Traditions and sexual inhibitions

One month ago, Sayoni Speak highlighted a survey conducted among (female) tertiary students. The results reflected a correlation between homophobia and adherence to ‘traditional perspectives on the role of women’.

This sets me thinking as to what constitutes the traditional Asian femininity and whether the survey results are indeed reflective of the operational traditions that have encouraged the inhibition of sexual expressions in Asian societies.

My earlier post on Chinese characters may speak volume of the social expectations on the ‘second sex’ in Asia. I’ll not expound further on the Chinese population which I intend to discuss in greater depth in the future. But here, let me take a stab at exploring the role of Malay women pre and post-colonial times.

Interestingly, if my limited research is at all indicative of Malay traditions, indigenous women in the early days of colonial Malaya (including Singapore) have in fact enjoyed relative ‘freer rein’ in their self-expressions than their post-colonial sisters.

One of the earliest English settlers in Singapore, Frank Swettenham, for instance, had detailed in his descriptive account of the Malayan lifestyles, how women appeared to enjoy relative autonomy in their intellectual and sexual expressions – particularly after their marriages (my own emphasis here).

So,

In Perak, a man who tries to shut his womankind up and prevent her intercourse with others and a participation in the fetes and pleasures of Malay society, is looked upon as a jealous, ill-conditioned person.

And while a Malay man is entitled to “have as many as four wives”, a married woman – possibly of genteel birth – ‘can and often does, obtain a divorce from her husband’.

This arguably runs into contrary popular expectations of a Malay/Muslim woman, whose veiled countenance is often constructed (perhaps more so in the west, native scholars prefer a different reading) as a repression of her sexual expression and subjugation of the feminine to that of the masculine*. Likewise, the widely embraced norm of familial duties before career and proliferated images of ‘docile’ and ‘submissive’ feminine bodies at work all served to perpetuate social norms supporting the stereotype of a hyperfeminised Malay woman^.

I do not think my resources here are exhaustive or conclusive enough to dwell on the fracture between pre and post-colonial Malay women. Suffice to say however, I do think such ‘subtle’ differences are sufficient cause for Asian women in the post-colonial age to question the basis and the dominant reading of the so-called traditions.

*See ‘Negotiating Their Visbility: The Lives of Educated and Married Malay Women’ by Roziah Omar in Women in Malaysia: Breaking Boundaries on alternative reading of the ‘veil’ or tudung.
^In her paper, Vicki Denese Crinis provides a more detailed discussion on the possible motivations for constructing the ‘hyperfeminised Malay woman’.