Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

104 SESSION II
women are unable to focus on any thing other than
their own economic precariousness so that gender-based
inequities become less of a concern. Yet while many
married women who do paid work in the modern sector
are not able or are not willing to assert sexual options,
the IRRRAG studies also show that there are a number
of women who expressed markedly different opinions
or engaged in different behavior. One might call these
expressions and behavior emerging “voices”, resistances,
or counter-hegemonic discourse. These resistances find
support in an active, multi-class women’s movement.
The situation in Malaysia is one which involves an
expanding middle class, a resurgent Islam, and
state-promoted reactions to westernization. Although
“Islamization” (Othman, 1994; Stivens, 1996; Ong, 1995)
and a state apparatus dominated by a ruling party are
engaged in competing discourses on Islam and
modernity, they are one with individual men in
appropriating women’s bodies for their personal or
political projects.9 The political project is a rejection
of “Western values” and what is endangered is female
chastity.
In Malaysia and the Philippines, a western-oriented
media and a consumerist culture are increasingly
making virginity, a prescription closely related to religion,
irrelevant. Globalization has seen the influence of
religion as diminishing or on the wane in a conservatively
Catholic Philippines and revivalist Islam in Malaysia.
Religious influence is no longer taken for granted and
one can see a threatened influence in the Philippines
in the increasing incursions of the Catholic Church in
state affairs. In Malaysia, the fast paced flux and mobility
of economic changes has been seen as threatening,
engendering attempts at Islamization which has
encountered, in turn, calls for the secularization of the
state or a rights-based rereading of Islamic texts. The
control of sexuality, particularly female sexuality,
features prominently in most of these religious anxieties.
Religious, state and parental surveillance are coming
up against a powerful and increasingly intrusive global
material culture that has had its strongest impact on
the youth and young adults. Certainly the availability,
accessibility and use of erotica and pornography in
whatever form these can be consumed in the cities and
the countryside of Malaysia and the Philippines are an
indication of how the sexual figures prominently in
the everyday lives of the youth. In Malaysia religious
forces backed up by state support, as in the presence
of a “morality police”, are deemed necessary to enforce
the separation of the sexes crucial in Islamic definitions
of sexual behavior among Muslims.
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
At the same time many Malay Muslim middle class
women espouse the preservation of female chastity and
the male’s proprietary right to female bodies when they
talk about the housewife as the proper role of women.
In so doing these women close ranks with their men,
the state and religion in the name of an Islamic “national
identity” to stave off what is perceived as the “undesirable”
onslaught of neo-colonial “Westernization” and its
accompanying notions of liberalism. But this has as
much to do with reproducing a class and maintaining
middle class respectability as it is with buying into statesponsored
definitions of women’s role. The defense by
mainly middle class women of the notion of woman’splace-is-in-the-home
and thus for preserving female
chastity resonates in calls for the preservation of a national
identity yet much of the prosperity enjoyed by these
women was achieved on the backs of much maligned
“sexually promiscuous”—Malay Muslim working class
women employed in high technology factory work in
free trade zones. (Ong, 1987) But in Malaysia as well,
there are middle class women across all ethnicities, who
despite a politically restrictive environment, are waging
a resistance against the religio-state complicity in
defining and limiting their social, economic, political
and sexual rights.
Second, the link between procreation and material
resources and thus of population to economic growth
means that sexual and reproductive behavior become
the focus of states. On the one hand, Philippine regimes
have linked fertility control as a way out of increasing
impoverishment of the majority population but have
either encouraged or discouraged dissemination
of artificial fertility control devices depending on the
power of religious forces to influence public policy or
political practice. 10 The pluralistic tendencies of
globalization have provoked the Catholic Church to
intensify its intrusion in the political arena to achieve
by imposition what it cannot achieve by persuasion.
This clash of religion and the sexual is no more evident
than in the issue of contraception where most
of the population believe that it is important to have
the ability to control fertility. 11 When artificial fertility
control devices are banned or not made available,
sexual relations between women and men, especially of
the poor and working classes, are affected. It is these
women and men who are faced with conflicts between
children as proof of male potency and the limits of
household resources. Furthermore, population pressure
on limited economic resources has meant that poverty
makes women more vulnerable to unwanted sex and
unwanted pregnancy when men who own or control
no property appropriate in the only sphere available to
them, the sexual. (Pagaduan, 1988)