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382 20 The Shifting Status of Middle-Class Malay Girlhood from “sisters” to “sinners” in one generation patricia sloane-white Twenty-first-century middle-class Malay Muslim girls are often portrayed as “seducers,” “sinners,” and “material girls,” sexualized symbols of global modernity’s dystopia, a place where mothers are working and absent, family is dissolving, and children no longer obey. But a generation ago, their mothers—twentieth-century middle-class Malay Muslim girls—were valorized as “sisters to modernity” for contributing to national development, and their mothers were valorized for shaping that modernity. In this chapter I hypothesize that the valuing of girls in modern middle-class Malay Muslim society since Independence in 1957 is contingent upon the cultural authority granted to or denied their mothers; in the Malay case, a middle-class girl’s status shifts in tandem with her mother’s perceived role in social change. By examining how girls become moral proxies of their mothers, we are led to ask a crucial question about girlhood in general: Is girlhood a category of motherhood? The status and representation of Malay Muslim girls between the 1960s and the present day have changed. Malaysia, a multiethnic nation with a powerful Muslim majority,1 is today known as one of Asia’s “miracle economies.” In 1970, many Malaysians were poor, and, according to government leaders, the majority of Malays still lived much as they had in colonial times: traditional in outlook, humble in expectations, and marginalized from modernization .2 Malay ethnic and class-based resentment of the Malaysian Chinese, who were perceived to have monopolized the post-Independence economy , erupted into violence in 1969. In response, the Malay-dominated government devised a development program known as the New Economic Policy (NEP).3 NEP—spanning the years from 1970 to 1990—was an interventionist economic and affirmative-action program directed at creating a capitalist class among the Malays. One of its major policy initiatives used tertiary education as a catalyst of change. The university system was expanded dramatically. Thousands of Malay students were given scholarships to study locally and overseas.4 During the same period, Malays were affected by the increasing power of Islamic conservatism. By the end of the NEP period in 1990, Malaysia was rife with ethno-religious contestation, and dissension was kept under control by the increasingly authoritarian state. Young Malay women figured prominently in all of these transformations. In the early 1980s, the Malaysian government courted multinationals to increase export-based production, one of NEP’s development goals; the multinationals courted “nimble-fingered Asian girls,” of whom there was a ready supply in rural Malay villages. As they were famously described by anthropologist Aihwa Ong, Malay girls were “docile bodies” refigured by the unfamiliar time routines and punishments of industrial capitalism, whose labor benefited the extractive capitalist goals of government and parents alike. In response, unable to cope, some girls reportedly fell into episodes of hysteria on the factory floor.5 While some lower-class Malay girls were toiling away in Malaysia’s new multinational industries, for other girls a different definition of modern girlhood began to take shape. Social scientists describe how, starting in the 1970s, other Malay females, like their Malay brothers, were brought by NEP policies into tertiary education, some with little emotional, social, or academic preparation. Many of these girls became, according to some literature on Malaysian Islamization, “dakwah girls” (girls influenced by Islamic missionizing)6 and were often described as culture-shocked and unable to cope with urban modernity. Dakwah girls were swayed by the fundamentalist movement that enveloped Malay student life in the 1970s and 1980s, a vivid symbol of a vast Islamic reconfiguring of modern Malay life that soon reached far beyond universities. My own anthropological research on Malay girlhood, part of a larger project addressing middle-class socioeconomic transformations among Malays most affected by NEP,7 grew from my realization that the girlhoods described by nearly fifty Malay women whose contemporary lives and personal histories I studied—whose ages spanned from the early teens to the early twenties during the NEP period—did not parallel the vulnerable, acted-upon factory or dakwah girlhoods I had read about in the literature on modern gender and social change in Malay life. Nor did they originate from the rural and impoverished Malay class that NEP was said to benefit. Indeed, as I learned about their lives, it appeared that most of them had emerged from empowered...

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