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Christine B.N. Chin
1998
6. Modernity Via Consumption: Domestic Service and the Making of the Modern Malaysian Middle Classes
| What I mean may be put into the form of a question, I said: Are dogs divided into hes and shes, or do they both share equally in hunting and in keeping watch and in the other duties of dogs? [O]r do we entrust to the males the entire and exclusive care of the flocks, while we leave the females at home, under the idea that the bearing and suckling of their puppies is labour enough for them? |
| —Plato, Republica, circa 380 - 370 b.c. |
| A woman who has a head full of Greek, like Mme. Dacier, or carries on fundamental controversies about mechanics, might as well have a beard. |
| —Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 1979. |
Toward the end of the NEP period, persistent demands for live-in domestic workers led to the formal reopening of the immigration gates and the implementation of rules governing Malaysian employment of Filipina and Indonesian servants. Their mass employment comes at a cost both to the women and middle-class female employers. As ascertained in the previous chapter, many female employers in this study failed to question the ways in which capitalist development mediated through the patriarchal-ethnic lens in Malaysia shape their lives and obscure the sociomoral consequences of their relation to foreign domestic workers.
While extreme cases of physical abuse are sensationalized by the newsprint media, the relatively less abusive aspects of employer-foreign servant relations have not received much attention. 1 Long work hours, no rest days, inadequate nutrition, and verbal harassment have become routine among servants in some middle-class households. This is not to say that no Malaysians are concerned with employer mistreatment and abuse of foreign servants. To be sure, NGOs are involved actively in counseling abused foreign servants, and lobbying the state for foreign migrant workers’ rights. Nonetheless, such voices on behalf of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers barely have been able to challenge the general public and private apathy toward foreign servants’ working relations and conditions.
In this chapter, I argue that employers and the public-at-large have been able to ignore Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers’ plights because of the ways in which interests of the state elite and the middle classes have converged. For the Malaysian state elite, contemporary domestic service helps socialize the middle classes in general and women in particular to specific kinds of social relations and organizations deemed necessary for the future of society and country. The employment rules encourage the middle classes’ adoption of the nuclear family form for specific normative and political economic purposes.
From the perspective of the middle classes, not only are foreign servants substitute homemakers but they also are symbols that construct and maintain social status. In short, the in-migration and employment of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers have become a major part of the state elite and the middle classes’ pursuit of a shared vision of modernity that defines national and personal progress, in part, with the ability to purchase, consume, and display goods—including that of commodified Filipina and Indonesian female servants.
This chapter begins with a discussion of the Malaysian state’s juridical-legislative relation to middle-class women, especially in reference to the implementation and intended consequences of the 1984 National Population Policy (NPP). The NPP was a policy that overtly encouraged women to have more children in order to meet the projected labor demands of the twenty-first century. In this section, I revisit the employment rules to show how and why contemporary domestic service has been coopted as one of the state’s “educative” institutions.
State involvement in the changing form and content of contemporary domestic service has, as one of its key objectives, the middle classes’ adoption of the nuclear family form. In the midst of the politics of socioeconomic restructuring, the nuclear family becomes the site of and for the reaffirmation of the state’s normative position vis-à-vis Malaysian women. The family rule, which allowed only married couples with children to employ foreign servants, was used as leverage to redomesticate Malaysian women.
The middle-class nuclear family form also has a perceived distinct political-economic advantage for development in Malaysia. Members of the nuclear family are expected to encourage the expansion of the capitalist market economy. Family members, especially in urban areas such as Kuala Lumpur, increasingly rely on the capitalist market as opposed to the community or extended family members for the provision of goods and services. Chapter 4 demonstrated that key among the services offered by the capitalist market economy in Malaysia is that of foreign migrant women’s domestic labor.
A major reason for the middle classes’ employment of foreign domestic workers is the lack of childcare support for mothers who work beyond the home. The question, however, arises as to why Malaysians who turn to the capitalist market for the supply of domestic labor would elect to hire foreign servants instead of sending their children to creches or childcare centers. Female employers’ decision to do so is shaped by the prevailing Asian patriarchal belief that the performance of housework is women’s work, and that the women negotiate this constraint by transferring the responsibility of domestic labor to Filipina and Indonesian women who work under their supervision.
The contemporary institution of domestic service in Malaysia is indicative of more than the issues of which gender, what social class, and what nationality ought to perform paid reproductive labor. Interviews of Malaysian employers revealed that the presence of a foreign domestic worker in a Malaysian household is considered a significant symbol of a family’s achievement of “middle class-hood.” Put simply, the middle classes’ consumption of Filipina and Indonesian women’s domestic labor is considered by Malaysian Malay, Chinese, and Indian employers alike as a key way to construct and maintain social status in an age of rapid social change.
The last part of this chapter locates Malaysian demands for servants within the context of the middle classes’ consumption of goods and services. I examine the public and private (namely the advertising industry) sectors’ role in promoting consumption-oriented lifestyles for Malays and non-Malays from the middle classes. In the schemata of what I call “modernity via consumption,” the social construction of Filipina and Indonesian servants as a symbol of distinction between the middle and working classes, and also as commodities, obfuscates the notion that foreign domestic workers are women who deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, and who have a right to legal recognition and protection as workers.
The National Population Policy: Redomesticating Malaysian Women
Midway through the period of the NEP, during which Malaysian women enjoyed greater education and employment opportunities, a specific policy was introduced that attempted to redomesticate Malaysian women from specific social classes. In 1984, Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad announced the National Population Policy (NPP)—the state’s plan for a population of 70 million in 115 years (the population in 1984 was 12.6 million). 2 As a result, the Malaysian state appeared to overtly shift to a pronatalist position when most of the developing world was struggling to search for more effective means of controlling population growth. 3
The NPP is a continuation of the gendered ideological basis of state power. The real and perceived requirements of export-oriented development have made this only more salient. The gendered ideological basis is discerned most readily by the law and its implementation.
The Malaysian state’s juridical-legislative dimension constructs rules that regulate relations within civil society. Among the rules are those that define the formal status and roles of women. 4 Malaysian women, unlike their Western counterparts, won suffrage at the same time that society achieved independence from colonialism: female citizenship was necessary for the perception of and the claim to a newly born or liberated nation of Malaysians.
In spite of women’s suffrage, men remained in the eyes of the law as the more legitimate gender possessor of civil-political rights. 5 At the outset, Malaysian women’s right to vote in 1957 was synonymous with the formal recognition of women as legitimate citizens. However, for at least five years after independence in 1957, the postcolonial state refused to grant citizenship to children born in Malaysia if the only parent with Malaysian citizenship was the mother. 6 Children born to families in which only the father was a citizen, however, were automatically granted citizenship.
Although the Federal Constitution was amended in 1962 to recognize Malaysian women as bearers of citizenship, there remains the belief that men, not women, are the legitimate bearers of citizenship. Presently, Article 23 Clause (1) of the Federal Constitution permits anyone who is twenty-one years old and above to renounce his/her citizenship. 7 Nonetheless, Article 23, Clause (3) allows a sixteen-year old woman to renounce her citizenship if she marries a non-Malaysian citizen. This rule is based on the assumption that if and when a Malaysian woman marries a non-Malaysian citizen, she would want and would be expected to adopt her husband’s citizenship.
