Martyrs, Men, and Masculinity: Institutional and Ritual Reproductions of Male Authority in the Nine Emperor Gods Festival of Postcolonial Southeast Asia

The Nine Emperor Gods Festival is a nine-day religious observance celebrated by overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia during the ninth lunar month. While the festival is conventionally observed within a “Taoist liturgical structure” (Dean 1993) and occasionally a Buddhist one, its signature rituals and overall structure do not fully align with either tradition, instead drawing from local religious practices unique to Nine Emperor Gods temples in Southeast Asia. Devotees observe vegetarianism, wear white, and raise nine lamps as key rituals. The deities are received from a water body in the form of an incense censer, which remains covered and enshrined in a restricted altar space—the Inner Palace or Dou Mu’s Palace 斗母宫—accessible only to male ritual specialists. The festival concludes with the departure of the deities via the same water body and the lowering of the lamps (Koh et al. 2023).

Despite the festival’s male dominance, scholarship has overlooked the mechanisms that sustain male control over the institution. This study argues that this dominance is not incidental but actively maintained through systematic reinforcement. The festival’s history, deeply embedded in sworn brotherhood networks, persisted even after their suppression, demonstrating the long-term entrenchment of gendered power. From the 1930s, as more women migrated and the male-dominated demographic balance shifted, gender divisions eased and stable family structures emerged—yet female ritual specialists remained sidelined, reflecting enduring historical exclusions from religious authority (Lee 1989; Show 2020). 

This study, whose case studies span across Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, serves two purposes. First, it emphasizes historical inertia, showing how male religious authority in the Nine Emperor Gods Festival remains entrenched despite broader social changes. While examinations of wen-wu complementarity have provided an important framework for theorising masculinity in Chinese life, it does not fully account for how historical structures of exclusion operate in lived religious contexts (Edwards and Louie 1994). Rather than balancing literary and martial masculinities, male dominance in the festival is reinforced through institutional control, spatial restrictions, and the systematic marginalization of women’s roles. 

Secondly, this study introduces the concept of the “peripheralizing impulse,” which confines women’s participation to peripheral spaces across cultic, institutional, and individual domains, ensuring that gendered power structures persist despite social change (cf. Chau 2014). This approach explores how social strategies and spatial configurations of religious authority actively exclude women from core ritual spaces. Even after the decline of sworn brotherhoods, their homosocial imprint persists in the festival’s leadership and ritual frameworks. Although male-female ratios equalized after the Second World War, the festival’s leadership have remained overwhelmingly male, demonstrating how historical systems of exclusion adapt rather than disappear.

In East Asia, during the Yuan and Qing dynasties, Dou Mu was venerated as the Nine Emperors mother (Koh et al. 2023). Her prominence, however, declined in Southeast Asia, where religious authority became structured around male fraternal networks. Abroad, the festival developed within the framework of sworn brotherhoods and ritualized masculinity. Such brotherhoods created—and melded together—fictive kinships, martial aesthetics, and ritual power (Boretz 2010, ter Haar 1998).  Providing social and economic support for overseas Chinese migrants, they played a crucial role in shaping the festival’s early history, mythology, and ritual practices. 

The festival’s expansion in Penang and Phuket was closely tied to these organizations, whose leaders controlled labor and commercial networks. Ritual elements—including the reception of the deities from water and the wearing of mourning attire—mirrored initiation myths, where martyrdom and Ming restorationist narratives conferred spiritual legitimacy (Wang 2008). Even after their suppression, the gendered logics of these associations remained embedded in the festival’s ritual structures.

From the late nineteenth century, the festival spread across Southeast Asia through migration and religious networks. Although colonial authorities suppressed such organizations, the festival survived, gradually detaching from its sworn brotherhood origins. Yet, while its political and economic ties to these organizations faded, its gendered structure remained. The festival’s historical ties to sworn brotherhoods might suggest an alignment with wu masculinity in Kam Louie’s framework, but this does not fully explain how religious authority is claimed and maintained today. Male dominance endures not through martial ideals but through control over ritual space, codification, and institutional power. Instead of being informed by wen-wu, the reproduction of male authority operates through spatial configurations that enforce a masculine center and a feminine periphery.

This peripheralizing impulse ensures that female roles remain secondary, restricted, or entirely absent, reinforcing a gendered structure of authority. At the cultic level, women were excluded from key ritual spaces. Nearly all temples restrict women from the Inner Palace, where only designated male ritualists perform key ceremonies. Even when women financially support or lead temples, their involvement is rarely central. The Malacca Jiu Huang Gong, the only Nine Emperor Gods temple run entirely by women, reinforces its status as an exception.

At the institutional level, women who historically founded temples have been systematically replaced by male successors. For example, at the Klang Dou Mu Gong, a female religious specialist was commemorated but not succeeded by another woman. Women’s Groups, often presented as progressive developments, function instead as institutionalized mechanisms to contain female participation rather than integrating them into leadership structures.

At the individual level, the peripheralizing impulse operates through purity discourses and lineage-based inheritance. Women are generally excluded under notions of ritual pollution, but exceptions exist for those who have passed menopause or inherited religious authority from male predecessors. The cases of female temple leaders who assumed their roles through patrilineal succession illustrate that female religious authority within the festival remains contingent on male lineage.