Although I have been a Malaysian citizen from birth, I spent my teenage years and much of my twenties in Melbourne, Australia. In 2002, I resolved to reconnect with the country of my citizenship and to combine that resolve with interests I had been developing about democracy and human rights. In 2003, I commenced a Ph.D. project on human rights activism in Malaysia, and planned to go to Kuala Lumpur for a yearâs worth of participant-observation. It was my immense good fortune that a fellow Ph.D. candidate at the time introduced me to Zaitun âToniâ Kasim , who happened to be visiting Melbourne in 2003. Although I did not know it then, Toni was a major character in Malaysiaâs tight-knit community of civil society activists. Her amazing life was the subject of the book Many Shades of Good (Kua 2009). But it was as a result of her efforts and introductions that I made my entry into a circle of Malaysiaâs diverse human rights activists with whom, in one way or another, I continued to conduct research for more than ten years.
For the Ph.D. I was pursuing in 2003, I had no hypothesis that I was testing. I was, instead, interested in seeing how activists in Malaysia operated in an authoritarian political environment. I was interested in their motivations and strategies for pursuing their diverse causes which, overall, could be said to be in direct and indirect aid of defending or affirming an understanding of the public sphere in which Malaysians could participate equally, irrespective of their political or ethnic orientations and affiliations. Exemplifying this is a recollection that remains strong in my mind from my first fieldwork. While chatting with Toni in her flat in a living room replete with diverse trinkets and mementoes, which mostly came from various activist causes from around the world, she told me about a book launch to which she had recently been. My recollection is that it was a book by Muslim women who were discussing their relationship with their tudungs (headscarves) . The discussion at the book launch had rankled Toni . This was not because she was against the wearing of headscarves by Muslim womenâin fact I had witnessed her vigorously defended womenâs right to do so. It was because, so she reported, the tone of the discussion implied or asserted that all Muslim women in Malaysia ought to embrace the tudung. She took exception to this. She told me how she had approached some of the women involved in the book launch to explain her feelings. The words she said to them that she recalled from that conversation, and which I continue to recall vividly, were: âIn my version of Malaysia there is room for you, but in your version of Malaysia, there is no room for meâ.
The sentiment captured in this quote seems to me to speak more generally to the vision of Malaysia and its public sphere being pursued by many of the activists whose work I have followed, with different foci at different times in different projects, between 2003 and 2017. It is especially true of the womenâs rights activists I came to know. I have always been struck by, and in admiration of, the energy, the cohesiveness, the commitment and the sophistication of the analysis of the feminist activists I came to know, initially through Toni .
A common though not defining feature of these activists is their connection with the Joint Action Group for Gender Equality (JAG). JAG , as it is referred to, is a coalition of twelve womenâs rights organisations and its history and achievements formed a case study in a report I was a part of on successful womenâs coalitions in the Pacific (Spark and Lee 2018). JAG âs inclusion in this report was intended to present a model and case study of a successful womenâs rights coalition. While working on this report, which was aimed at both academics and potential funders of womenâs rights and civil society organisations, I realised the potential academic and practical value of insights from those involved in promoting womenâs rights in Malaysia and it was this realisation that prompted me to write this book.
The insights in that report were not wholly based on the interview material gathered for it. They were also informed by my long-term and ethnographic engagement with activism in Malaysia, and Sparkâs similar engagement in PNG. The importance of such engagement in understanding the pursuit of gender justice has been highlighted by Aihwa Ong in her 2011 article âTranslating Gender Justice in Southeast Asiaâ. With reference to the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Ong writes that âWe urgently need detailed explorations of how concepts first proposed in Beijing are translated and modified on the groundâ. To that end, she continues,
It is mandatory to have ethnographic research that is familiar with and sensitive to the particular assemblage of culture , religion, language, and politics through which the actual translation, recasting, and selective conversion of universal civil rights into local ethical idioms takes place. (Ong 2011, 44; cf. Vargas 2002, 209â210)
Although what follows in this book does not make reference to goals set out at the Beijing Conference , and although it does not seek to show explicitly how those goals are âtranslatedâ into local contexts and idioms, what does follow is a grounded and ethnographically informed exploration of how women have perceived and pursued gender justice in Malaysia. While I agree with Ong with respect to the research agenda she calls for, for various reasons I have not couched my discussions in the terms laid out by her. For one thing, the notion of âtranslatingâ implies to me a certain primacy of the Beijing Conference as a source of gender justice goals and concepts, which are then subsequently pursued. This implication could be seen as not giving due credit to the ways in which perceptions and efforts towards gender justice arise locally, contextually, responsively and primarily within the lifeworlds of the Malaysian women who are the focus of this book.
Therefore, in Chapter 2, which is co-authored with the emerging feminist writer Nikkola Mikocki-Bleeker, we draw on interviews with Malaysian feminists to uncover their personal encounters with and experiences of feminism , and how they regard criticisms by opponents of feminism who say it is culturally and religiously inauthentic and an inappropriate import into Malaysia. This chapter also draws on Vivian Wee and Farida Shaheedâs concept of âindigenous feminism â to respond to and to gainsay the suggestion that feminism is inherently Western. This concept posits that feminism emerges during âwomenâs endeavours of asserting their rights in their own socio-cultural contextsâ and that âfeminism itself is indigenous to the dialectic of womenâs resistance and patriarchal dominationâ (Wee and Shaheed 2016). To explore this, this chapter examines how womenâs biographical experiences led them to form âfeministâ views before the term âfeminism â was known to them; it describes their subjective experience of feminism and what it means for some Malaysian women; it demonstrates how a concept such as âfeminism â does and doesnât translate into the Malaysian context; and what discursive manoeuvres some of these women use to counter suggestions that feminism is foreign.
Chapter 3 then moves from the personal and biographical to the more overtly political by exploring my first-hand experiences with the campaign formulated and run by the Womenâs Candidacy Initiative (WCI) during the 2008 General Elections . WCI is a collectivity that has sought to improve the number of independent women in Malaysiaâs parliament, where women remain under-represented. Toni was a prime mover in WCI and it was initially through her that I was invited to join WCI âs campaign to place an independent female candidate into Malaysiaâs parliament. I present my reflections of that campaign here because, as well as being an especially interesting campaign, it was formative for me in developing insights into both activism in general and womenâs rights activism in Malaysia. These are explored in the three sections that dwell on gender and the public sphere , on the impact of fear on participation in the public sphere , and the overemphasised importance of âsuccessâ in discussions of civil society ventures.
From out of the background of the previous two chapters, Chapter 4 brings into view a vibrant, inspiring and...