Intersections of Gender, Books and Power: Converging interests in narratives by/on women of East Timor

This essay discusses some political and theoretical texts on gender in Southeast Asia in general, and in East Timor in particular, with a view to examine values related to traditional female roles, as well as the strategies used to recognize women in political and social fields that are conventionally dominated by males. In the post-colonial space of East Timor, the intersections of past and present, of the global and the local, of war and peace, define the guidelines to explore the negotiation and evolution of gender concepts. Listening actively to the narratives of women from Southeast Asian transitional territories like East Timor, requires translation, equivalence, dialogueand negotiation resources, in order to find points of convergence and divergence with dominant knowledge and thus build and implement concrete and specific strategies, while exercising the hermeneutics of suspicion on the alleged universality of western thought.