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An increasing academic interest in gender relations and women's rights movements in East Asia have challenged the Eurocentric approach to social sciences and cultural studies in this region.Positioning itself against the perspective of Area Studies, the Routledge Handbook of East Asian Gender Studies presents diverse empirical engagements and theoretical debates across a range of geopolitical and disciplinary localities.Consisting of twentyfive chapters, this book is divided into seven thematic sections.This review will prioritise the overarching issues throughout the volume, along with the distinctive contribution of each chapter.Gender, as a force generating and in turn maintained by social organising in diverse forms, has its own history in East Asia and yet it has become complicated by the processes of 'modernisation' involved with global capital and postcolonial nationalist movements.Resonating with the emerging decolonial interventions in modernity/coloniality where modern gender and sexual knowledge have been identified to be problematic, in their introductory chapter Liu and Yamashita are explicit about their 'mixed feelings' towards the modernisation of East Asian societies, which should not be simply seen as a passive receiver of westernisation, particularly in terms of knowledge production and socioeconomic development.On the one hand, social and feminist researchers in or from East Asia have been encountering an epistemological problem concerning 'translating' local and regional issues to satisfy the academic hegemony of Anglo-American gender studies, and relatedly, an ethical account regarding how to liberate gendered and sexualised East Asians from an orientalist view.On the other hand, this and many other chapters highlight that the rapid economic growth and independence does not necessarily promote gender equality.These considerations are well situated in the first section on 'Theorising gender relations in East Asia', in dialogues with western and between Asian theorists.Doing so facilitates an inquiry into gender construction in these societies to go beyond the universal/particular binary.For example, Ochiai's chapter contends that referring to East Asian societies simply as 'Confucian societies' not only overlooks the varied interactions between gender and social classes and between politico-ideological structures and everyday practices, but also conflates the diverse fashions of kinship and familial system that are in place.Ochiai draws on both historical and materialist approaches to contextualising the developments of and changes in gender relations in Japan and beyond (including Southeast Asia).Ochiai shows that it is important to identify how the modes of production and the travelling of kinship ideologies (especially Confucianism) affect local arrangements of gender relations, which can be mapped out as a 'geography of Asian patriarchy' (p.16).As follows, her notion of the 'traditionalisation of modernity' (p.18) challenges the assumption based on a lineal progressivism,
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