The basis for the Federal Constitution’s construction of Malaysian female citizenry can be traced to the classical liberal conception of gender and gender rights in the state-society divide. I neither argue that Malaysian Malay, Chinese, and Indian cultures were/are not patriarchal in their conception of women’s rights, roles, and status, nor do I intend to make “strawmen” of Western/British state and culture. The point that I wish to impress here is that the construction of the modern Malaysian state apparatus was modeled after that of its colonial master. In other words, the “import” of a foreign form of state must necessarily include the “import” of different ideas and ways of organizing social relations and institutions. This does not mean that indigenous or “traditional” forms of social institutions were static prior to, or discarded at the imposition of, foreign structures. Rather, the Malaysian politico-bureaucratic elite chose to focus on restructuring some dimensions of imported institutions at the expense of others. A key dimension left somewhat intact is the conception of women and the family as “natural,” hence free from state intervention.
According to the classical liberal framework, the state is the guarantor and protector of citizens’ possession and expression of civil-political rights. Social relations and organizations in public space are believed to be characteristic of, and dependent on, the exercise of instrumental rationality. Of the two sexes, men are constituted as the gender possessor of instrumental rationality since they must and do freely move between the public and private-domestic domains. 8
The private or domestic domain is a distinctly unremunerated work domain characterized by expressions of love and comfort, rather than instrumental rationality. 9 As such, the institution of the family is conceptualized as a nonpolitical “natural” unit of social organization. 10 Women, by virtue of their capacity to bear children, are located exclusively within the domestic domain wherein their identities are the product of two interrelated processes: women are ascribed expressive/affective rationality as opposed to instrumental powers of rationality, and concomitantly, their preordained role is to provide emotional comfort and reproductive labor.
Taken to its logical conclusion, women are perceived as incapable of possessing and exercising civil-political rights. They enjoy civil-political rights only by association with their husbands and fathers. 11 The liberal construction of women’s roles and status is epitomized or embodied in the rise of bourgeois society in the West, i.e., concrete manifestations of the theory of gender relations and family life.
In the case of postcolonial Malaysia, key legacies of British colonialism are assumptions that inform the juridical-legislative construction of women’s formal roles and status. Women’s legal rights are grounded in the belief that they are, above all else, primarily wives and mothers in charge of the domestic domain. Left unacknowledged in the liberal framework is that implicit in the state’s construction of women’s rights is the regulation of gender relations. Critical feminist theorists today argue that the liberal construction of women’s identities as wives and mothers has to be maintained consistently by legislation and policies “pertaining to the family, population, labor force and labor management, housing, sexual behaviour and expression, provision of child care and education, taxation and income redistribution, and the creation and use of military forces.” 12 That is, legislation and policies on a variety of aspects of social life surreptitiously maintain women’s status and roles primarily as wives and mothers.
Particularly in the realm of Malaysian employment legislation, the concept of equal pay for equal work does not exist. The assumption is that if women venture to work beyond the home, then they are expected to do so only temporarily. While the Federal Constitution prohibits religious and race discrimination, it does not protect women against sex discrimination. As late as 1994, the issue of sex discrimination in employment practices remained unaddressed by the state.
Personal income tax legislation constitutes and legitimates male social and economic control within a nuclear family unit. The Income Tax Act 1978, Clause 53, Section 45, allows a Malaysian woman to file her income tax return separately from her husband only if her income is derived from a recognized and registered profession (medicine, law, architecture, and so forth). In this case, middle-class women benefit from the legislation so long as they are engaged in a profession that is recognized formally by a community of peers and by the state.
The invisible contribution of women within the domestic domain is superimposed on to women who work alongside husbands in building family businesses. A Malaysian woman is not permitted to file separately if her income is derived from services rendered to a business owned by her husband.
The state penalizes families in which women are the sole breadwinners, while rewarding families in which husbands work outside the home while their wives either perform housework, or employ others to do so. Sections 47 and 48 (1) of the Income Tax Act 1978 respectively prohibit working women who file separately from their husbands to claim deductions for nonworking or unemployed husbands or for wages paid to childcare providers. Put succinctly, a husband is allowed to claim deductions for nonworking wives and for childcare, whereas a wife who works beyond the home is prohibited from doing so.
Arguably, middle- and upper-middle-class women can afford not to participate as workers in the formal economy. Increasingly however, many middle-class women are compelled to work beyond their homes either because of the personal desire to pursue careers, and/or the need to maintain the ability to pursue modern urban lifestyles.The NEP did not plan for women to be more than temporary workers in the economy. Zainab Wahidin argues “That Malay women received the benefits of the NEP is accidental for there was no explicit recognition in the policy that Malay women’s participation were equally important in the restructuring of occupations.” 13 When the state planned FTZs, it was assumed that TNCs would hire Malaysian (especially Malay) men. 14 When TNCs preferred female workers instead, the Federal Industrial Development Authority (FIDA) produced a brochure promoting women’s “natural” skill in assembling computer chips. The brochure read, “The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous the world over. Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care. Who therefore could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench assembly line than the oriental girl?” 15
By the late 1970s, approximately 80,000 Malaysian women (from all ethnic groups between the ages of 16 and mid-20s) worked in TNC-owned factories. 16 Gradually, public discourse on the consequences of young women’s, especially Malay women’s, newfound social and economic independence from men was framed in terms of the declining standards of female morality. The infamous Minah Karan metaphor emerged in public discourse to symbolize the perceived sexual liberation of all female factory workers. 17 Women’s economic independence would be conflated with declining sexual morality.
What little social and economic progress that Malaysian women achieved during the 1970s did not go unchallenged. The image of sexually “loose” female factory workers in a development era in which family planning programs were pursued actively while the marriage age increased and fertility rates decreased linked Malaysian women’s growing socioeconomic independence to the size of the future Malaysian workforce. 18
Within the Malay community or the numerically and politically dominant ethnic group, women’s independence became synonymous with Malay men’s sense of real or perceived loss of social and economic control over their womenfolk. 19 The 1970s Islamic movement, in part, provided men with a legitimate avenue for reasserting their control over Malay women. The state’s 1980s Islamization program would reinforce further the images of the ideal Muslim wife and mother. As Aihwa Ong writes, “The call for a strengthening of the Malay race required women to adhere to a stricter Islamic version of male authority and of women’s roles as mothers and wives.” 20
Scholars of Malaysian women in development identify two key consequences of women’s newfound socioeconomic independence. On the one hand, Malaysian men’s belief that women were more sexually approachable meant that working women confronted increased incidences of verbal and sexual harassment from men in public space. Rural and urban Malay women began to wear the veil, not only as a symbol of religious purity, but also for protection against harassment. 21
On the other hand, some Malay men began to forego the Islamic marriage contract that constitutes men as the responsible party for the economic support of the family. Aihwa Ong reported that wives of the Malay rural elite (UMNO members) petitioned the state to require husbands to pay their wives monetary “allowances.” She argued that the petition was not a reflection of marxist-feminist demands for “wages for housework.” Rather, Malay women insisted that their husbands fulfill the traditional male role since “land scarcity, widespread female wage labor and secularization in many cases reduced men’s customary obligation to be the sole supporters of their families.” 22
The state’s solution was to reinforce women’s roles as mothers and wives while laying the groundwork for a larger population and workforce that could support the labor demands of export-oriented development. In 1984, the NPP was introduced and incorporated into the Fourth Malaysia Development Plan:
Recognizing that a larger population constitutes an important human resource to create a larger consumer base with an increasing purchasing power [emphasis mine] to generate and support industrial growth through productive exploitation of natural resources, Malaysia could, therefore, plan for a larger population which could ultimately reach 70 million. 23
The NPP was formulated under the assumptive equation of more babies=more workers=more purchasing or consumptive power=more development. It was acknowledged then that the modernity project could not be fully realized unless Malaysian women strengthened their role as reproducers of the future Malaysian workforce.
