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Politics and Gender: Negotiating Conceptions of the Ideal Woman in Present Day Cambodia
Author(s) -
Ledgerwood Judy L.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
asia pacific viewpoint
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.571
H-Index - 38
eISSN - 1467-8373
pISSN - 1360-7456
DOI - 10.1111/apv.372003
Subject(s) - ideal (ethics) , gender studies , power (physics) , politics , sociology , negotiation , ambiguity , human sexuality , state (computer science) , order (exchange) , ethnography , face (sociological concept) , law , social science , political science , anthropology , philosophy , linguistics , physics , finance , algorithm , quantum mechanics , computer science , economics
This paper briefly describes a Khmer politician’s references to four women made during a 1993 campaign speech. It then reviews notions of the ideal woman from Khmer literature, and from life stories and ethnographic accounts. The politician manipulated gender symbolism, playing on multiple ambiguous notions of femaleness to prove his own powerful status and to comment on the current state of the Khmer social and moral order. In the face of the drastic changes of the last twenty years, he linked his own power and that of other men to their control over women’s sexuality. While he was willing to allow for, indeed participate in playing on, the ambiguity inherent in gender conceptions to create new ideal types of strong women, he simultaneously used appeals to tradition to maintain male authority over women.