Romancing Human Rightsfocuses on the representation of real and imagined Burmese women as authors, cultural mediators, and transnational practitioner-citizens—figures who migrate and translate across borders of culture and nation.¹ This study of representations written by and about Burmese women in the twentieth century illustrates how gender is a currency exchanged and differentially valued between varying cultural ideologies, produced in relation to other contemporaneous embodied performances. My queer/feminist analysis situates “Burma” as a nexus of overlapping transnational interests, exceeding disciplinary, regional, and geopolitical boundaries. Using Burma as a case study to triangulate Asia, the United States, and Europe, this...

This chapter surveys a range of Anglophone representations in order to highlight discursive patterns in how “Western eyes” have imagined Burma (cf. Chandra Talpade Mohanty). From George Orwell’sBurmese Days(1934) toRambo(2008), Euro-American cultural productions have repeatedly portrayed Burma as a jungle. The bulk of popular media, literature, and film produced in the United States and Europe in the twentieth century and early twenty-first century tends to represent Burma as a contemporary “heart of darkness”: an oppressive, primitive, dangerous unknown full of mysterious Oriental allure and excess. This naturalistic metaphor situates a country that was once considered a...

To begin exploring Burmese perspectives on cross-cultural encounters, this chapter focuses onNot Out of Hate,the English translation of a novel written in the early years of Burmese postcoloniality by Journal Kyaw Ma Ma Lay (1917–1982), a prominent activist-author-publisher and now canonized woman of letters.¹ Originally published asMon ywe mahuin 1955,Not Out of Hateis the first translated work of modern Burmese literature and dramatizes a crisis of cultural contact brought on by British colonization of Burma.²

Not Out of Hateoffers an alter/native view of the end of British colonialism. Rather than focusing on...

In this chapter I examine postcolonial adjudication by white women of the global North and the role that such interventions play in the circumscription of Burmese women. Analyzing two human-rights exposés, Inge Sargent’s memoir,Twilight over Burma: My Life as a Shan Princess(1994), and the filmBeyond Rangoon(1995), directed by John Boorman, this chapter problematizes the politics of white women “going native” and visually “passing as Burmese” in the late twentieth century. These narratives seek to bring attention to the tragedy and “evil anachronism” of postcolonial Burma through the intimate dyad of a white Western woman and a...

In this chapter I will examine the iconic figuration of Aung San Suu Kyi, contrapuntally juxtaposing her writing and performativity alongside how Western and Burmese sources have read and inscribed her. Although various sources attribute Aung San Suu Kyi’s appeal to an unwitting combination of birth and “destiny,”¹ here I highlight her flexible and tactical use of displacement. Building on feminist scholarship on modern Asian women, rhetoric, and discourse, my analysis examines her parentage, entry into Burmese politics, and the manner in which she negotiated antagonistic oppositions, such as male/female, military/citizenry, intellect/body, religion/politics, and Burma/West. Focusing primarily on her performativity,...

Four decades after Ma Ma Lay’sNot Out of Hate,the work of diasporic author Wendy Law-Yone takes up Burmese women’s literary exploration of displacement, intimate labor, sex, and contact zones. Law-Yone is the first author of Burmese descent to write and publish fiction in English. To date, she has published two novels in the United States and one in England, in addition to a memoir of her father, a few short stories, and a number of nonfiction articles and book reviews. Her first two novels,The Coffin Tree(1983) andIrrawaddy Tango(1993), introduced to the Anglophone literary landscape...

To see Burma simply as a bizarre, exotic land that is not shaped by and implicated in Western dynamics obscures a critical understanding of globalization, the power relations of the past, and the competing agendas of the present. In this book I have offered a contrapuntal reading of Burmese in/visibility through narratives of interracial encounters between Burmese and Western(ized) bodies. My genealogy of real and imagined Burmese women deconstructively tracks figures of Burmese femininity as marginalized effects of representation—legible only through Orientalist fantasy and certain acts of spectacular violence—and as vexed authors—gendered writers shaped by a fraught...