To reflect the new pronatalist position, the National Family Planning Board was renamed the National Population and Family Development Board. The following incentives were given to Malaysian women to have more children: extended paid maternity benefits to mothers for their first five children (as opposed to the first three children); and income tax deductions or “child relief” was raised for the third, fourth, and fifth child. 24
It has been posited that the NPP was the official response to Islamicist assertions that women no longer were fulfilling their traditional roles as wives and mothers. 25 This perspective is only one part of the larger picture. Rather, it was the confluence of Islamicists’ demands, and planning for the expansion of export-oriented development, that finally brought the state’s gendered basis to the foreground as embodied in the NPP:
Indeed it [the state] could not offer any explanation as to how the figure of 70 million was to be achieved in 115 years by women having five children each. At the present growth rate of 2.2 percent, Malaysia’s population would reach 70 million in 71 years (i.e. in 2051) or 117 million in 115 years . . . Numerical juggling notwithstanding, it is quite clear that the Prime Minister’s message is that he wants a rapid increase in the country’ population and that is to be achieved by an increase in fertility rates [emphasis mine]. The best official rationale for this is that for Malaysia to become a great society (presumably like South Korea and Japan), it will require a policy of heavy industrialization. This, in turn, requires a large population to provide both the labour force as well as the domestic market for industrial products. 26
We know that the juridical-legislative dimension was gendered in its modern inception. The next logical question is, “Which class(es) of women is the realistic target of the NPP?” Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad would identify women from the middle and upper-middle-classes as the primary target groups. One newspaper quoted him as having said in 1984 that, “Women whose husbands could afford [five children] should stay at home to raise their families.” Another newspaper quoted him in a slightly different way: “In a situation where there may be unemployment, it will be good for the girls to have babies and let others [emphasis mine] be employed.” 27
The latter message was that women should not compete with men in the job market during times of economic downturn/crisis. The former message would encourage women from the middle and upper-middle classes to stay home and have children in preparation for a larger population and workforce that would bolster export-oriented development by bringing about “a larger consumer base with an increasing purchasing power.”
It became clear during the mid-1980s that the economy eventually would confront labor shortages in the twenty-first century if the initial policy of limiting population growth was not reversed. Hence, the pronatalist NPP was expected to increase the national birth rate by encouraging women to bear more children, and at the very same time, to quell the complaints of Malaysian men in general, and Islamicists in particular.
Since then, rapid economic growth has facilitated the in-migration of foreign workers and made explicit the need for Malaysian women from all classes to work beyond the home: by the early 1990s, the unemployment rate had declined to approximately 3 percent (see table 2.9). 28 Today, the Malaysian economy requires Malaysian women’s active participation along the productive and reproductive dimensions. In her keynote address at the 1993 International Strategic and International Studies’ National Conference on Women, Minister of National Unity and Social Development Datuk Seri Paduka Napsiah Omar best summarized the state’s position toward women.
But, however much we would like to rest on our laurels as a nation, the needs of the country remains our imperative. Women, the country needs you! In our effort to achieve the very realistic socio-economic target, as set out by Wawasan 2020, we have come across one enormous problem. Our successes, we find, have left us with a labour shortage . . . Now we have to lay the groundwork of our future with a population of 18 million [emphasis mine]. With a gradually aging population—also due to another success, good health care—our labour shortage will be exacerbated. It is only reasonable therefore that the government looks to its women as a reservoir of ready labour . . . It then becomes obvious where and to whom we must turn. It is to our women [emphasis mine]. But women are already burdened with the reproductive role. We reproduce society not only physically but socially. We are the nurturers. Should that the national interest be given its due priority, women must now bear the full brunt of the economic burden, too. 29
She exhorted women to assume their responsibility to economy and country by having children and by participating in the labor force.
In the early to mid 1980s, the NPP was expected to encourage women to stay home and reproduce and nurture future generations of Malaysians. Today, the state and the economy require women to bear children and to work outside the home. These messages seem contradictory only if we fail to take into account the underlying capitalist-patriarchal construction of women as appendages to men. 30 So long as women are located in and constructed as the gender in charge of the domestic domain, then their participation in public space and activities is required only in times of political and economic challenges. Modern history of the developing world in general, and Malaysia in particular, abounds with examples of women’s participation in nascent nationalist movements against colonialism, only to be relegated to the domestic domain after independence. 31 The state’s modernity project of Vision 2020 entails a greater emphasis on women—specifically the middle and upper-middle classes—in their capacities simultaneously as mothers and workers.
In addition to legislative changes designed to encourage women to have children, what other state benefits are there for middle-class women to do so, especially since the issue of who performs childcare and housework could prevent some, if not many, middle-class women from working beyond the home? According to the family rule governing the employment of foreign domestic workers, only married couples who earn a certain combined level of annual income, and who have children, legally qualify to employ Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers.
The gendered state apparatus is not interested merely in middle-class women having more babies per se, but that women reproduce the future workforce within a family structure that is acceptable. Only the middle classes (and upper-middle classes) who have nuclear families then are rewarded with state approval to employ Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers.
The income and family rules construct a middle-class nuclear family in which women’s roles and identities as workers, wives, mothers, and supervisor-spies of foreign servants are emphasized simultaneously in their service to the country and family. Given the level of entrenched public patriarchy in Malaysian society, the employment rules cannot but function to reinforce the state’s normative position vis-à-vis Malaysian women. Specifically, the interplay between the socioeconomic implications of the NPP and the state’s employment rules has the effect of what M. Jacqui Alexander, in a different context, identifies as the gendered state’s effort to “redraft morality.” 32
To be sure, the family rule insists that middle-class women who can be relieved socially and legally from performing housework are those who practice the patriarchal construction of the family. Inevitably, the state assumes a harsh and punitive posture toward those who require domestic help but who, for one reason or another, fail to meet this requirement. 33
Middle-class women and men who choose to remain single or who are single parents; middle-class couples who do not have children; and the elderly who do not have young children living with them are excluded, in theory, from the exclusive community of legal employers of foreign domestic workers. In practice, Malaysians in any of the above categories are able to employ Filipina and Indonesian servants by way of creative, DOM-initiated solutions (see chapter 4).
Aside from the intent to redraft morality, the choice of the nuclear family form is premised on a specific political economic rationale. The rest of this chapter discusses how and why the persons and labor of foreign domestic workers are indispensable in encouraging the expanding Malaysian middle classes to pursue a particular vision of modernity that strengthens export-oriented development and maintains social stability in the multiethnic society.
