Yingluck Shinawatra’s victory at the Thai elections has generated reactions from local feminists. Contrary to many Thai women, they are reluctant to consider it a successful step on the way to equality.
"How can we be proud? Everyone knows it’s down to Thaksin”, declared Sutada Mekrungruengkul, director of the Gender and Development Research Institute of Thailand, to the AFP news agency.
Indeed, Yingluck’s success is largely due to her being the younger sister of Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister overthrown after a military coup in 2006, and as adored by the poor as he was hated by the elite.
Yingluck’s success has, however, gone beyond all expectations, which is a sign that she managed to convince not only her brother’s followers but also many undecided voters. Without counting that, if she won because of being Thaksin’s sister, she could easily have lost for the very same reason. Yingluck may go from little sis to the Big Sister.
But Sutada’s declaration, shared by all the political adversaries of Thaksin’s Pheu Thai party, doesn’t stop there. It falls into the ridiculous with a comparison to Aung San Suu Kyi, who, they say, «has fought for twenty years and is still not prime minister of Myanmar». That can’t be said to be Yingluck’s fault. It shows that, despite many limits, there is democracy in Thailand, unlike in Burma. The comparison also ignores the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi succeeded in becoming leader of the opposition because she was the daughter of general Aung San, the founder of independent Burma. Another powerful female Asian politician, Indira Gandhi, owed her success to her family. Not Gandhi’s (her husband, no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), but her father Nehru’s, the Indian Prime Minister between 1947 and 1964.
The problem may lie less with gender and more with dynasties, which in Asia often result in a chiefly female line.
Using Yingluck for the umpteenth feminist controversy could also be seen as a symptom of hysteria. Not because hysteria is to be considered as a solely female condition (the term derives from the Greek hystera meaning womb). But because, as many psychologists maintain, it is the manifestation of a crisis that a person expresses in a coded representation that he/she knows.
Yingluck’s victory could positively be interpreted as the recognition of female qualities, such as moderation and reconciliation, on which she based her election campaign.
But in the coded representations of extreme feminism, that could not happen. So there must be another reason.
You have to wonder: would the feminists have been quite so critical if she had been ugly? But then, male honesty demands: would she have won in that case?
What is important for Thailand right now is that Yingluck really manages to unite all the different factions. Under the same sky.