The laugh of the pontianak: darkness and feminism in Malay folk horror

ABSTRACT

The laughing woman represents a special kind of excess and cautionary reminder of social and moral decay. With her head cast back, the open laugh of a woman is disparaged as a sign of provocation, disorder, and immorality. In many instances a woman’s open and hearty laugh is “grotesque” regardless of the multiple genres of laughter. This essay has two main aims. First, to interpret the meaning of the laughter of the pontianak, the female vampire, in Malay-language horror film and folk culture. And second, to rehabilitate the grotesque femininity of the pontianak by foregrounding the significance of women’s laughter as feminist resistance. With reference to scenes from Malay-language horror cinema from three different eras, an argument is advanced that the darker shade of laughter can mobilize resistance. “Dark” laughter is not only gendered but also linguistic and behaves in a range of specific speech acts. Moreover, the dark laughter in popular representations of the pontianak is part of a repertoire of her sonic subjectivity that stages the collapse of desire and patriarchal order, opening up potentialities for feminist affective knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• laughter
• horror
• humor
• Malaysian and Singaporean cinema

Acknowledgments

An early version of this essay was first presented at a public seminar at Nottingham University Malaysia campus in March 2015 and was later developed as a paper for the 2017 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies conference at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul, South Korea. Research was funded by the University of Malaya. The author would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive comments on this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Universiti Malaya.

Notes on contributors

Alicia Izharuddin

Alicia Izharuddin is a Research Associate and Visiting Senior Lecturer in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. E-mail: [email protected]