![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In the past few decades many countries have experienced a surge in crime that is heavily gendered. Men are responsible for much of the rising tide of criminality (and for most criminal offenses prior to the recent surge). This dynamic threatens not only women and children but also societies and polities more generally. Additionally, it occasions serious doubts about state agents’ widely touted commitments to law and order and their oft-celebrated claims to prioritize the safety, flourishing, and overall well-being of law-abiding citizens. It is thus paradoxical that mainstream public debates on illegalities and delinquencies oftentimes do not substantively engage the strongly gendered nature of criminal transgression. This article explores such paradoxes by providing interdisciplinary perspectives on the Muslim-majority nation of Malaysia. It draws on nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork and historical research, supplemented by analysis of court records, media accounts, and other sources, to argue that essentialized categories and conceptual dichotomies in the dominant public narratives on crime contribute to the relative elision of gender in discussions of criminality. The article also addresses the socio-political significance of these dynamics and some of their comparative and theoretical implications.
KEYWORDS:
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Sa’ed Atshan, Baudouin Dupret, Arzoo Osanloo, Susan Henry Peletz, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks also to Robert Shepherd for detailed editorial suggestions, and to Avery Adelman and Sophia LiBrandi for research and editorial assistance.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the author.
Notes
1 See Harrendorf, Heiskanen, and Malby Citation2010 for regional and national variations, counter currents, and caveats relevant to this generalization. See also Comaroff and Comaroff Citation2016 and Merry Citation2016.
2 I hasten to add that not usually does not mean never. Some genres of public crime talk are strongly gendered and racialized as well. Consider, for instance, discourses in the United States that traffic in racist tropes equating Black men with criminality. CF. Wacquant Citation2009; Alexander Citation2020 [Citation2010].
3 This phrasing borrows from Teresa Caldeira’s superb ethnographic study of criminality, violence, graduated citizenship, and urban change in São Paulo, Brazil, though the implications of these dynamics for gender are not mentioned in the passage from Caldeira (Citation2000, 31) that I draw upon. Indeed, Caldeira devotes surprisingly little attention to gender.
4 The semantic domains of the terms “criminality” and “illegality” are not isomorphic, though there is considerable overlap (all forms of state-defined criminality entail illegality, though some illegalities involve civil rather than criminal infractions). Where appropriate, I use the terms interchangeably. I should also note that I deploy the general term “transgression” to encompass both criminal and moral breaches, though I often distinguish between the latter types of offenses, as my interlocutors sometimes did.
5 For example, Rafael Citation1999; Caldeira Citation2000; Schneider and Schneider Citation2008; Comaroff and Comaroff Citation2016; Murray Citation2020.
6 Murray Citation2020, 27.
7 Khalwat refers to an offense involving a marriageable man and woman who are discovered in a secluded or private setting and are assumed to have engaged in physical intimacy or to have had the opportunity to do so.
8 For reasons noted above, I do not focus in this essay on phenomena that are relatively well documented in the historical and cross-cultural literature such as death squads and justiceiros (“justice makers”), social bandits, street gangs, Chinese Triads, mafia- and Yakuza-like organizations, modern-day drug cartels, or terrorists of either the home-grown or foreign variety. For a discussion of issues such as these, see Rafael Citation1999; Caldeira Citation2000; Bourgois Citation2003; Schneider and Schneider Citation2008; and Comaroff and Comaroff Citation2016.
9 Ethnic Malays make up approximately fifty-one percent of Malaysia’s population of thirty-three million people. The two other major ethnic groupings are Chinese, most of whom are Buddhists or Christian, and Indians, who are predominantly Hindu. Because all Malays are Muslims and because roughly eighty-five percent of Malaysian Muslims are Malay, I sometimes use the terms “Malay” and “Muslim” (and “non-Malay” and “non-Muslim”) interchangeably.
10 I use the adjective “mainstream” here and subsequently as shorthand to characterize narratives, discourses, and genres of crime talk that are both mainstream and hegemonic. The alternative, “mainstream/hegemonic,” is rather awkward, though I deploy it occasionally. As we shall see, there are numerous variants of these phenomena, which is to say that we are dealing with multiple hegemonies.
