Just don’t say feminism: Covering the domestic violence act in the women’s pages of the Malaysian Malay-language press

ABSTRACT

The women’s pages of a newspaper have often been dismissed as fluff, playing at most a subsidiary role, while the real news of a paper is in the malestream pages: the domestic news or leader pages. Yet historically, these pages are often key in constructing women, and men, politically, socially and economically; in terms of generating revenue within the paper; and in terms of how the paper constructs itself in relation to its readers. Further, they have been important in bringing women into newsrooms, and allowing them to construct themselves as journalists with specialist expertise and independence from the male editorial hierarchy. In Malaysia, however, the women’s pages of the Malay-language press played a key role in the 1996 campaign for a Domestic Violence Act. Informed both by feminist critical discourse analysis and oral histories with female journalists working at the time, this article sheds light on the gendered nature of Malaysian newsrooms, with implications for how feminist media activists can negotiate feminist coverage, even in an environment hostile to feminism. There are further implications for the importance of understanding processes of both negotiation within newsrooms and identity formation as journalists, both of which impact upon the news produced.

KEYWORDS:

• Newspapers
• journalism
• Malaysia
• media history
• feminist critical discourse analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A similar methodology has been applied by Jingrong Tong 2014.

2. Statistics from Department of Statistics, Malaysia www.dosm.gov.my; and the World Bank data.worldbank.org .

3. All the interviews took place between January and April 2014 in various locations in or near the Malaysian capital city, Kuala Lumpur. Interviews were conducted in a mixture of Malay and English.

4. This could be due to their reliance on male-dominated power structures, rather than drawing support, as the women’s page journalists do, from a female audience, a subject for future research.

5. “The toilet was shared by all irrespective of sex. Utusan Melayu had a few women employees at the time; but it couldn’t afford a separate ladies’ room. The staircase at the rear of the department overlooked the toilet which had no lock… There were embarrassing moments for the ladies since the staircase was busy with male traffic for most of the day.” (Ali. Salim 1987, 56).

6. Statistically, around 43% of Malaysian working-age women were employed during this period, though this figure probably hides a lot of family-based or informal paid employment. Similar rates for the UK and US were just over 50%, according to World Bank figures.

7. Wan Chik April 3 1996.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. There is no potential conflict of interest that the author is aware of;Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship;

Notes on contributors

Sonia Randhawa

Sonia Randhawa was recently awarded a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, focusing on the history of women journalists in the Malay-language press. Her interests include Malaysian media, freedom of expression, gender and the media, freedom of information, media law and community media. She serves on the board of feminist media organisation Io International Manila (formerly Isis International), and is a director of the Centre for Independent Journalism, Malaysia. E-mail: [email protected]