“Controlling Ourselves, By Ourselves”: Risk Assemblages on Malaysia's Assembly Lines

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, the Malaysian government has identified factories as high risk for HIV and AIDS. Signaling epidemiological concerns over the rising rates of HIV among factory workers, a significant proportion of whom are women, the label also appeared to reconstitute stereotypes of factory women as dangerously sexual and of factories as immoral spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research in the export processing zones of Penang, Malaysia in the mid-1990s, I examine the meanings and experiences of HIV risk among factory women themselves. Data were analyzed using discourse and grounded theory methods, the former to identify women's multiple modes of rationalizing HIV risks, and the latter to theorize the sources and significance of women's HIV risk assemblages. The heuristic of assemblages as localized knowledge spaces helped to show that biomedical and socioreligious risk lexica operated not as fixed epistemological categories but as situational resources in women's risk scripts. Overall, women desired multiple risk knowledges to help them “control themselves by themselves,” a project of reflexive self-shaping mediated by the diverse and discordant discourses of gender, ethnicity, and modernity in Malaysia that shaped how HIV risks were engendered and experienced.

Key Words:

• biomedicine
• gender
• HIV
• industrialization
• Islam
• Malaysia
• risk

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research for the project was supported by a National Institute of Mental Health AIDS training grant and Fulbright Program Award. The author would like to acknowledge the indispensable support of Carole Browner and Shirley Lindenbaum for editorial counsel early on. The author expresses appreciation for the prodigious constructive feedback of Stacy Pigg and anonymous reviewers. Most of all, the author is grateful to journal editor Steve Ferzacca and managing editor Lisa Kozleski for shepherding this manuscript into publication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robin Root

ROBIN ROOT, PHD, MPH, is an assistant professor of anthropology at Baruch College, City University of New York. Dr. Root's theoretical and applied research draws on anthropologies of medicine, globalization, and gender to explore local experiences of globalizing risks. Her current work in Swaziland examines the roles of faith-based groups as complex postcolonial institutions that mediate the meanings and impact of diverse risks to individuals and communities. She may be reached at: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Baruch College, City University of New York, One Bernard Baruch Way, New York, NY 10010. E-mail: [email protected]