A difficult paper to read, the jargon was unfortunately too obtuse for me, but I could extract some interesting snippets. What this is telling me is that if the women are educated, specially having a tertiary education, then the fact that they are wearing a veil allows them to skate over the patriarchal theological requirement of veiling and actually dramatically change the male/female power dynamics of the country. The fact that there are more women than men in university, marriage age is getting delayed and delayed, assets are in the hands of the women, all while they wear the veil means that the conceptual framework around the veil, the patriarchy, the religion, and male-female relationship is undergoing a silent revolution.
Very interesting indeed and women all over the world should take not just a leaf but whole shrubs and trees from this study.
Audrey E. Mouser, Defining `Modern' Malay womanhood and the coexistent messages of the veil, Religion, Volume 37, Issue 2, Negotiating Women's Roles and Powers: The Practice of World Religions in Contemporary Asia, June 2007, Pages 164-174.
Abstract: The gender constructions and performances of Malay women are often perceived by outside researchers as `shrouded under a veil' of increasing Islamic conservatism. Urban Malay women, however, argue that women actively engage in the construction and performance of gender identities. Based on research conducted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, during 2001 and 2003, this article argues that women advantageously alter, transform and utilise the constructs placed upon them by Islam, by ethnic identification and by conceptions of `modernity'. Often one image of `womanhood' is presented and in public - an image that is socially accepted, honoured and respected - while less publicly alternative forms of `womanhood' articulate individual goals and aims. Using an agent-oriented perspective, this article further includes an analysis of women's individual renegotiations of larger cultural constructs and the ways in which the tudong, or headscarf, has become a symbol by which individual women express their understanding of social position and personal freedoms in an industrialised Islamic context.
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Some quotes:
Urban Malay women between the ages of twenty and fifty were invited to participate in the study because they were raised in the context of the revitalisation of Malay ethnic and Islamic identity. The metropolitan area of Kuala Lumpur and Klang Valley are areas dominated by middle-class populations. In order to illustrate diversity within a population and still see whether there are cultural commonalities, I identified a stratified sample of women to achieve a maximum level of population variation. To understand current attitudes towards gender and marital patterns, I used a wide variety of approaches in the fieldwork process, including participant observation, open-ended and semi-structured interviews, life histories and in-depth interviews. The interviews were conducted on specific issues such as Islam and Muslim identity, marital history and relationships with partners, the importance of children and family, satisfaction with the implementation of syariah2 family law, and concern over industrialisation.
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While middle-class women utilised the dominant ideology of the Islamic revival and governmental policy to meet certain personal and familial goals, working-class women worked on the periphery, utilising industrial development and economic gains to obtain social capital. Their wages were used to help defray the costs of raising younger siblings. This economic capital was converted into social capital as these young women acquired a more forceful role in household decision-making because of their contributions to the family income. In turn, they often delayed marriage and child-bearing, and they gained enough personal buying power to ‘flex their economic muscles’ within the domestic market. As a result, they were often accused of being ‘pleasure-seekers’, ‘un-Malay’, or ‘un-Islamic’ by a Malay population unhappy with how young Malay women were defining womanhood
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Zaleha, a twenty-four-year-old female medical student at University Malaya who wears the tudong, is concerned about her marital future. She is the eldest of four children, and her parents have recently divorced. Her father had been engaged in numerous extra-marital affairs through the course of the marriage, and remarried only after her parents had divorced. She was witness to his verbal and psychological abuse of her mother, followed by neglect of the children after the divorce. Although she is interested in marriage after her education is complete, she is cautious. She is concerned that her marital choices are limited because of her advanced education. Additionally, even if she were to find a potential spouse in her class he would also be prone to abuse her or to engage in extra-marital affairs, neither of which she is willing to accept. Zaleha is also hesitant because she has witnessed her mother's experiences with the family court system in Malaysia, and argues that there is no way for a woman to protect herself once she is married. ‘Men can do anything they want’, she says. She has decided to focus her energies on becoming a doctor, and she will consider marriage and children only later. Zaleha's story exemplifies a change in gender roles, increased education, and awareness of potential marital difficulties that embody the changing nature of ‘womanhood’.