Creches or Foreign Maids?: Middle-Class Family and the Privatization of Social Life
Feminist scholarship of household relations continues to demystify or deconstruct the family by arguing that it is not merely an institution filled with love and care. 34 Rather, the family in its various forms cannot be adequately understood without examining the relationship between the (patriarchal) state, capitalist development, gender division of labor in the domestic domain, and/or prevailing interracial/interethnic relations. Succinctly put, it is argued that changing family forms, which accompany the shift in production from within to beyond the domestic domain, are consequences of capitalist expansion mediated through patriarchal and/or racial-ethnic ideologies. 35 The capitalist-patriarchal (and/or racialized-ethnicized) state is identified as a facilitator of changing family forms via social legislation and policies. 36
It is appropriate to warn the reader, at this point, that in the following discussion on the Malaysian state’s relation to the family, there will not be an analysis of ethnicity per se. I am aware that feminists of color have critiqued the scholarship of feminists such as R. W. Connell who, in the discussion on state-family-gender relations, fail to integrate or deal with the dimensions of race and/or ethnicity. 37 While I agree that race and/or ethnicity are important dimensions in understanding the political economy of many countries of the world, I argue that in the context of the family rule, which encourages the middle classes’ adoption of the nuclear family form, ethnicity paradoxically is not key to the state’s relation to female employers in Malaysia.
An argument can be made that within the context of interethnic relations, the NPP could be and was implemented with Malay women in mind: i.e., to increase the Malay population relative to non-Malays. Even so, the “family” rule that normalizes Malaysian employment of foreign domestic workers within the nuclear family form applies to middle-class women from all ethnic groups. It is in this sense that the Malaysian state is gendered without regard to ethnicity. As discussed later, the state’s ethnic-blind policy vis-à-vis the Malaysian nuclear family is part of the efforts to overcome ethnic differences in the construction of a modern Malaysian family.
State regulation of Malaysian employment of Filipina and Indonesian servants has coopted contemporary domestic service as a key educative institution to socialize employers into a particular kind of middle class-hood. Of the different family forms, the nuclear family is considered the most appropriate organization of modern social life that facilitates the development of capitalist market economies. 38 As Janet W. Salaff points out in her study of the family and the state in Singapore, “By changing the source as well as the distribution of resources, the state economic and social policies restructure the fabric of community and family life. Peoples not only become more closely integrated into a national market economy, they also enter deeply into the capitalist culture.” 39
Salaff further writes that, “As members of households become directly linked to the market economy as consumers, debtors, and pensioners, wider ties to the local community based on mutual aid are weakening. At the same time, these exchanges stimulate the market economy and empower the state.” 40 Contemporary capitalist development in Singapore is revealing of the extent to which the state is involved in what can be called the “privatization of social life” in which families are encouraged to turn to capitalist markets for the provision of goods and services.
Similarly in Malaysia, the processes of privatizing social life at the level of the household occur in conjunction with economic privatization at the national level, in which the state appears to disengage from the economy by selling major industries to privately owned corporations that, in turn, offer manufactured products and services to the peoples. A key difference is that while economic privatization at the national level is premised on addressing economic inefficiency in state-owned and controlled industries, the privatization of social life in the form of the nuclear family is premised on the real or perceived need to mold society in a manner that is conducive to bringing about and normalizing capitalist social relations and lifestyles.
The family rule governing Malaysian employment of foreign female domestic workers embody the assumption that the nuclear family is the most appropriate and “natural” form for socializing the Malaysian middle classes—regardless of ethnic, religious, and cultural differences—into a modern urban capitalist lifestyle. In the absence of alternative resource avenues that could be and were provided by extended families or households in the past, middle-class family members rely on the capitalist market for the provision of services. This level of dependence on the market increasingly is reflected in middle-class women’s demands for household help. The phenomenon of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia, and the structure and processes of the Malaysian-Philippine-Indonesian maid trade, are telling of the degree to which the transnational migrant domestic labor market has become a major provider of “privatized” childcare services.
The question arises as to why Malaysian women would elect to employ foreign servants rather than contract with formal or informal childcare centers/creches. After all, the growth of childcare centers also could be seen as an indicator and a factor in the expansion of the capitalist market economy.
None of the female or male employers in this study had ever considered sending their children to creches. Ostensibly in a multiethnic society, childcare centers may be a problem for Muslim families because of the potential for Muslim children to be exposed to “haram” or unclean food. Melina was the only one out of all the employers interviewed who either mentioned or implied that middle-class Malay families refuse to use creches for this particular reason: “I’ll tell you why, Christine. Guaranteed, if it’s [a] Chinese [managed creche], then there’ll be pork. . . .
If most of the employers did not consider ethnoreligious differences as a mitigating factor in the use of childcare centers, then what are the underlying structural reasons for the absence of the middle classes’ support of creches? Until recently, the state did not consider promoting creches as an alternative avenue of childcare for working mothers per se. Even during the 1970s decline in the supply of domestic servants, state agencies did not respond by establishing childcare centers at the workplace. 41 In an interview conducted at her workplace, Rose a mid-level state bureaucrat who employed a foreign servant, reasoned that there are “too many constraints [she looks up]. They are men upstairs making the decisions.”
Three interrelated reasons emerged from my field interviews of middle-class women who refused to send their children to childcare centers. The women were concerned for their children’s welfare while in creches; they wanted to be relieved from the more laborious aspects of housework; and they considered creches as institutions traditionally favored by the working class. Although the Malaysian state recently passed a series of legislation to upgrade existing formal creches and to regulate informal neighborhood creches, female employers’ fear of creches as breeding grounds for disease and abuse inevitably affected their decisions. 42 Over lunch at a country club, an educator and a corporate consultant, respectively said:
| Jane: | I don’t want my kid picking up diseases and getting into accidents. | |
| Karen: | It [creche] is not popular in this part of the world. You never know how they’ll treat your children. Centers must be professionally run. I don’t want any accidents with my children. |
The perception of creches as unhealthy and dangerous places for children is not the only or even the most significant reason for the employment of foreign domestic workers. The choice of Filipina and Indonesian servants over creches also is related to middle-class women’s responses to the practice of Asian patriarchy in the domestic domain.
Most certainly, a key consequence of the state’s modernity project for many Malaysian women is the promise of the freedom of choice. Expanded education and employment opportunities encourage women from the middle classes to realize their potentials beyond the four walls of the home. Nonetheless, the practice of private patriarchy continues to characterize household relations.
Regardless of different class, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, most Malaysian women are held responsible for the performance of housework and childcare. 43 Studies of professional women’s withdrawal from the labor market find the major reason to be women’s lack of alternative avenues for childcare services. 44 Conversely, women’s ability to secure domestic help have allowed mothers to remain in the workforce while increasing the quantity and quality of time spent with children. 45
Husbands of female employers in this study did not perform domestic tasks such as bathing young children, cooking meals, cleaning bathrooms, or washing and ironing clothes. During an informal social gathering in an employer’s home, Greg and his friend Sunny unabashedly announced, in front of their wives, their respective aversion to performing housework.
| Greg: | I won’t do the work. After a full day at the office, all I want to do is relax and eat dinner. | |
| Sunny: | If you want a hassle free lifestyle, get a maid to live in so that you can have her do all the stuff that you don’t want to do yourself. If you want to do everything and don’t have enough money, then it’s easy for you, don’t get a maid! |
Over the course of dinner at the house of a middle-class Indian couple, Joseph, Prithiva, and one of their guests had the following to say about childcare:
| Prithiva: | Look, you put the child in kindergarten and pick him up after work—sounds good, right? But who’ll do the housework: iron, cook, and clean? | |
| Joseph: | Don’t look at me, dear. I’m not going to do it. Why break your back when you can pay someone to do it? | |
| Bee Lan: | We are mortgaged to our heads. But it is worth it to get a maid . . . allows us to enjoy life a bit more. |
Enhanced purchasing powers of middle-class couples allow husbands such as Sunny and Joseph not to do any housework, while maintaining their expectations that domestic labor is and should be performed by the women in the household.
