Response to ‘The Single Woman’ and ‘Miss Beer Lao’
Response to ‘The Single Woman’ and ‘Miss Beer Lao’
In ‘The Single Woman,’ Zeamer uses Jiem’s persepective to explore how the rising population of urban single women in Thailand symbolizes a shift in expectations for gender roles. Women are becoming more modern, more willing to wait for marriage, and pursuing education and career goals instead. Marriage has a dual role for Thai women. On one hand, it is a societal expectation, it is seen as natural for women to want to marry. On the other hand, it also fulfills a woman’s spiritual duty. Thai feminity contrasts with masculinity, sexual release is seen as necessary for men. Because of this contrast, it is the woman’s responsibility to stabilize the marriage through diligence and patience. Though Jiem is a married woman, her child is almost grown and her husband does not work in Bangkok, where she lives. Because of this, she is able to act as a single woman in the sense that she can pursue her interests freely.
In ‘Miss Beer Lao,’ High explains the ideal image of Lao women through the Beer Lao calendar, a publication issued by Lao’s ‘most celebrated company.’ Each year, there is a competition to determine which women will appear on the calendar. Women must be aged 18 and 23, at least 158cm, ‘quintessentially Lao,’ and look sexually charged but innocent. Beer Lao, Lao’s most popular beer, plays an important role in Lao culture. Beer Lao is in various celebrations and rituals. Beer Lao calendar women need to maintain the fantasy adorned on the calendar, they cannot marry for the year in order to seem ‘attractive but untouched.’ High comments that the figure of Miss Beer Lao is ‘an effort to tame the perceived threats of globalization.’ Concepts of the calendar are chosen by the government, such as handicrafts and electricity, meant to provide a sense of unity for Laotians. Miss Beer Lao at once portrays the ideal Lao woman, attempts to tame globalization, and unites Laotians.
Both The Single Woman and Miss Beer Lao explore the image of women in Thai and Lao culture, respectively. The Single Woman explores Thai women in the setting of marriage, Miss Beer Lao explores the fantasy of women as sexual, innocent, and nationalist figures.
Zeamer’s portrayal of single women, married women, and Jiem has implicitly explained the path of life for modern Thai women. Although Zeamer contextualizes her exploration of gender roles and its changing nature in Thailand, I find her commentary to be very universal. Jiem can act like a single woman, but only after her family and marriage duties are fulfilled. There is a time where women must go to school, then get married, have children, then she is able to explore her personal interests. In this sense, I think that the fulfillment of family duties ties back to Tuesday’s discussion of sacrifice. Thai women sacrifice the pursuit of personal passions for the interest of her family. Zeamer’s comment about single women being cast as a destructive force for broken homes and lonely souls in conservative discourse intrigues me, when a woman begins to prioritize her career, men do not take over the child caretaking duties, the woman is blamed for ‘abandoning’ her children.
Between the two readings, I found it notable how Southeast Asian women (or women in general for that matter) have so many different roles to fulfill depending on age. Younger than 18, they are considered young girls who need to be sheltered and pampered. Suddenly, between 18 and 23 they are supposed to maintain an innocent image while also looking sexually charged. After 23, they are expected to get married, have kids, and focus on their family. Finally, after a woman’s children have grown up, she can explore her own self and goals.
High’s portrayal of Beer Lao women can be connected to modern Southeast Asian prostitution. As High noted, beer is associated with prostitution, which plays into creating Miss Beer Lao as a sexual figure. I find it ironic how Miss Beer Lao is celebrated as a beautiful Lao woman, yet its immediate connotations with sexual availability and prostitution are frowned upon. At the same time, many Southeast Asian female sex workers feel forced to work in such an industry in order to care for their children, it is an act of sacrifice. A female sex worker fulfills her role as a mother but is also degraded for being sexually available, but prostitution is also somewhat needed for her country (both Lao and Thailand) to maintain the influx of sex tourists. The sexualization and gender roles of women explored by High and Zeamer cannot be chalked up to calendars, globalization, and economic transformations. There is a history of colonial and army prostitution, Buddhism, and the current circumstances of sex tourism and poverty.
Discussion Questions:
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To what extent do you think that Miss Beer Lao and The Single Woman explains the stereotypes of Asian women? (eg submissive / subservient, selfless)
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What role do you think masculinity has played in shaping women’s roles?
The Single Woman Key Quotes:
Pg 2 ‘Men still saw women as possessions, while women are taught to accept
whatever a husband delivers. “The man comes home one evening angry or in a bad mood, she has to take it. If he loses interest in her, she has to accept it. Whatever he wants, she has to go along with it.”
Pg 3 ‘Now that her child was nearly grown, Jiem saw her duty toward her family as nearing an end. She was now free to re-imagine herself as a modern single woman, empowered to pursue her own goals.’
Miss Beer Lao Key Quotes:
Pg 3 ‘A woman must appear ‘innocent’ in order to win the competition, and must remain so for the year that her picture adorns the calendar. If she were to marry, he said, ‘people who are son jai (interested, often indicating amorous interest) might hear,’ presumably puncturing the fantasy.’
Pg 4 ‘Miss Beer Lao, then, provides one of the few threads of unity that stretch across the otherwise diverse settings of rural and urban Laos, highland and lowland, privileged and
marginalized, ethnic Lao and otherwise, home and abroad. Miss Beer Lao sits in these diverse settings as an image of the fantasy of national unity.’
Comments
Amelie,
You’ve astutely picked up on the multiple conflicting images of women that are imagined and circulated, a theme that runs through the Brenner piece as well. I would agree that sexualisation of women cannot be reduced to globalisation and economic transformation and take your point that these processes cannot be extricated from a longue durée of colonial violence. Perhaps this point, too, can be linked to your question around stereotypes, as I found myself pondering the ways in which generalisable and yet uncomfortably specific ideas and expectations of women gain potency over time and across space. Here I am specifically thinking of the harrowing and violent outcomes from the hypersexualisation of Asian women that dominated headlines for some time this summer.
Amelie,
You’ve done a nice job drawing out the compartive points that emerge from the two short pieces. I’d like to call attention to the way your comments themselves represent a kind of nascent anthropological theorizing. On the one hand, you can consider the two “figures” discussed in the two pieces (Single woman and Miss Beer Lao) as “individuals” but as you very quickly start to insist, they are also more than individuals in the sense that they come to evoke processes and idea systems that extend well beyond them as individuals. They need to be understood in terms of themselves and also in terms of all the representations associated with them, and all the contextual and ideological meanings that surround them. Furthermore, they immediately inspire comparison–there is a structural equivalent to Miss Beer Lao in ads for Singapore Airlines, for Tiger Beer, for x for y and for z. Why? How has this kind of figure come to stand in for something else but also do so in similar (but also slightly different ways) in countries across the region and across the world? Why the moral panic of single-hood? How does that say something about culturally specific or culturally universal gender ideologies? Is it something “Asian” or something “Southeast Asian” or something “gendered” but not ethnically or nationally inflected? Engaging with all of these kinds of questions requires both empirical observation (what is happeing in the world?) and also theorizing and interpreting (how do we make sense of what we see happening in the world?). In a sense, this is exactly what your engagement with these two texts is starting to do, and it’s at least part of what anthropologists try to do.