11 Hardt and Negri Citation2004, 107.
12 Many of these observations are congruent with insights from more-or-less contemporaneous studies of Malay society and culture (e.g., Banks Citation1983; Scott Citation1985; Shamsul A.B. Citation1986; Ong Citation1987; Wazir Jahan Karim Citation1992; Stivens Citation1996; and Carsten Citation1997). One important contrast that merits note concerns kinship. Malay kinship throughout the Malay Peninsula is commonly characterized as bilateral and matrifocal. The term “bilateral” refers to systems of descent and inheritance that place more or less equal emphasis on links through male and female kin, as distinct from systems that formally prioritize ties through men (as in patriliny) or women (as in matriliny). The gloss “matrifocal” designates women’s de facto centrality in the domestic domain and in kinship networks as a whole. Bilaterality and matrifocality are commonly coupled with post-martial residence that is either matrifocal or neolocal. In Negeri Sembilan and a few other enclaves, the “matri-” emphases are more elaborated than among Malays in other regions of the Peninsula and include matrilineal systems of descent and inheritance that reflect the Sumatran Minangkabau ancestry of the region’s early Malay settlers (Peletz Citation1988).
13 Wives tended to manage household finances, sometimes leaving their husbands with little money for daily expenses.
14 One of my adoptive aunts was frequently criticized by her sisters and others for this transgression (though rarely if ever to her face, to the best of my knowledge), particularly since her elderly, infirm husband could not take care of himself.
15 In emphasizing that nearly all criminality in Malaysia occurs at the hands of men, I am not suggesting that the majority of Malaysian men are inclined toward criminality, let alone aggression or physical or symbolic violence. Almost all the Malay men I came to know during my fieldwork were pious, hardworking family men who appeared to treat their wives and children well, were good neighbors and community citizens, and were quite hospitable, generous, and kind in their dealings with me, my wife, and our young son. These generalizations also apply to the other Malaysian men I know, except that I do not have much direct knowledge concerning their ritual practices and piety.
A more general set of issues has to do with the types of behaviors subsumed under the rubric of crime, especially state-defined crime. These are of course highly variable both cross-culturally and historically, and the rubric itself is sometimes deeply contested within a given society. Additionally, behaviors deemed criminal may or may not involve aggression or violence. The latter phenomena are analytically distinct from criminality and are not the focus of this essay.
16 Peletz Citation1996.
17 Unlike what has been reported for many healing rituals cross-culturally, moreover, my adoptive father’s healing practices included no elements of divination oriented toward identifying perpetrators.
18 If the woman was married, she might first be summarily divorced; if the man was married at the time of the offense, the woman would likely become his second wife. A hastily arranged marriage I attended in 1979 involved a twenty-five-year-old man who had impregnated a fifteen-year-old neighbor (Peletz Citation1996, 132-147). In cases like this, parents could have filed a police report or referred the matter to the local Islamic judge but chose to avoid involving outside authorities.
19 Kotor was also frequently invoked, especially by women, when referring to menstrual blood; when girls and women were menstruating, they could not pray, enter the mosque, touch the Qur’an, or fast during the month of Ramadan. Their “dirtiness” and “impure” bodies during these times risked invalidating the ablutions and ritual cleanliness of others, and were thus both contaminating and polluting, much like men involved in politik.
20 Douglas Citation1966.
21 Peletz Citation1996, Citation2002, Citation2020b; see also Scott Citation1985; Shamsul A.B. Citation1986; Ong Citation1987; Stivens Citation1996; Sloane Citation1999; and Thompson Citation2007.
22 Tedong et al Citation2014.
23 Hassan Citation2020.
24 Farish Noor Citation2022, 326.
25 Farish Noor Citation2022, 329.
26 Involvement in the civil-society organization known as RELA (discussed below) represents one of the other ways Malay men endeavor to combat discourses associating them with delinquency, illegality, and immorality.
27 See, for example, The Star 2018.
28 Inhorn Citation2012, 32.
29 Some of the material in this paragraph and the one that follows is adapted from Peletz Citation2021.
30 Most Malay men neither gamble nor drink alcohol, but the villagers and urbanites who engage in such activities are almost always men. See Peletz Citation1996; Citation2020b.
31 These national trends, which have prevailed since the late 1990s, are comparable to those for bumiputeras (“sons [and daughters] of the soil”), eighty-five percent of whom are Malay. The number of bumiputera graduates in 2021, for instance, was 3.63 million, two million (55.1 percent) of whom were women. For additional details, see Tienxhi 2017, https://www.dosm.gov.my/site/downloadrelease?id=bumiputera-statistics&lang=English, and https://knoema.com/atlas/Malaysia/topics/Education/Tertiary-Education/Female-students-in-tertiary-education.
