Page 210 - Cultural Theory

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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

for secular counter-attacks against the headscarf for being not an ‘innocent’
religious convention but a powerful ‘political symbol’.
(ibid.: 183)

Traditionally denied any visible presence in the public sphere, Muslim women’s rep-
resentation of contemporary Islam has redefined both gender roles and representa-
tions of women, as Gole (ibid.: 189) observes:

Women are the principal actors in this process as they display the boundaries
between private and public … Islamism reinforces the boundaries in social rela-
tions through regulating bodily practices in public spaces; this regulation in turn
serves as a public display of Islamic subjectivity.

Gole is writing about contemporary Islam and the practice of veiling, drawing on the
example of the secular state of Turkey and from a European perspective. However, sim-
ilar issues have emerged in South-east Asia, and feminist writers have highlighted simi-
lar tendencies in Malaysia. Malaysia, like Turkey, is not an Islamic state, however, unlike
Turkey, which is a secular state, in Malaysia, Islam is the official religion of the country
and the constitution assumes all Malays are Muslim (Nagata, 1994). There has been an
intense Islamization in the country in the past two decades. Lelia Ahmed (1992: 236)
suggests that ‘the reimagined revivalist Islam’ is an Islam redefining itself against
Western values. While there has been a crackdown against radical Islamist groups since
the emergence of anti-state terrorist cells in Malaysia and Singapore, it is unlikely that
the broader movement of ‘revivalist Islam’ will change. The positioning of women
and the family within these debates has always been central. Ong (1990) argues that
controlling the definition of Malay womanhood and the family was crucial in the strug-
gle between state power and revivalist Islam over the changing body politic in Malaysia.
Ong saw the bodily covering of Malay university student supporters of revivalism as a
‘subversive bricolage’ registering ‘protest over cultural dislocations linked to colonial
and post-colonial domination’ (Ong, 1990: 269) (see also Stivens, 2000: 7).
The practice of ‘veiling’ in this context can be seen to have both religious and
ethnic expression. It has been argued that working-class women have found in
Islamic practice a sense of social worth denied by the social order, whereas middle-
class women are essentially victims of a governance by Islam (Ong, 1987; 1990).
Stivens argues that for urban middle-class Malay women, there are a number of
dimensions to the veiling process. The first is ‘a neonationalist symbol of a specif-
ically Malay modernity that has deep ethnic and class repercussions’ (cf. Ong.
1990) (Stivens, 1998: 114); second, a commitment to a particular form of Islamic
modernity and an escape from the sexualizations of modernity by the West. The
transformative character of contemporary Islam is still developing and its outcome
remains to be seen.
What is clear from the analysis of both case studies, Chinese transnationalism and
contemporary Islamic publics, is the vibrancy that a combined cultural studies, critical
ethnography, feminist and anthropology approach can bring to an understanding of

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