Visualizing the Invisible: Social Constructions of Straight Identified Men Who Have Sex With Transsexuals and Feminized Gay Men On/Off Malaysian Film

Abstract

This article examines an “invisible” group of Malaysian men who—although straight identified and gender socialized to eroticize and have sexual relations with natural-born females—also secretly have sex with transsexuals and/or feminized gay men, incidentally or occasionally. Specifically, the article looks at how these otherwise heteronormative men are socially constructed in 2 forms of social texts, namely, Malaysian films and interview-derived narratives of transsexuals and feminized gay men. These social texts are parsed through Simon and Gagnon’s (1986) theory of sexual scripting to yield 4 constructions of the men under focus: the accidental, the repentant, the volitional, and the cloacal. The contention of this article is that the invisibility of these men is causally linked to the prevailing cultural scenarios in Malaysia that are heavily shaped by political Islamism and weighted in favor of the heteronormative male gender/sex. The article argues also that the invisibility of these men does not render them static and that their sexual practices and the meanings they attach to them have been evolving radically since the mid-1990s, even as the cultural scenarios in Malaysia are becoming increasingly intolerant of nonheteronormative genders and sexualities.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank my TFGM informants for agreeing to share their narratives; Mona Sheikh Mahmud, Dina Zaman, and Suziati Kamaruddin for the discussions and leads; the anonymous referees and Lisa Baraitser for their comments on earlier drafts; and Open University Malaysia for the institutional support.

FILMOGRAPHY (by title in chronological order)

• From Jemapoh to Manchestee (From Jemapoh to Manchester, feature). (1998). Dir. Hishamuddin Rais.

• Spinning Gasing (Spinning Top, feature). (2000). Dir. Teck Tan.

• Bukak Api (Having Sex with Clients, feature). (2000). Dir. Osman Ali.

• KL Menjerit (Kuala Lumpur Screaming, feature). (2002). Dir. Badaruddin Azmi.

• Waris Jari Hantu (Heir of the Family Spirit, feature). (2007). Dir. Shuhaimi Baba.

• I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (feature). (2006). Dir. Tsai Ming-Liang.

• She’s My Son (short documentary). (2007). Dir. Indrani Kopal.

• Comolot (French Kiss, feature). (2008). Dir. Mohd Akram Ismail.

• Pecah Lobang (Exposed, short documentary). (2008). Dir. Poh Si Teng.

• 2 Alam (Two Worlds, feature). (2010). Dir. Hairie Othman & Zarith Lokman.

• Dalam Botol (In the Bottle, feature). (2011). Dir. Khir Rahman.

• Transgender Nun: Rights and Rites (short documentary). (2011). Dir. Arvind Raj.

• The Transcendent (short documentary). (2012). Dir. Eugenia Wong.

ORCID

David C. L. Lim

http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3566-5486

Notes

¹ The major ethnic groups constituting Malaysia’s population of 28.3 million are the Malays (63.1%), the Chinese (24.6%), the Indians (7.3%), and the indigenous people (4.3%). All Malays are Muslims by the definition of the Federal Constitution. Most Chinese are Buddhists, Taoists, or Christians. Indians are mostly Hindus, whereas the majority of the indigenous people are animists, Muslims, or Christians (Population and Housing Census of Malaysia, 2011).

² Mak nyahs are transgender people insofar as their “gender identity, expression or behavior is different from those typically associated with their assigned [male] sex at birth” (National Center for Transgender Equality, 2014). The nyahs I interviewed for this article also identify as “transsexual,” a term referring to persons seeking to “adopt permanently the gender, costumes, and roles of the other gender” (Simon, 2000, p. 2572), often through modern surgical and/or pharmacological techniques. The feminized gay men I interviewed do not, however, identify as transgender, even though their feminized behavior qualify them to be thus categorized.

³ The acronyms SMST and TFGM are used here as singular and plural nouns.

⁴ Malaysian lesbians have also recently been receiving scholarly attention. See Wong (2012) as an example.

⁵ My conception of SMST partially overlaps with but is not equivalent to “gynandromorphophiles,” a term coined by Blanchard and Collins (1993) to describe “men who sought cross-dressers, transvestites, transsexuals, or she-males for sexual encounters or romantic relationships” (p. 572). SMST do not generally seek cross-dressers and transvestites, most of whom are heterosexual identified and not necessarily feminine in comportment. Furthermore, unlike SMST, not all gynandromorphophiles are heterosexual identified. The category of SMST as it is conceived in this article partially overlaps also with Money and Lamacz’s (1984) “gynemimetophile” (p. 392) or “gynemimetophiliac” (p. 392); these two terms refer to men who are erotosexually attracted to “gynemimetics” or persons with “male anatomy and morphology” living in society as women “without genital sex-reassignment surgery, and with or without taking female sex-hormonal therapy” (p. 393). SMST are sexually attracted to not only gynemimetics but also to transsexuals (who may have had sex reassignment surgery, thus failing to meet the definition of gynemimetics) as well as feminized gay men (who may not live as full-time “women” in society but would occasionally cross-dress and feminize their behavior to attract SMST).

