Buddha's mother and the billboard queens: Moral power in contemporary burma

Anthropologists have documented many examples of the increased regulation of women's bodies when the body politic is threatened. The desire to manage the subversive power of women while at the same time needing to shore up the state's or group's external defenses is a dilemma that has been faced by male leadership for millennia. In British colonial Burma and today in a nation recolonized by its own military, there is a certain kind of regulation and control of women's bodies mandated by the state in an attempt to satisfy this perennial quandary for male dictators. This chapter explores the juxtaposition of the body of the Burmese woman and the body of the state in the shadow of one woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In Burmese cities we are newly besieged with images of orthodox women, but her image is too heretical, too hagiographic, to be seen, and so in living rooms throughout the country, her father's picture is proudly displayed.He, General Aung San, is the signifier of the political potential of wives and daughters of presidents and prime ministers in South and Southeast Asia. Her name is known but dangerous and therefore too powerful to speak aloud. She is, simply, in whispered voice, The Lady.