future, therefore, the construction of women’s
identity through their domesticity will continue
throughout the Muslim Caucasus, even across
most of oil-rich Azerbaijan.
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137–161.
Farideh HeyatEast Asia, Southeast Asia,
and AustraliaThe grand gender narrative that has dominated
East and Southeast Asia over the last five hundred
years is the definition of woman as wife and mother
(“bearer of sons” is the East Asian variation). This
metanarrative remained uncontested until the late
twentieth century when the rise of second wave
feminism and women’s activism raised alternative
definitions of woman as worker and citizen. The
corollary of this limited construction of the femi-
nine as wife and mother (and this applies to women
in both Muslim and non-Muslim societies in the
region) is women’s conflation with domesticity.
Hence, both Muslim and non-Muslim women in
East and Southeast Asia were similarly defined by
cultures which delineated men as heads of house-
holds and women as mothers responsible for child-
rearing and for domestic duties – the caring of the
home. Although some official discourses may pro-
nounce women “queens of the households,” in
actual practice men still had authority over house-
hold decisions. There is a wide gap between official
discourses of the ideal woman embedded in domes-
tic bliss, or the ideal woman as housewife, and real-
ity, since many peasant and lower-class women
have been workers (and in Southeast Asia have
dominated the marketplace) throughout the cen-
east asia, southeast asia, and australia 131turies. The other interesting irony is that although
second wave feminism has officially raised alter-
native narratives for women, the rise of Islamic
revivalism in the 1970s (coinciding with second
wave feminism) reinforced the traditional gender
narrative and raised women’s domesticity as an
ideal. In Malaysia for example, “‘upwardly mobile’
women were keen to demonstrate their ‘Muslim-
ness’ and modernity by their identification with
domesticity, motherhood and the consumption of
religious and material paraphernalia which marked
the Muslim home” (Healey 1994, 109). The “fem-
inine” woman is “domestic” (Healey 1994, 109).
This cultural deification of the woman as domestic
is also endorsed by state ideologies of women,
particularly in Malaysia, Indonesia (during the
Suharto years), and Singapore.
The woman as housewife confined to the domes-
tic sphere is also an elite or middle-class ideal since
in reality many women have to work in order to
make ends meet. Those who can afford it hire
domestic helpers. These helpers are mostly women
as well, thus reinforcing the view that women are
best suited to domestic tasks. Consequently, the
study of domesticity, Islam, and women in the
Southeast Asian context is more about construc-
tions of the feminine than it is about the realities of
women’s daily lives. Nevertheless domesticity is a
very powerful ideology endorsed by culture, Islam,
and the state even in the midst of the desire to
become “modern” (Stivens 1998, 60).
State ideologies promoted women’s domesticity.
In the last 30 years of the twentieth century state
ideologies and Islamic revivalism both emphasized
women’s domesticity. According to Evelyn Black-
wood: “In Indonesia, in addition to state efforts to
identify women with the domestic domain, main-
stream Islamic discourse on womanhood portrays
women as wives and mothers above all else” (1995,
126). In Indonesia during the New Order (1965–
98) the state enshrined the notion that men are heads
of households and families and women’s roles are
as housewives and mothers. Feminist scholars have
labeled this ideology State Ibuism (ibumeans
mother), interpreting the state’s definition of ibu as
limited to its biological meaning: “State Ibuism
defines women as appendages and companions to
their husbands, as procreators of the nation, as
mothers and educators of children, as housekeep-
ers, and as members of Indonesian society – in that
order” (Suryakusuma 1996, 101). These views were
codified in programs that promotedthe importance
of motherhood and the belief that women were pri-
marily responsible for their children and their fam-
ily’s health, care, and education (Blackwood 2000,