Myanmar’s anti-coup protesters defy rigid gender roles – and subvert stereotypes about women to their advantage
One of the first signs of the military coup that overthrew Myanmar’s democratically elected civilian government was a Facebook Live video of regional lawmaker Pa Pa Han being arrested, which was posted by her husband.
Soldiers stormed Pa Pa Han’s home around 3 a.m. on Feb. 1, 2021. While her young daughter wailed and her husband pleaded to see an arrest warrant, Pa Pa Han stalwartly grabbed her handbag and a coat and left with the soldiers.
Other parliamentarians were simultaneously being roused from bed and arrested across Myanmar by soldiers who claimed election fraud had occurred in the November elections. By daybreak, Myanmar was under military rule.
Ever since, thousands of people in Myanmar – most of them young, many of them women – have been protesting the coup daily and demanding the restoration of democracy. More than 770 civilians had been killed and over 3,738 detained as of May 6, according to the nonprofit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
Myanmar, formerly called Burma, is a conservative country with rigid gender roles. A 2015 survey rated it Southeast Asia’s most traditional society when it comes to family structure, deference to elders, respect for authority figures and conflict avoidance.
Yet Myanmar’s Generation Z activists, born between 1997 to 2012, are defying many of these social norms with their protests – and busting gender stereotypes while they’re at it.
A very traditional society
One act of creative resistance on March 8 involved hanging women’s sarongs on clotheslines above streets across Yangon. The young protesters suspected that many soldiers would avoid going underneath the clotheslines for fear that doing so would diminish their “hpon” – a kind of mojo that belongs to only men.
They guessed right: Soldiers sent to arrest the protesters climbed atop their army trucks to clear the clotheslines before passing underneath, giving protesters extra time to avoid arrest.
