Jennaway, Megan 1958-

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Jennaway, Megan 1958-

PERSONAL:

Born February 5, 1958. Education: University of Sydney, B.A., 1984; University of Queensland, Ph.D., 1996.

ADDRESSES:

Office—School of Population Health, University of Queensland, Level 2, Public Health Bldg., Herston Rd., Herston, Queensland 4006, Australia. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

University of Queensland Medical School, Australian Centre for International and Tropical Health and Nutrition, casual lecturer, 1996-97; University of Queensland, St. Lucia, School of Asian Languages and Studies, associate lecturer, 1998-2000, School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies, honorary research advisor, 2001-04, School of Population Health, Indigenous Health Program, lecturer, 2002; Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Creative Industries Research and Allocations Center, postdoctoral re-entry fellow, 2003-05, research fellow, 2005; University of Queensland, Herston, School of Population Health, lecturer, 2006—. Has worked with community development programs, including Information and Communication Technologies for Poverty Reduction, and the Finding a Voice/Program for e-Prosperity for the Poor.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Recipient of writing fellowships and grants, including two Arts Queensland Major Grants, 2000, 2002; and a postdoctoral fellowship in creative writing from Queensland University of Technology, 2002. Winner of Canberra Times National Short Story Competition, Schools Division, 1974, for "Summerhill War Veteran's Home."

WRITINGS:

Sisters and Lovers: Women and Desire in Bali (nonfiction), Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2002.

Contributor to books, including Maternity and Reproductive Health in Asian Societies, edited by Pranee Liamputtong Rice and Lenore Manderson, Harwood Academic (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia), 1996; Women and Households in Indonesia: Cultural Notions and Social Practices, edited by Juliet Koning, Marlene Nolten, Janet Rodenbert, and Ratna Saptari, Curzon (Richmond, England), 2000; and Coming of Age in South and Southeast Asia: Youth, Courtship, and Sexuality, edited by Lenore Manderson and Pranee Liamputtong, Curzon (Richmond, England), 2002.

Short stories have been published in journals and anthologies, including Silverfish New Writing, I Won't Be Long, Social Alternatives, Imago: New Writing, Redoubt, Social Alternatives, and Australian Multicultural Book Review.

Contributor to journals, including Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Oceania, Australian Journal of Anthropology, Anthropological Forum, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, Asian Studies Review, Journal of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Inside Indonesia, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and Culture, Health and Sexuality. Also contributor to Dotlit, the Online Journal of Creative Writing.

SIDELIGHTS:

Medical anthropologist Megan Jennaway has done extensive research on physical and emotional health issues, especially as they affect women, in South and Southeast Asia. She is a lecturer at the University of Queensland School of Population Health in Australia, where she has taught courses on the health of indigenous people, Asian studies, and Indonesian language. She also has worked with antipoverty programs in South Asia and Indonesia. Much of her writing deals with the society, culture, and health-care systems of Indonesia, and her work on the Indonesian island of Bali forms the basis of her book Sisters and Lovers: Women and Desire in Bali.

The book explores the romantic and sexual lives of Balinese women, with a focus on a small village in northern Bali and a neighboring resort town. During Jennaway's fieldwork in this part of Bali in the 1990s, she found the women to be oppressed in numerous ways. It was considered normal and natural for men to engage in sexual activity outside marriage, but women had to have a reputation for chastity, yet be sexually appealing, if they hoped to find a husband. Some men worked as paid sexual partners for women tourists, but Balinese women did not have such relationships with male visitors. She also notes that women generally worked in the home or in low-paying jobs, and despite the importance of their work to their communities, they had no economic or political power. She writes that some women in Bali expressed their frustrated sexuality through hysterical illness, and many used some degree of secrecy to cope with life in their repressive society. Mingled with her factual accounts are fictionalized passages about three sisters in the village, with an omniscient narrator providing a window into the women's inner lives. These passages are set in italic type to distinguish them from the rest of the text.

Several reviewers described Sisters and Lovers as valuable and insightful, although some saw weaknesses in a few aspects of the work. "Jennaway succeeds in portraying many of the diverse tensions and challenges faced by Balinese women," related Laura Noszlopy in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Sharyn Graham, writing in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, remarked that while Jennaway depicts "the patriarchal tyranny some women in Bali live under," she also demonstrates that these women are not simply passive victims. Through her fictionalized scenes, Jennaway allows women to "disentangle and articulate the complex emotions and desires they engage with as they journey through life," Graham explained. Graham acknowledged that such fictionalized narratives can be open to questions about their basis in fact, but she thought this approach "worked exceptionally well" in Jennaway's book. Noszlopy also deemed Jennaway's use of this device effective, saying it "enables her to portray the subjective perspectives of these three women in lively detail that might not be possible using more traditional styles of ethnographic writing."

Noszlopy saw a problem in the book in that much has changed for Balinese women since Jennaway did her research. Noszlopy said women have gained freedom to leave rural areas to pursue schooling and careers in cities, and to express themselves sexually. She added, however, that anthropologists often do not have the opportunity to publish their research before it becomes dated. A contributor to the American Ethnological Society's Web site had another criticism of Jennaway's work, saying she "does not connect her research with more recent scholarship on emotions and desire." The reviewer added: "Her assertion that this is an undeveloped area in anthropology is myopic." Still, this reviewer pronounced Sisters and Lovers "useful for scholars of North Bali," and observed that it "shines the most" when Jennaway uses direct quotes from her subjects. "We see their romantic worlds as imaginatively rich but frustrated by various social constraints," the commentator noted. Noszlopy, despite finding some of the material out of date, summed up the book as "beautifully written, thoroughly researched," and "very valuable." Graham concluded that Sisters and Lovers is "wonderfully written" and will be helpful to "anyone interested in Bali, desire and women."