Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction: stitching together gender, textile and garment labor, and heritage in Asia
- Part I Fashioning identity: textiles, garments, and belonging
- 1 Wearing a gendered tree: a new style of garments from early modern to twentieth-century China
- 2 Women for cotton and men for wool: consuming gendered textiles in colonized Korea
- 3 Gendered blue: women’s jeans in postwar Taiwan
- 4 Bhutanese women and the performance of globalization
- 5 Weaving and dyeing the ideal of reproduction among Shidong Miao in Guizhou province
- Part II Gendering creative agency: women fashion designers, textile makers, and entrepreneurs
- 6 Soft power: Guo Pei and the fashioning of matriarchy
- 7 Investigating female entrepreneurship in silk weaving in contemporary Cambodia
- 8 (Re)crafting distribution networks for contemporary Philippine textiles: women’s advocacy and social enterprise
- 9 Women weaving silken identities and revitalizing various Japanese textile traditions
- Part III Creative voices for change: textiles, gender, and artivism
- 10 Entangled histories of craft and conflict: the story of phulkari textiles in The Singh Twins’s Slaves of Fashion
- 11 The politics of wastefulness and ‘the poetics of waste’:1 Ruby Chishti’s sartorial interventions
- 12 Made in Rana Plaza: Dilara Begum Jolly’s garment factory-themed art
- Index
4 - Bhutanese women and the performance of globalization
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 January 2026
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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction: stitching together gender, textile and garment labor, and heritage in Asia
- Part I Fashioning identity: textiles, garments, and belonging
- 1 Wearing a gendered tree: a new style of garments from early modern to twentieth-century China
- 2 Women for cotton and men for wool: consuming gendered textiles in colonized Korea
- 3 Gendered blue: women’s jeans in postwar Taiwan
- 4 Bhutanese women and the performance of globalization
- 5 Weaving and dyeing the ideal of reproduction among Shidong Miao in Guizhou province
- Part II Gendering creative agency: women fashion designers, textile makers, and entrepreneurs
- 6 Soft power: Guo Pei and the fashioning of matriarchy
- 7 Investigating female entrepreneurship in silk weaving in contemporary Cambodia
- 8 (Re)crafting distribution networks for contemporary Philippine textiles: women’s advocacy and social enterprise
- 9 Women weaving silken identities and revitalizing various Japanese textile traditions
- Part III Creative voices for change: textiles, gender, and artivism
- 10 Entangled histories of craft and conflict: the story of phulkari textiles in The Singh Twins’s Slaves of Fashion
- 11 The politics of wastefulness and ‘the poetics of waste’:1 Ruby Chishti’s sartorial interventions
- 12 Made in Rana Plaza: Dilara Begum Jolly’s garment factory-themed art
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores female identity in dress in Bhutan and how this has been shaped in the twenty-first century by the competing and complementary forces of the Royal Government, contact with international development agencies, and the growth of digital technology in the kingdom. The impact of national policies such as driglam namzha, a sumptuary dress code, and Gross National Happiness on women’s dress is discussed and explored alongside discussion and analysis of Her Majesty The Gyaltsuen Jetsun Pema Wangchuck and how her royal sartorial identity is crafted and presented both within Bhutan and globally. Critical analysis of how this sits alongside the everyday dress and stories of ordinary Bhutanese women is placed within a broader discussion of how the creation, consumption, appropriation, and display of heritage textiles and garments has evolved in Bhutan and how this contributes to debates surrounding the politics of dress and globalization.
Information
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- Chapter
- Information
- Threads of globalizationFashion, textiles, and gender in Asia in the long twentieth century, pp. 92 - 112Publisher: Manchester University PressFirst published in: 2026
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