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Malay women, such as Zaleha, have utilised the availability of government funded Malay-only scholarships for higher education for more than their male counterparts.6 In fact, the article ‘PM challenges males to balance varsity gender ratio’ in The Star, August 27, 2003, noted that nearly 70% of all college students at Malaysian universities are female. Women are becoming more educated than men and are becoming active, visible, and powerful in industry, academia, government and social activism, and therefore economically independent. As a result, women are postponing marriage and are altering the nature of relationships, of courting and of sexual activity.
This delay in marriage contradicts the prevailing pronatal position of the previous generation and of national goals. The unequal representation of male and female students in Malaysian universities and the subsequent changing nature of gender and sexual codes of conduct are of great concern to the government. Young Malay men are encouraged to attend universities so as not to let the women of the nation surpass them in education. Recently, the television and print media have focused on the ‘problem’ of so few male students on university campuses. Officials highlight the need for women to remain modest, and they challenge men to achieve higher goals than women in order to ensure that women do not become able to provide for themselves without the assistance of male partners.
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In conjunction with this trend of women's educational achievement is the importance of women's gender roles through the wearing of the tudong, a headscarf or ‘veil’ (a form of purdah) that covers a woman's hair from public view. When tudong was initially adopted as part of common dress in Malaysia, it was representative only of women actively involved in the Dakwah movement. Today, however, wearing tudong has increasingly become a social expectation for Malay women in general. Women are often blamed for sexual crimes, rapes and illicit behaviour if they fail to cover themselves sufficiently so as not to elicit the uncontrollable desires of men. They bear the onus of maintaining the social conformity of men and women, for it is the proper performance of their gender that supposedly dictates the appropriateness of men's behaviours (see Zamani, 2002, p. 345). This expectation – that if women dress modestly, men will act accordingly – was challenged when Noor Suzaily Mocktar, a twenty-four-year-old Malay computer engineer was raped, sodomised and murdered by a bus driver in Kuala Lumpur on October 7, 2000. According to the article ‘Incident also by Sabah Minibus Driver’ in the Daily Express, October 14, 2000, she was dressed in baju kurong and tudong, appropriate dress by Malay-Muslim standards, and yet was still a victim of violence. As stated by Datin Paduka Marina Mahathir on July 19, 2003, at the memorial service of a recent violence victim, ‘It doesn't matter if we took care to keep our bodies and our hair out of the view of men; it still does nothing to protect us, as Noor Suzaily … found out’ (Women's Aid Organisation, 2003). Nevertheless, social pressure, challenges to women's purity for those who did not wear the tudong, and concern for personal safety from unwanted sexual advances by men have encouraged many women to make it a part of daily attire, regardless of their level of religiosity.
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In many ways, however, wearing the tudong has become a ‘free pass’ for movement through society. By wearing the socially sanctioned ‘uniform’ of tudong and modest dress, women gain silent, unrestricted movement through society. In contrast, those women who choose not to wear the tudong are under constant public surveillance in order to ensure that they behave appropriately.
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Conclusion
Women who were raised or matured during the Dakwah movement in Malaysia are choosing and directing the expression of gender roles in the post-Dakwah era. As individuals articulate the conjoining of industrialisation, ‘modernisation’ and a cultural revitalisation movement, so educational and occupational opportunities, gender roles, and family behaviours among Malays will change. Malay women are faced with change at the level of the meta-narrative and are therefore subject to conflicting norms and pressures on various fronts. As women redefine Malay gender roles, gender performance is no longer a matter of social class or participation in the global market economy. Gender performance has instead become a combination of both public images of virtue and dutiful religiosity, and the pursuit of economic, social and personal independence.
The tudong has become the stage upon which the articulation of gender performances often takes place. Individual choices about when, where and how to wear the tudong have come to symbolise opinions on the place of women in society and religion. That symbol is then reinterpreted by the larger Malaysian society, representing the public and private images of ‘womanhood’ as they are played out in the daily lives of women. Based on their perceptions of the changing nature of marriage, the syariah legal system, and social expectations contemporary Malay women express individual goals through their use of tudong.