The employment of foreign domestic workers reinforces the patriarchal assumption and definition of who-is-supposed-to-do-what-in-the-home. Equally significant, the presence of a foreign domestic worker allows some female employers to reason that their husbands’ refusal to perform housework is biologically programmed and not socially constructed. At a different informal group discussion organized by Melina in her house, three professional women (a Malay doctor, a Chinese accountant, and a Chinese remisier) laughed when I asked if their husbands helped to care for young children, cleaned bathrooms, and so forth. One of them said, “Christine, you must know the Asian mentality: men just sit back and goyang kaki.” 46
Male employers’ refusal to perform housework was most evident during the course of an interview with Eileen, a Chinese female employer. Eileen and her husband had different expectations of the division of household tasks. As Eileen and I conversed in the dining room, her husband who was sitting in the living room barely fifteen feet away from the kitchen door, raised his voice to ask the foreign servant to bring him a cup of tea. While the servant waited for the water to boil, he looked at me and said, “I’m so sorry, she’s extremely lazy.” Minutes later, Eileen got up, went into the kitchen, and personally prepared tea for me so that the servant could finish washing the dishes.
The husband’s behavior conveyed the impression that the presence of a domestic worker in his home meant that he need not and should not have to get up, walk to the kitchen, and pour himself a cup of tea. Eileen, on the other hand, perceived the employment of a foreign domestic worker as a way to assist in the performance of household tasks that, according to tradition, is women’s responsibility.
It can be argued that marital or familial discord could surface easily as a result of male employers’ refusal to perform their share of housework while female employers have to balance the demands of working beyond the home and taking care of the family. However, middle-class families with dual income earners in an era of the transnationalization of migrant domestic labor have lessened female employers’ household chores without any major changes in husbands’ expectations for well-kept homes. Significantly, middle-class women such as Eileen, who employ foreign domestic workers, can safely realize the image of the modern liberated woman without necessarily challenging their husbands’ patriarchal attitudes toward the performance of housework.
Even so, Malaysian men, who wish their wives to adhere to their traditionally ascribed domestic roles, are hardly unaware that women in increasing numbers are transferring their household responsibilities to servants. 47 The following are excerpts from a newspaper survey of Malaysian men’s opinions regarding working mothers’ employment of servants:
[Women] should not leave the family to others.
It might be more economical for the wife to stop working than for her to work outside the home to have another source of income just to be able to afford household help.
It would not be good for your child, your own flesh and blood, to be inclined towards an outsider.
Because of my career, we were always on the move. I feel that because my wife took care of the children all by herself, my children were loyal to her throughout their childhood, helping out with chores. I think children who grow up in families where their mothers take care of them, develop a stronger bond with their mothers. They understand how mothers do so much for them. 48
Middle-class wives’ demands for and consequent employment of foreign servants can be read as a kind of indirect “challenge” to Asian patriarchy. Nonetheless, it is a challenge that succeeds in reinforcing the belief that domestic labor is women’s work since the substitute homemakers are women, not men.
The third reason why female employers prefer domestic workers to creches concerns their efforts to maintain social status. The employers considered creches to be the traditional childcare institutions of and for the working class, while wealthier families employed amahs. Meena, the owner-manager of a travel agency, stated the issue bluntly: “Creches bring up the connotation of lower class, like one step behind the middle class. You see, only secretaries and primary school teachers send their children to childcare centers. Why the hell would you want to send your child to someone else’s house for a whole day? It’s low status and demeaning.”
Well-intentioned state policies perpetuate the middle classes’ association of creches mostly with the childcare needs of the working classes. In 1991, the Minister of National Unity and Social Development offered financial aid to nonprofit organizations that provide childcare services to poor women: “We hope to encourage voluntary organizations to provide such facilities for working women who cannot afford to engage a babysitter or a maid.” 49 The assumption is that those who are able to afford domestic workers will naturally reject childcare centers. Consequently, there does not seem to be the need to encourage middle-class women to utilize state-licensed and regulated creches.
Today, factory shift hours have been restructured to lessen the childcare woes of working-class mothers: women can work the evening shift from five to eleven o’clock, while their husbands are asked to care for the children. Seen from a more critical perspective, the state’s policy is designed to strengthen capital accumulation by ensuring an uninterrupted supply of low-wage female labor for factory work. By 1995, it is expected that creches will be established throughout low-income neighborhoods to cater to the needs of working mothers. 50
State solutions for working-class mothers ironically reinforce middle-class mothers’ perceptions that creches are for those who cannot afford to employ servants. Representatives of formal and informal creches in bangsar and Ampang Jaya confirmed that their clients mostly were lower ranked civil servants, primary school teachers, street hawkers, and tailors. 51
Dual-career middle-class couples’ combined income allows husbands and wives to purchase and consume Filipina and Indonesian women’s labor. Foreign servants not only leave women from the middle classes free to pursue careers and other more leisurely and pleasurable responsibilities (e.g., helping children complete their homework) in the home, but also meet many of their husbands’ needs (such as having freshly ironed shirts and cooked food on demand).
Latifah, a Malay employer, who worked with Rose in the same state agency, succinctly expressed most of their fellow employers’ rationale for hiring live-in servants: “Even if they put one [childcare center] here [place of work], I must have a maid at home to clean the house so that I’ll have more time with my husband and children.” Rose agreed and added that, “If I’m not working, I’ll still need a maid. Let me tell you why . . . poor bones-lah! I’m getting old [mid-40s]. I don’t mind cooking but washing toilets, scrubbing floors? Forget it-lah! [She pointed to her legs.] Diseases of the rich [hearty laughter].” Foreign female domestic workers are a solution to the “diseases of the rich,” in that Filipina and Indonesian women perform domestic labor while reflecting employing families’ achievement of middle class-hood.
State policies on creches and the employment of foreign domestic workers reinforce middle-class nuclear families’ dependence on the transnational migrant domestic labor market. Female employers’ choice of foreign servants over other forms of childcare frees working mothers from housework and simultaneously symbolizes Malaysian families’ achievement of middle class-hood. The latter point is of extreme importance in the ability to understand the middle classes’ attitudes and behavior toward Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers.
Malaysian demands for and consumption of foreign servants’ labor have become an inextricable part of efforts by the state elite to bring about middle-class lifestyles commensurate with the requirements of export-oriented development, especially the expansion of capitalist markets. I now turn to an exploration of the state’s relation to the expanding middle classes, i.e., how the state elite and the advertising industry promote consumption-oriented lifestyles of the middle classes that are supposed to reflect progress toward modernity.
Two major consequences emerge from the middle classes’ pursuit of modernity via consumption. First, is the conflation of employing Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers with consuming and displaying material goods. Within this context, there are employers who fail to reflect on or worry about the servitude of their foreign domestic workers. Second, interethnic relations take on a new political dimension. The potential divisiveness of ethnic, religious, and cultural differences within the growing community of the Malaysian middle classes—who constitute some of the state’s major social forces—increasingly appear to be peripheralized by emerging lifestyles of the middle classes that privilege acts of consumption as symbolic of having achieved middle class-hood.
