Global Perspectives to Reimagine Feminist Politics: Asian and Pacific Frames for Transforming Research and Action

The scholarship seeking to understand the lack of gender diversity in political institutions is vast. We have at our disposal a toolbox of concepts, theories, methodologies and interpretive frames to examine the gendered nature of political institutions and the mechanisms that sustain male domination. Yet despite this relative bounty, we remained caged in by the dominance of particular geographical and disciplinary frames. Theories, concepts and analytical tools are overwhelmingly developed from studies in Euro-America and applied to other regions. Rarely is ‘the rest of the world’ seen as a site of theory development that can illuminate the political institutions of the North Atlantic rather than a place for data extraction. Our imaginative resources are further constrained from citational practices that centre political science in studies of gender and politics. Insights from anthropology, history, cultural studies, development studies may touch on the margins, yet their capacity to advance the literature is dulled by their being corralled in disciplinary or area studies journals. This paper aims to rethink conventional questions and frames of analysis in the gender and politics literature by centring studies from Oceania and Asia. It reports key insights from an interdisciplinary workshop held at the Australian National University in July 2022, and which subsequently has been developed into an edited volume. We show how centring Oceania and Asia points to the importance of ethnicity, clan and religion for women’s political representation that are relatively underexplored in the literature, as well as the need to account for political cultures such brokerage, patronage and wantokism (giving preference to kin) that are common across the two regions. We identify common processes and structures that sustain male political dominance, such as the vernacularisation of democracy, the production of politics as a masculine space, and linguistic bias. In centring Oceania and Asia and challenging disciplinary parochialism, we aim to disrupt the chimera of certainty and clarity as to what is known with the ultimate goal of helping to practically address a lack of diversity in political leadership.