7 - (Re)Framing Women's Rights Claims in Malaysia

Summary

This chapter will explore briefly some of the dimensions of recent Women's “rights” claims in Malaysia. Its main focus is the complex and often tense relationships among a range of women's nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the “soft-authoritarian” state, and the powerful cultural particularisms embedded in the Malaysian modernity project. Across the region, recent social transformations have seen political claims of many kinds erupting, especially a range of claims made in the language of “rights”. In Malaysia, dramatic economic and political changes have produced a reshaping of the spaces within which women can act politically as gendered agents, with concerted activism relating to domestic and sexual violence. The last few years have seen a more proactive push by women's organizations, a change that one participant there has labelled a move from activism to political empowerment (Martinez 2000). In this initiative, rights claims on the state and on sections of “civil society” for a complex array of women's rights have become prominent within a wider momentum for reform, with an apparent growing willingness to make local versions of more “universal” rights claims. But, the pressures of ethno-nationalism and support for ideas about an alternative “Asian way” to becoming modern have produced especially complex terrains for such rights claims. This chapter is particularly interested in the ways in which such rights claims have been reconfigured, reframed, and reworked in the recent conjunctures, in complex dialogues with state, religion, and everyday practices.