32 Ahmad Fuad Rahmat Citation2020, 12, 13.
33 Ahmad Fuad Rahmat Citation2020, 173.
34 Ahmad Fuad Rahmat Citation2020, 38, 50, 149.
35 Ahmad Fuad Rahmat Citation2020, 177.
36 Felker Citation2015, 133.
41 Tedong et al Citation2014; Muhammed Abdul Khalid and Li Yang Citation2019.
42 Tan Citation2008; Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Wee Chong Hui Citation2014; Muhammed Abdul Khalid and Yang Citation2019.
43 Thompson Citation2007, 83.
44 Thompson Citation2007, 83. See also Ahmad Fuad Rahmat Citation2020.
45 Willford Citation2014; Nonini Citation2015.
46 Caldeira Citation2000; Comaroff and Comaroff Citation2016; Quraishi Citation2020, 37-45.
47 Global Peace Index Citation2022.
48 Tedong et al Citation2014, 1017.
49 Sidhu Citation2005, 10.
50 Sidhu Citation2005, 11. The trends have not been entirely linear. Moreover, some studies indicate that the period between 2009 and 2012 saw a twenty-nine percent decrease in index crimes, which includes both violent crimes and property crimes, followed in the first six months of 2013 by an (unspecified) increase in murders and armed robberies (Teh Citation2015, 10). For additional information on aspects of these trends and related matters, see Haslinda Abdullah et al Citation2015; Quraishi Citation2020 (especially his extensive bibliography); Tharshini et al Citation2020.
51 Fuller Citation2013, 2. The author emphasizes that no one seems immune to the wave of crime plaguing the country, citing as one example “a British-trained engineer who was burglarized twice at his home in the Kuala Lumpur suburbs and robbed once while he was in his car – all within 10 days” (1). As for his most general and widely ramifying point, albeit one referring specifically to the capital: “It is hard to find someone in Kuala Lumpur today who does not have a story about purse snatching, a burglary or worse” (1).
52 Schneider and Schneider Citation2008, 366-367; Comaroff and Comaroff Citation2016; Murray Citation2020.
53 See footnote 7.
54 World Prison Brief Citation2023.
55 Sidhu Citation2005, 17, 19-20.
56 Thompson Citation2007, 113.
57 Peletz Citation2002, 239.
58 The fact that those victimized or otherwise most adversely affected by crime are women is less commonly ignored, as I discuss later on.
59 Hardt and Negri Citation2004, 107.
60 Many of these same dynamics are at play in Indonesia, which borders Malaysia and has a good deal in common with it culturally but had a very different colonial experience and has been plagued by far more post-colonial violence. All of this is clear from James Siegel’s influential (Citation1998) study of the ways that imagined, mass-media amplified forces associated with scandal, rumor, fear, ghosts, and national identity in the final years of the Suharto regime (1966-1998) facilitated not only the emergence amidst widespread unrest of what Siegel, following Foucault (Citation1977, Citation1978), refers to as “a new criminal type,” but also stepped-up state repression purportedly required to eliminate it. During this time Indonesian political leaders sought to rally public support through targeted campaigns inciting moral panic and murder in order to head off an impending revolution. Siegel’s examples of this new criminal type – typically ordinary people never charged with a crime, “many of whom had until that point been employed by the government party” (1) but also bore tattoos, taken by some to signify gang membership or other criminality – are overwhelmingly male. But for many of the same reasons that obtain in Malaysia, neither elite nor popular narratives bearing on new forms of Indonesian criminality have homed in on masculinity per se.
61 Tun Hisan Tun Hamzah and Khoo Kheng-Hor Citation2011, 85.
62 Tun Hisan Tun Hamzah and Khoo Kheng-Hor Citation2011, xi.
63 Tun Hisan Tun Hamzah and Khoo Kheng-Hor Citation2011, 35.
64 Although neither the details nor the career highlights of Young’s biography are mentioned anywhere in the text, a few comments are in order. Young was recruited in 1952 to head-up a mixed, British-led force of Malays and Chinese that was assembled to put down Malaya’s communist insurgency (known as the Emergency; 1948-1960). He previously had served as Commissioner of Police for the City of London and on Africa’s Gold Coast (Ghana) (see New York Times, Jan. 25, Citation1952). The more general point is that he was, and in some quarters clearly remains, a potent, battle-tested symbol of British imperial authority and military prowess – both a “model of” and a “model for” (Geertz Citation1973, 93-94) the quelling of disorder, even or especially in post-colonial settings such as Malaysia.
