Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Perspectives

Based on long-term ethnographic research, the book chapters explore the intersection of gender and modernity as they are mediated in the lives and subjectivities of diverse individuals and groups. How are the messages of modernity/tradition gendered? How are the material practices and cultural meanings of modernity shaped by local ideas of gender and progress? Together these chapters demonstrate that the ideas of progress, rationality, order, and development encompassed by modernity are profoundly gendered, whether conveyed by mass media images of consumption, agendas of nation-building, or legal discourse. Furthermore, the mutual inflections of gender and modernity are at once pervasively global, occurring in different locales and ways; and deeply local, shaping and shaped by the structures and experiences of culture, class, ethnicity, and nation.