 | Romancing Human Rights: Gender, Intimacy, and Power between Burma and the West Subjects: Women Burmese -- Public opinion; Public opinion -- English-speaking countries; Women in literature; Burmese literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Ma Ma Le” 1917–1982. Muin‘ r* ma hū; Law-Yone Wendy -- Criticism and interpretation; Aung; When the world thinks of Burma, it is often in relation to Nobel laureate and icon Aung San Suu Kyi. But beyond her is another world, one that complicates the overdetermination of Burma as a pariah state and myths about the "high status" of Southeast Asian women. Highlighting and critiquing this fraught terrain, Tamara C. Ho's Romancing Human Rights maps "Burmese women" as real and imagined figures across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. More than a recitation of "on the ground" facts, Ho's groundbreaking scholarship--the first monograph to examine Anglophone literature and dynamics of gender and race in relation to Burma--brings a critical lens to contemporary literature, film, and politics through the use of an innovative feminist/queer methodology. She crosses intellectual boundaries to illustrate how literary and gender analysis can contribute to discourses surrounding and informing human rights--and in the process offers a new voice in the debates about representation, racialization, migration, and spirituality. Tamara C. Ho is associate professor of women's studies at the University of California, Riverside. She earned her PhD in comparative literature from UCLA. Her areas of specialization include transnational feminist politics, Asian/American and Chicana/o studies, Anglophone postcolonial literature, Southeast Asia and its diaspora, science fiction, women's human rights, and religion. |
