working as a writer, editor, teacher and researcher both in the UK and within Southeast Asia, primarily with educational organisations in Myanmar. Their research interests span world cinema, gender and sexuality, queer theory, globalisation, international ethics and human rights.

Women in between: Defining love and sexuality in Burmese literature

Little work has been done to date on issues pertaining to female sexuality in Burmese literature. One reason is the enduring taboos on the public discussion of female sexual desire in Burmese culture. Vernacular literature noticeably lacks discussions on the sexual freedom of women. Conversely, in Burmese society, men's sexual mobility, demonstrated through extramarital affairs and maintaining mistresses, not only escapes criticism but is taken for granted. This chapter aims to decipher this imbalance in the prescriptions for male/female sexual behaviour by exploring the social construction of female sexuality in Burma. I am aware that society as a homogenous unit does not exist. I consider this society to be the Bamar-Buddhist majority within my research.

This paper provides a study of complicated prescriptions concerning female sexuality in the Burmese literary context. It explores two pieces of literary guidebooks by two male authors: Pe Moe Hnin’s Guidance of Love (အချစ်လမ်းညွန်) (2003 [c. 1930s]) and U Nu’s Desires (ကာမတဏှာ) (2000 [1967]). By closely reading these two non-fictional works, it investigates intertwined systems regarding love and sexuality, modern ideology influenced by foreign sexology and traditional ideology dominated by Theravada Buddhism disciplines. To be clear, although these works and principles are broached separately, I argue that the boundary overlaps and is blurred, and I intend to highlight the hybrid nature of Burmese sexology. In the second part, furthermore, I explore how Burmese female sexual desires and expressions are restricted by these intertwined systems and how prostitutes are marginalized and stigmatized.

Tongchen Hou is a PhD candidate in South East Asian Studies in SOAS. Her research interests include Burmese literature in contemporary periods and cultural and gender studies of Myanmar. She pursued her undergraduate studies at Peking University from 2013 to 2017, with a focus on Burmese language and literature. She completed her Master's degree in the Department of South East Asia at SOAS in 2019. Her PhD project focuses on the literary works of a Burmese female author, Kyi Aye, around the topics of modernity, sexuality, body and emotions.

Header image credit: Kittitep Khotchalee via Unsplash.