Engendering Asia's Economic Miracles:  Rethinking Gender, Labor, and
Globalization Spring 2006

Course Description:

This course explores how gender has figured in the economic Amiracles@
of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong in the 20th and
21st centuries.  Focusing on the linked nexus of factory work, sex
work, and service work, it examines the relationship between wage
labor participation and gender roles by asking how cultural ideologies
regarding gender and family have shaped the meaning of non-domestic
labor for different generations of East Asian women and men.  How do
work and gender identities influence and potentially reconfigure one
another?  What is the relationship among work, family, education, and
social status in different Asian contexts and across time?  How have
the various political-economic systems in the region (socialist,
capitalist, colonial) shaped the gendering of work and bodily
capacities?  The course will integrate theoretical readings on gender,
labor, class, and globalization with historical and contemporary case
studies from the region.