“I was born feminist,” insisted Daw Pyo Let Han, 35, sitting in her small office on the second floor of a narrow building in downtown Yangon. “I always questioned traditional norms, like that women’s longyis are dirty. Most people think women are equal to men in our country, but I never thought that was true because in the religion and the culture women are always subordinate to men.”
Last year, Daw Pyo Let Han launched Myanmar’s first feminist magazine, Rainfall, with three other women activists. She is also the author of three novels about women’s experiences in Myanmar.
“I like to break out of the traditions and the cultural and social norms. I make women think about their social status as second class citizens,” she said, describing her novels as “shock therapy”. “I think I wrote the first book in Myanmar about the love between two women,” she said.
Daw Pyo Let Han is part of burgeoning feminist movement in Myanmar, an organic strand of women’s activism that is thriving outside party politics. The movement is creative and thoroughly modern, clever, adaptive and diverse, and explicitly intersectional. Slowly but surely it is gaining traction and helping to change the restrictive gender norms that have a quiet grip on Myanmar’s women, and are all the more insidious for their subtlety. (Courtesy of Frontier Myanmar)
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