⁶ There are no official figures on the population size of MSM, let alone SMST. Baba (2007) modestly estimated that “there are between 0.8 and 1.4 million MSM” (p. 15) in Malaysia out of a population of 27 million. The figures are extrapolated from MSM studies in Thailand, Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia, where MSM population has been estimated to range “between 3 to 5 percent of the total population” (p. 15). Malaysia’s population has since increased to 28.3 million (Population and Housing Census of Malaysia, 2011). By Baba’s (2007) formula, then, there should be between 0.849 and 1.415 million MSM in Malaysia today out of 9.85 million males within what we might conservatively take as the sexually active category (between 15 and 65 years old).

⁷ The term “informants” here is used in the sociological sense to refer to individuals as useful sources of information who “extend the investigator’s reach in situations where he or she has not, or cannot, be a direct observer” (Rieger, 2007).

⁸ According to Teh (2002), Malay-Muslims constitute the majority of nyahs in Malaysia: “About 70 per cent to 80 per cent of them are Malays and the rest are Chinese, Indians and other minority ethnic groups” (p. 45).

⁹ On the resurgence of Islam in postindependent Malaysia, see Nagata (1984) and Shamsul (1997). On Islam and same-sex sexuality in premodern Southeast Asia, see Clarence-Smith (2012).

¹⁰ In 2000, Anwar Ibrahim was convicted and sentenced to prison for sodomy. The conviction was overturned in 2004. In 2008, Anwar was again charged with sodomy in a new case involving a former aide. He was acquitted in 2012. Following the prosecution’s appeal, the acquittal was overturned in 2014.

¹¹ For a list of Malaysian films that engage with the theme of nonheteronormative genders and/or sexualities, see the filmography section at the end of the article. My listing there is not meant to be exhaustive.

¹² All translations in this article are mine. In parts, translations are adapted from the subtitles provided in the films.

¹³ Dalam Botol appears to suggest that Ghaus’ preferred object of desire is feminine in comportment but male bodied, genitally intact, and gender conforming in dressing—as embodied by the “soft” male with whom he cheats on Ruby.

¹⁴ Syariah/Sharia law has in the past 50 years “shifted from the norms of female progressivism to male conservatism” (Mohamad, 2011, p. 51). Since the mid-1990s, home-grown Syariah lawyers and jurists in Malaysia have been drawing more from Arab sources in their legal deliberations, contributing “to the conservatism and increasingly misogynistic perspectives on Sharia” (p. 56). As a result, the most current version of Syariah law court judgments “exaggerate even more starkly the asymmetrical divide between male entitlement and female behavior” (p. 66). Among other leeway, men can now apply for a fasakh (no-fault) divorce, which would exempt them from paying their wives postdivorce maintenance claims. They are also entitled to practice polygamy without “having to prove that the marriage was both necessary and just, as was the case under the old law” (p. 56).

¹⁵ It might seem inappropriate for Bukak Api, a film made for community education on HIV/AIDS, to feature a main nyah character (namely, Riena) who regards HIV/AIDS as just punishment, if not as death sentence, for the men who raped her. But as an informant involved in HIV/AIDS intervention work explains, and as the film’s intended primary audience is likely to be aware, what Riena means is that the real killer is not HIV/AIDS-related diseases, which can be clinically managed, but the devastating discrimination and rejection of people living with HIV/AIDS by family, friends, coworkers, and community. Riena, who suffers the triple stigma of being nyah, sex worker, and HIV positive, is saying in other words that the men who raped her have volitionally obtained for themselves the opportunity to experience at least a third of what she endures daily.

¹⁶ Lyttleton (2008) described kathoey in Laos as “the local vernacular catch-all term. It depicts a gender identity (somewhat feminine), a sexual orientation (towards men) and social category (somewhat valorized in very specific situations, but more broadly stigmatized when placed against normative male-female identities) with a long history in local Thai, Cambodian and Lao cultures” (p. 7).

¹⁷ Framing transsexualism as a late-20th-century phenomenon, Escoffier (2011) argued that “it wasn’t until the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when sex was more openly explored and accepted [in the West], that the MTF [male-to-female] transsexual was eroticized” (p. 269).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David C. L. Lim

David C. L. Lim, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Open University Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. He is a coeditor of Film in Contemporary Southeast Asia: Cultural Interpretation and Social Intervention (Routledge, 2012) and the author of The Infinite Longing for Home: Desire and the Nation in Selected Writings of Ben Okri and K. S. Maniam (Rodopi, 2005).