Learning, Justice and Atopia in Myanmar’s Gender Activism Movements

Gender activism has a well-established history in Myanmar and the border regions : in the 1990s many ethnically aligned women’s organisations (such as the Shan Women’s Action Network or the Karen Women’s Organisation) were founded, often associated with the ethnic armed struggles for auto-determination (Hedström 2016). By focusing on the needs of ethnic women and children in conflict, and attending primarily to culturally acceptable female domains such as education and healthcare, the women’s organisations in ethnic regions were able to gradually establish a position for themselves that was less contested while they were viewed as operating in non-political spheres (Laungaramsri 2011). This then provided a platform from which to engage in more overtly politicised campaigns such as reporting on the systematic rape and abuse of ethnic women by the military (WLB 2014) or advocating for women’s inclusion in the peace negotiations (Lahtaw & Raw 2012). As Myanmar’s political and conflict landscape has shifted over the last 15 years, gender activist movements have likewise responded, with more diverse organisations emerging employing varied strategies to contest authoritarianism and the gender hierarchies implicit in militarisation.

Community education has frequently been mobilised as a way of sharing information within such movements, often reaching across Myanmar’s borders, reinforcing the position of community education as occupying an alternative space for the recognition and renegotiation of identities. This paper explores the position of education and learning in the shifting dynamics of gender activist movements within Myanmar’s multiple conflicts, offering a discussion of the historical and contemporary evolution of gender activism through Deleuzian conceptualisations of social space and nomadic subjectivities. The notion of atopia, being beyond or out of place, is offered as a way of understanding the distinctive forms of learning in these cross-border activist movements.