Material Consumption and the Pursuit of Distinction
The poor are important. And look, look, even if we redistribute everything, and it’s spread so thin that we’re all poor—that’s good. Consider the culture we poor have invented—vegetarianism and fasting, pencil sketches, pottery, singing without instruments, mending, saving and reusing things, quilting patchworks . . . and kung fu, which doesn’t require expensive sports equipment. Oh, let’s value the poor, who in a way are all of us.
—“Uncle Bun,” in Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, 1977
Societies currently experiencing rapid industrialization offer unprecedented opportunities to examine the relation of different social classes to capitalist development. Theoretical literature on social class in general reflects the codification of a wealth of intellectual endeavors undertaken by Marxist and Weberian scholars who respectively attempt to offer the definitive perspective in analyses of class stratification. 52 Although Marxist and Weberian analyses of class stratification are markedly different, there is an underlying common assumption.
Classes are assumed to be identified easily or preconstituted in the social structure respectively because of production or market relations. Ironically, in spite of different ideological and methodological orientations, the “middle class” is conceptualized in the center of the capitalist-proletarian distinction, or the upper-lower class divide. Whether or not the middle class is more or less permanently situated in the center of this divide is a related but separate issue. 53
Contemporary intellectual debates among class theorists point to a possible convergence of structure and agency in class theory as Neo-Marxists grapple with the role of human agency in class formation while Neo-Weberians admit to the importance of structural constraints in determining life chances. 54 Class theorists from both perspectives are beginning to acknowledge that class formation involves the material and the symbolic dimensions—i.e., the simultaneous processes of establishing interclass material and symbolic distinctions, and intraclass subjectivity. 55 Pierre Bourdieu describes these processes as “the pursuit of distinction,” i.e., the construction of distinctive lifestyles:
[B]ecause social agents are capable of perceiving as significant distinctions the “spontaneous” distinctions that their categories of perception lead them to regard as pertinent, it follows that they are also capable of intentionally underscoring these spontaneous differences in life-style by what Weber calls “the stylization of life” (die Stilisierung des Lebens). The pursuit of distinction—which may be expressed in ways of speaking or the refusal of misalliances—produces separations intended to be perceived, or more precisely, known and organized, as legitimate differences, which most often means differences in nature (“natural distinction”). 56
Of particular interest to this study are the following questions: How do members of the expanding Malaysian middle classes distinguish themselves from other classes? In what ways do the state and private sector capital facilitate the middle classes’ pursuit of distinction?
The above questions are relevant to the extent that the institution of domestic service is coopted by the state elite to police the form and content of the expanding Malaysian middle classes. Analysis of contemporary domestic service in Malaysia demonstrates how the state is involved actively in constructing an “imagined community” of the urban middle classes with distinctly consumption-oriented lifestyles. 57 As discussed, the middle classes’ pursuit of modern consumption-oriented lifestyles encourages, if not legitimizes, an overall desensitized attitude toward Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers—an attitude that dehumanizes them.
Rules governing Malaysian employment of foreign domestic workers were implemented during a period of rapid social change that was brought about by the perceived exigencies of ensuring stability in a multiethnic society while attempting to capture transnational capital and markets to fuel rapid industrialization. Specifically, the income rule was responsible for objectifying the material boundaries of the expanding middle classes to indirectly address criticisms that development had not benefitted Malaysians, especially Malays. The family rule today is charged with promoting the form of the nuclear family—irrespective of ethnic, religious, and cultural differences—as the norm for the Malay and non-Malay middle classes.
The assumption widely held among the middle classes that modernity can be achieved via consumption already is discernible in the mutually reinforcing processes of dehumanizing and commodifying foreign female domestic workers. According to employers in this study, membership into middle class-hood depended on three major factors: a certain annual household income level (between RM24,000 and RM50,000); a white-collar occupation and/or university-level education; and “lifestyle.” Lifestyle was defined further as having traveled overseas or having knowledge and appreciation of different cultures and peoples; ownership of a house or a condominium; and ownership of an imported car(s), the latest consumer items (such as computers and laser disc players); and the presence of a live-in servant.
For both the Malay and non-Malay middle-class employers in this study, the key defining feature of a modern middle-class lifestyle is the ability to consume or display what their income permits. 58 Middle-class consumption of goods and services offered by the capitalist market is facilitated and reinforced by the fact that all of the sixty-eight employers in this study lived in nuclear families. Employers’ parents and/or in-laws either lived in different neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur, or in other states in Malaysia.
In spite of differences in ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds, Malaysian employers’ definitions of middle class in general, and lifestyle in particular, were relatively similar. Implicit in employers’ conceptualization of the modern middle-class lifestyle was the privileging of physical comfort and concomitant aesthetic appreciation and display of material goods over the more traditional and conflictual issues of ethnic, religious, and cultural differences that have been used to construct identity. In this study, Melina a Chinese female corporate executive, was the only one out of sixty-eight employers who emphasized ethnic differences in her narrative of the lifestyles of the Malaysian middle classes:
For Malays, it’s the car they drive, where they live and what kind of house they live in. The women are always so well bedecked. But they have no base, they are not solid. . . . What I mean is that the government pampers them so much that if the government stopped helping them, they simply couldn’t survive. Ask any Malay, and he’ll tell you,“style mesti ada, duit tak apa” [it doesn’t matter if one doesn’t have money, one must have “style” over and above all else]. I’m telling you what is fact. My Malay friend [ ], he drives a Jaguar, lives in a nice house, but he can’t even give us his share of RM5000 so that he can join us in setting up the business I told you about. . .
The Malay-dominated state’s refusal to abrogate officially the ethnic specific aspects of the overall development policy fuels the perceptions of non-Malays such as Melina who believe that Malays, by virtue of their ethnic background, are given carte blanche entry into the imagined community of the middle classes. It is believed that Malay conceptions of middle class-hood are characteristically stylized or formulaic, i.e., ownership of imported cars, modern houses, designer clothes, and so forth. Significantly, non-Malay employers are not much different than their Malay counterparts in the pursuit of consumption-oriented lifestyles.
The NEP, to be sure, was an affirmative action program that privileged Malays in most aspects of social life. Even though the NEP’s successor, the NDP inherits this legacy, official rhetoric in the 1990s vacillates between, or is confronted increasingly by, the perceived need to continue to cater to Malay demands for state trusteeship on the one hand, and the necessity of downplaying ethnic differences and of instilling the value of economic competitiveness in the multiethnic society on the other hand. According to Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad:
In particular, the Bumiputeras are still far behind other races in business, especially in the commercial and industrial activities which, with the emphasis on industrialization, constitute the growth sectors of the economy. In continuing these efforts, the government realizes that it is essential to pay more attention to the qualitative aspects of Bumiputera participation as these have been given less emphasis in the past . . . It is time the Bumiputeras cease to expect to do business only with the government. They must go fully into the marketplace to compete. The contracts and the sales must be with the public. It is not impossible to reduce their dependence on government contracts. 59
Given the history of real and perceived interethnic contestations, it is not surprising that embodied in the development path are the dual processes of state production of similarity and difference. Development involves all Malaysians regardless of ethnic background. Yet, development structures, institutions, and processes institutionalize preference for Malays. In the same vein, the state constructed rules of inclusion and exclusion into the imagined community of middle-class employers of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. Within this group of employers during the 1980s, there had been a lower income qualification level for Malay employers.