65 Peletz 2020, 85 et passim.
66 The logo features the head of a tiger, an intersecting kris and machete, and a garland of padi flowers, on top of which is a royal crown with Arabic lettering spelling the words Allah and Muhammad and a crescent moon and star symbolizing that Islam is Malaysia’s official religion.
67 Sun Tzu’s celebrated treatise, The Art of War, written in the fifth century BCE, is the most extensively discussed text.
68 Rela means “willing,” “ready.”
69 The following discussion of RELA is adapted from Peletz Citation2020a, 617-618.
70 See Human Rights Watch Citation2007, Goh Citation2013.
71 Lee and tan beng hui Citation2017, 104.
72 I am paraphrasing a point made by John Pratt et al (Citation2005, xxv) in their discussion of analogous dynamics in the West.
73 On judicial fields, see Bourdieu Citation1987.
74 Hussin Citation2016, 31.
75 The Federation of Malaysia included Malaya as well as Sarawak, North Borneo, and Singapore, but Singapore was expelled in 1965.
76 These figures were provided by officials in the Jabatan Kehakiman Syariah Malaysia (Malaysian Department of Syariah Judiciary) during my fieldwork in 2012, 2013, and 2018, and in subsequent correspondence.
77 These acronyms refer to high-profile religious bureaucracies. JAKIM stands for the Jabatan Kemajuan Islam Malaysia (Malaysian Department of Islamic Development); JAWI is shorthand for the Jabatan Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan (Federal Territory Department of Islamic Religion); JAIS refers to the Jabatan Agama Islam Selangor (Selangor Department of Islamic Religion). tan beng hui (Citation2012) and Maznah Mohamad (Citation2020) provide incisive analyses of the growth of these bureaucracies in recent decades and their ever more expansive mandates as guardians, gate-keepers, and brand stewards of state-sponsored Islam.
78 Peletz 2020, 211 et passim.
79 These offenses involve a range of illicit activities, including underage marriage, improper solemnization of marriage, and marriage without proper consent.
80 The only example of substantive gender skewing in which females outnumber males involves prostitution. But there were only six instances of this between 2011 and 2017 (all of which involved females), representing less than .00005 percent of the more than 142,000 cases handled. Prostitution, which is sometimes pleaded down to and recorded by sharia officials as khalwat, is usually handled by the civil courts. For reasons such as these, the figure cited here is not an accurate reflection of the state’s prosecution of this offense.
81 Peletz Citation2020b, 211.
82 Peletz Citation1996, 290; see also Koktvedgaard Zeitzen Citation2018, 8 et passim.
83 International Islamic University of Malaysia, 2005. See see also Noraini Mohd Noor et al Citation2005.
84 For example, Kausar Citation2005, x, 2, 46, 57.
85 Ibid., 3.
86 Kausar notes, for example, that those who sexually harass and rape women are men, that men often “misuse … [their] right of divorce”, and that “there is a need” in Muslim societies “to … transform the prevailing male chauvinist culture[s]” in ways that render them more “just and Islamic” (72). But these remarks, all of which appear toward the end of the book and are grouped together on a single page, are atypical with respect to her relative silence on men and masculinity.
87 Ibid., 22-23, 30.
88 Ibid., 20, 46.
89 Ibid., 91.
90 Ibid., 68.
91 See footnote 10.
92 SIS is but one of many NGOs operating in Malaysia. Others sharing its progressive concerns include AWAM (All Women’s Action Society), HAKAM (National Human Rights Society), IRF (Islamic Renaissance Front), JAG (Joint Action Group for Gender Equality), MWRAF (Muslim Women’s Research and Action Forum), and SUARAM (Voice of the Malaysian People). For additional information on groups active in the fields of civil society, see Weiss Citation2006 and Azza Basarudin Citation2016.
93 See for example Zainah Anwar Citation2001, Citation2008, Norani Othman Citation2005; see also Maznah Mohamad Citation2020.
94 Azza Basarudin Citation2016.
95 Hefner and Bagir Citation2021.
96 Scott Citation1985, Citation1990.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Michael G. Peletz
Michael G. Peletz is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor and former Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Emory University. His research focuses on gender and sexual diversity; law, discipline, and social justice; and the cultural politics of religion, especially Islam, and modernity, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Muslim world.