"Perempuan, Isteri, dan....: Embodied Agency and the Malay Women of Contemporary Singapore"

Abstract

This research critically analyzes the embodiment of Malay women and the multiplicity of ways that ideals of bodily comportment and bodily rituals are transmitted across generations towards the achievement of feminine virtue. In examining virtue, the larger theoretical question that the research addresses is the notion of subjective agency, specifically agency of Malay women in Singapore, a theoretical premise that has not been sufficiently explored by existing anthropological and sociological discourses. What does it mean to proclaim through theories of subordination that agency enabled and created by relations of subordination has equal value to that produced by liberatory frameworks? Is the political agency of minority women as articulated within the entelechy of subversive feminist politics necessary within the framework of hegemonic politics in Singapore? What are the implications of ascribing to a model of agency premised upon the disciplining of the self to attain a desirable state of virtue?