Nonetheless, state production of similarity—i.e., to deemphasize ethnic, religious, and cultural differences—increasingly is stressed in the path of export-oriented development that, according to plan, will create a developed Malaysian society by 2020. For the employers of foreign domestic workers in this study, their ability to live distinctly materialistic lifestyles binds them into an imagined community of the consumption-oriented Malaysian middle classes.
This is not to argue that ethnic, religious, and cultural differences are overcome completely with the structures and processes of export-oriented development. Rather, within the context of enhanced consumption of goods and services, Malay and non-Malay middle-class employers exhibit a degree of commonality that characterizes the lifestyles of the modern urban middle classes. This is what appears to be encouraged in an effort to downplay interethnic contestations that, rightly or wrongly, have been identified as one of the consequences of the ethnic-specific NEP.
While the family rule encourages middle-class dependence on the capitalist market for the provision of goods and services, the task of reinforcing the middle classes’ pursuit of modernity via consumption primarily is left to the mass media, in particular the advertising industry.
Advertising Modernity
The contemporary transnational integration, consolidation, and expansion of media/information corporations facilitate the dissemination of particular images that reflect preconceived notions of modern lifestyles. 60 The expansion of open markets and free trade has allowed members of the Malaysian middle classes to be “cosmopolitans at home” without the need even to travel outside of the country. 61
[T]he distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information (newspapers, magazines, television stations, film production studios, etc.) . . . are now available to a growing number of private and public interests throughout the world; and to the images of the world created by these media. . . . What this means is that many audiences throughout the world experience the media themselves as a complicated and interconnected repertoire of print celluloid, electronic services, and billboards . . . the more like they are to construct ‘imagined worlds’ which are chimerical, aesthetic, even fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some other ‘imagined’ world. 62
It should be noted that the state maintains control over the mass media in the sense that the investment arms of major mainstream ethnic political parties such as the UMNO and the MCA own and control most major newspapers and even TV3, which in 1994 was the only commercial television station. 63 A slew of restrictive legislation such as the Printing Presses and Publications Act 1984 are used to regulate print media content.
I wish to stress that the advertising industry is not the primary target of restrictive legislation on the mass media. Such legislation is designed mostly to control the production and dissemination of information that is considered seditious. 64 For example in 1986, the Asian Wall Street Journal was banned for having published an article that reported bureaucratic corruption in a state-owned corporation. 65
The fact that mainstream political parties, especially UMNO, exercise substantial control over the mass media indicates state involvement in encouraging local and transnational capital to promote a consumption-oriented lifestyle for the middle classes. Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, speaking at the opening of Kuala Lumpur’s Sogo Pernas Department Store (the largest department store in 1994, in Southeast Asia), said that large-scale shopping centers offering “quality goods catering to the middle and upper income groups . . . [represent] another step in the standard and way of life which the people could expect with development.” 66
Implicit in the modernity project of creating a developed society by 2020, is the conflation of development with enhanced material consumption in spite of or indeed because of ethnic, religious, and cultural differences. The advertising industry, to be sure, readily assumes the responsibility for constructing and reinforcing the pursuit of modernity via consumption. Today, billboard, magazine, radio, and television advertisements in Kuala Lumpur promote yachting and golfing in privately owned recreational clubs as acceptable and expected middle-class leisure activities. 67 Culture industries’ 68 promotion of modernity in terms of what one consumes and exhibits or displays at the very same time (clothing, vacation, food, automobiles, and so forth), shapes the lifestyles of the modern urban middle classes. 69
The role of advertisements in encouraging the middle classes to pursue modernity via consumption was made explicitly clear to me during the course of the February 1994 Chinese New Year celebrations. Swee Ping a middle-class Chinese informant, invited me to a dinner at a hotel restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. There, she introduced me to her eleven guests as a friend who had recently returned to Malaysia to conduct research on foreign female domestic workers. Eager to ensure an uninterrupted flow of conversation, Swee Ping sat me next to Jonathan, a European expatriate who was an upper-level management executive in one of the largest and most successful transnational advertising corporations in Kuala Lumpur.
During my conversation with Jonathan about different approaches to advertising consumer products, he mentioned that the average monthly income of a Malaysian family was approximately RM1000. More importantly, he quietly asserted that a middle class did not really exist in Malaysia. I can only assume that it was out of his fear of eliciting the wrath of fellow dinner guests, all of whom were professional/credentialed Malaysians. 70 I asked him if his perception was related in any way to the average income level of Malaysian families that he had stated earlier. He assured me that the definition of middle class depended on more than just income level. Accordingly, he argued that “psychographics” or the analysis of consumer values, beliefs, and attitudes, were at least as important in identifying the middle class. I pursued the matter further by asking him if he meant that on the basis of his corporation’s research of Malaysian psychographics, he had then come to the conclusion that the middle classes essentially were nonexistent in Malaysia. And, if that was the case, what classes of Malaysians were the target group of advertisements that promoted consumer products such as imported cars, mobile handphones, country/golf club memberships, college savings insurance schemes, and Malaysian-British/American/Australian/Canadian college twinning programs? 71 The advertising industry executive laughed and said, “This is why you [Malaysia] need us!”
Middle-class Malaysian emulation of the model of modern urban lifestyle that is promoted by the advertising industry, and that commodifies social life by emphasizing material consumption, can and does take the form of wearing designer clothes, drinking particular brands of imported beer, driving European manufactured cars, pursuing certain kinds of recreational activities, and so forth. 72 In my interviews with at least fifty of the sixty-eight employers, there were discussions of the latest European fashion, the best model of European manufactured automobiles, and even different kinds of Western consumer products to import for sale to the middle classes. Implicit in such discussions was the manner in which middle-class employers, with the help of culture industries, construct and legitimize consumption-oriented modern urban lifestyles in a rapidly industrializing country.
In the last few years, print advertisements have played a key role in inducing the middle class to purchase social status by joining private multiethnic country or recreational clubs that have been established in major cities throughout Malaysia. Membership in these clubs depends on the applicant’s ability to pay one-time application fees that cost several thousands of Malaysian Ringgit (aside from monthly or annual membership fees), and occupation and lifestyle (e.g., professional and social affiliations). The middle classes in Malaysia, then, have their own recreational organizations and methods of recruitment that deny entry to those who fail to possess and/or exhibit the material and symbolic distinctions expected by and of the middle classes. 73
These country clubs provide stickers or membership “badges” that are adhered to front windshields of automobiles, thus, readily identifying the owner’s club and social class affiliation. 74 Indeed, I conducted several interviews at various country clubs because the employers insisted that their clubs offered a more private and comfortable environment in which to converse.
Affiliates of country/sporting clubs throughout Malaysia allow for cross-membership, and consequently club members are able to work actively to construct an imagined community of members who are bound by an ethos of exclusivity. Print media advertisements help to constitute and reinforce the image of exclusivity offered by country clubs while simultaneously encouraging or “calling” for potential members. The same can be said of advertisements in all form of media that sell to the middle classes the idea that the best way to pursue a distinctive lifestyle is to purchase, consume, and display high-quality foreign/Western manufactured goods.
