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Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Chie Ikeya, Associate Professor of History, Director of the Institute for Research on Women, and Co-Director of Global Asias at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, who will discuss the marriage laws in Southeast Asia.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. It is co-sponsored by the Department of History. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

First debated in the legislature in 1927 when Burma, also known as Myanmar, was a province of British India, the Buddhist Women’s Special Marriage and Succession Act (1954) has been praised as the first and only law in existence to protect the rights specific to Buddhist women. In 2015, the Act was revised as one of four controversial laws euphemistically known as “National Race and Religion Protection Laws.” I trace the history and afterlife of this legislation and compare it to British, Dutch, and Japanese colonial laws on mixed marriage; the anti-miscegenation laws of the U.S.; national marriage laws throughout Asia; and the anti-conversion laws in India that have been enacted in the name of religious freedom. Across these disparate contexts, I argue, marriage laws have functioned to alienate Asian migrants and settlers as perpetual, unassimilable foreigners. They have served to protect the “purity” of the ruling/majority group by empowering state and social control of women’s sexual, reproductive, and property rights in the name of protecting women. I suggest that a transregional analysis of the legal regulation of intermarriage and conversion illuminates connections in the historical articulations of law, race, religion, and gender that have enforced inequalities across imperial and national divides. It brings into sharp focus the segregationist and patriarchal tendencies of nations and regions, such as Burma and Southeast Asia, long identified with racial and religious pluralism and female autonomy, thereby unsettling the segregation of area studies itself.

About the Speaker

Chie Ikeya is Associate Professor of History, Director of the Institute for Research on Women, and Co-Director of the Global Asias Initiative at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of two monographs, InterAsian Intimacies across Race, Religion, and Colonialism (Cornell University Press, September 2024) and Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (University of Hawai’i Press, 2011). Her research has been funded by several institutions including the Japan Foundation, Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Toyota Foundation.

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