This article revisits theorising about the relationships between concepts of gender and modernity, drawing on long-term anthropological research on Southeast Asia. From the 1990s on, now well-known feminist critiques pointed to the profound androcentrism of much theorising about modernity, the many lacunae in such work, and the ways in which masculinity has operated as a core constitutive category of the social. Most theorising about modernity, feminists argued, was gendered both by the exclusion of women and a neglect of gender in explorations of the modern. In their turn, feminists have argued strongly for the centrality of genders and sexualities in the making of modern social and cultural forms and pointed to the crucial place of gendered imaginaries within modern social orders, with women being frequently identified and deployed as bearers of nation, ‘tradition’, and ‘civilisation’. Unpacking and challenging the received categories and paradigms – not least ‘woman’ – has proved demanding, however. Problems have been intensified by prevailing Eurocentrisms, and conceptual divisions of the world into essentialised binaries like ‘modern' and ‘traditional', ‘West' and the 'Rest', and latterly Islam and the West. With increased contests around the concept of modernity – feminist and non-feminist – some writers have argued for a pluralisation of modernity, with such concepts as multiple modernities or alternative modernities, or through conceiving of a global modernity. Engaging critically with such ideas, and grounding the discussion in empirical work on Malaysia carried out in dialogue with Joel Kahn, this article looks to possible further developments in framing debates about gender and the modern, exploring the contributions that locally based, anthropological scholarship can make to theorisations of modernity and its relationship(s) with gender.

中文翻译：

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重新审视性别与现代性：与乔尔·卡恩的对话

本文借鉴了对东南亚的长期人类学研究，重新审视了关于性别概念与现代性之间关系的理论。从 1990 年代开始，现在著名的女权主义批评指出了关于现代性的许多理论的深刻的男性中心主义，这些工作中的许多空白，以及男性气质作为社会的核心构成类别的运作方式。女权主义者认为，大多数关于现代性的理论都是由于排斥女性和在探索现代时忽视性别而造成的。反过来，女权主义者强烈主张性别和性欲在现代社会和文化形式的形成中的中心地位，并指出性别想象在现代社会秩序中的关键地位，妇女经常被确定和部署为国家、“传统”和“文明”的承载者。然而，拆解和挑战已接受的类别和范式——尤其是“女性”——已被证明是苛刻的。盛行的欧洲中心主义以及将世界概念性划分为“现代”和“传统”、“西方”和“其余”以及后来的伊斯兰教和西方等本质化的二元论，加剧了问题。随着围绕现代性概念（女权主义和非女权主义）的争论日益激烈，一些作家主张现代性的多元化，例如多重现代性或替代现代性等概念，或者通过构想全球现代性。批判性地参与这些想法，并将讨论建立在与乔尔·卡恩对话中进行的关于马来西亚的实证工作中，