Decolonising the Stories of Women Political Leaders in Asia and the Pacific

Abstract

First, we outline our approach to researching women’s lived experience of political leadership. We describe the research projects on which we have worked and the process by which we collectively reflected on this experience for this chapter—that is, our autoethnography. We present our reflections on whom we were able to research, how we undertook our research, what we researched, who we are in the research relationship and why we do this research. We find that women political leaders, and particularly the most senior women leaders in our countries, are hard to access for both institutional and personal reasons. They can be suspicious of researchers—and potentially more suspicious of local researchers—when they feel they will be judged harshly or placed in particularly vulnerable situations. We consider that where we can find physically and emotionally safe spaces in which to interview women politicians, we can deftly navigate the cultural cues that non-local researchers might not pick up on. We can see the ‘masks’ that women wear in their political settings—masks that aim to deflect from the constant sense of being observed. We also noticed that we could elicit new stories from women political leaders, sometimes divulged in the culturally appropriate silences that we maintained—stories of discomfort that tell us different answers to those of the usual questions asked of these women, and which have not yet filled the pages of history. We are not passive in these storytelling processes; we are conscious of our own positions of power in relation to these women and our responsibility, within our own communities, to keep the momentum towards gender equality alive.