Jomo Kwame Sundaram suggests that the consumption of Western cultural products is encouraged particularly because Western culture is the “lowest common denominator” in a culturally contentious multiethnic society:
Official reluctance to accept non-Malay ethnic cultures has ironically allowed vulgar imitations of imported Anglo-American culture to emerge as the lowest common denominator of Malaysian cultural life. The earlier emergence of shared cultural elements has been taken over by ‘nonsensitive’ western cultural hegemony dished out by the state controlled mass media. 75
Western cultural products are the most viable and readily available solution to balancing the demands of, or mitigating contestations between Malays and non-Malays, especially the Chinese, over the degree of each ethnic group’s symbolic representations in the multiethnic society.
My field research supports Jomo’s point. In interviews of individual employers and also informal group discussions organized by several employers, Malays and non-Malays insisted that fishmongers, food stall operators/street hawkers, and other participants of the informal economy were not legitimate members of the middle classes primarily because of different occupations (e.g., the manual-nonmanual distinction), and consequently lifestyles.
Over dinner at the house of an Indian bank executive, guests talked about the difference between a fishmonger and a corporate executive. The host, Joseph, argued that a fishmonger “acts and thinks in a different way, even though he can buy out most of us if he wanted to [meaning that the fishmonger rarely, if ever, pays his personal income tax, thus he would have more liquid and fixed assets than most of the respondents in the room].” His wife Prithiva an orthodontist, and their friends Bee Lan, a Chinese female accountant, and Din, a Malay businessman, laughed when Joseph used crude verbal and nonverbal gestures in his caricature of the fishmonger.
Prithiva supported her husband’s argument by giving us additional information about the fishmonger’s lifestyle. She said, “Do you know or not, ‘Ah Chun’ the fishmonger at the market has enough money to send his son to Australia for further studies? They have so much money but you’d never know it by looking at them. I bet that if you go to his house, it’ll [the house] look like a poor man’s house. He doesn’t even own a car!” Prithiva, pokes fun at members of the informal economy who may have the purchasing powers of the middle classes, but who cannot or choose not to pursue the middle-class lifestyle characterized by the appreciation and consumption of high-quality consumer goods—not to mention foreign female domestic workers’ labor.
Operators of grocery stalls in farmers’ markets, on the other hand, perceived white collar workers or professionals like Prithiva, in a very different light. Mrs. Lim, who sold baked goods at a farmers’ market in Kuala Lumpur, said the following to me after a man and a woman who were dressed in business suits haggled with her over the price of banana bread. They criticized Mrs. Lim for wanting to make a fifty-cent profit on the sale. As the couple walked away from the stall, she said to me:
I’ll see when they’ll come crashing down. Think they wear western suits, work in big office, buy BMW, use tai kor tai [colloquial Cantonese for cellular handphone], and they own the place? Hah, sooner or later they’ll fall. Arrogant bastards. Who do they think they are? We earn our money with our sweat and blood. What do they do? Sit down all day until they have no backside . . . and no backbone!
Mrs. Lim critiqued what she considered as white collar professionals’ real and perceived penchant for consuming or collecting material symbols of social status—especially high-end western consumer products—while denigrating those who would not or could not do so. Uncle Tan, the owner of a coffeeshop in Kuala Lumpur’s business district, had a similar view of white collar professionals who patronized his shop during lunch hours.
I honour them by calling them si tau [boss]. So long as they come to spend money, I don’t care. But I will tell you now, they are nothing like the si tau of your grandfather or father’s generation. These people have no values. They always want more for their money. They don’t realize that we have to make a living too. They buy expensive clothes from America, from London . . . but they don’t want to pay 60 cents for a cup of coffee. What kind of people are they?
Implicit in Uncle Tan’s comments was the notion that middle-class values and morals have not kept pace with their increased earning powers. It is this lag that reveals one consequence in which export-oriented development can shape the consciousness of the expanding middle classes.
The Malaysian state encourages and reinforces the middle classes’ construction and maintenance of status via the consumption of goods and services. For employers of foreign domestic workers, the income rule clearly delineates the material boundaries of the middle classes. Within these boundaries, the state elite and local and foreign capital promote the middle classes’ construction of status and identities in the form of modern lifestyles that are characteristically shaped by new patterns of consumption. Enhanced middle-class consumption of goods and services is key to the production of similarity in the pursuit of modernity. By selling lifestyle images, the advertising industry helps construct an imagined community of consumption-oriented middle-class Malaysians.
Arguably, there is nothing insidious about the expansion of capitalist markets that bring to peoples different choices and presumably higher quality consumer goods and services. However, the middle classes’ employment of foreign female domestic workers occurs within a context in which acts of consumption are promoted and valued as symbolic of personal and national progress. In this context, the in-migration and employment mechanisms that dehumanize and commodify foreign servants, together with negative public perception and discourse, then can and do legitimize the conflation of hiring foreign servants with owning the women.
Contemporary domestic service has become an indispensable part of the state elite’s strategy of consent. State involvement in Malaysian employment of foreign domestic workers inculcates Malaysians into new forms of social relations and organizations that strengthen the growth of the capitalist market economy, and that ensure social stability in the multiethnic society. In the context of the global expansion of neoliberalism, the state elite and the middle classes’ pursuit of modernity have come to necessitate and perpetuate premodern aspects of unlegislated live-in domestic service, i.e., the service and servitude of foreign female domestic workers.
Notes on the Epigraphs
(In order of appearance): Martha Lee Osbourne, ed., Woman in Western Thought (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 18 and p. 155; Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Ballantine Books, 1981), p. 194.
Endnotes
Note 1: For example, Malay Mail published an article on December 9, 1993, that graphically described how an unidentified female employer abused her domestic worker: “Among the allegations against the woman employer were pouring hot water on the maid’s private parts, smashing her head against the wall, pulling her hair, and poking her stomach with a fork.” Between 1990 and 1994, a cursory examination of the New Straits Times, Malay Mail, and The Star will show that relatively less abusive actions are discussed only in a few “special” articles. Back.
Note 2: “The growth rate dropped from 2.8 in 1960&-;70 to 2.5 in 1970–1982; the projected growth rate for 1980–2000 is 2.0. Based on this, the population is expected to grow to 17 million in 1990, 21 million in 2000 and to stabilize at 33 million in 2005.” Chee Heng Leng, “Babies to Order: Official Population Policies in Malaysia and Singapore,” in Structures of Patriarchy: The State, The Community and The Household in Modernising Asia, ed. Bina Agarwal (London: Zed Books, 1988), p. 164. Back.
Note 3: Singapore is another exception. In this case, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew explicitly introduced his eugenic policy by encouraging Singaporean female university graduates to have more babies in order to replenish a shrinking skilled workforce. See Chee Heng Leng, “Babies to Order.” Back.
Note 4: Essentially, Malaysian law derives from civil/secular law and Islamic law. In the early 1990s Islamic law remained decentralized: each of the eleven “states” has independent jurisdiction over the interpretation and application of family law that specifically applies to Muslims. Michael Peletz explains: “The state, for example, not only confines the jurisdiction of the Islamic legal system to Malaysia’s Muslim population, which includes all Malays but is nonetheless only about half of the country’s total population; the state also limits the jurisdiction of Islamic law to a rather narrow range of Muslims’ affairs. In terms of civil matters, Islamic law is largely restricted to what is sometimes referred to as ‘family law,’ such as the registration of marriage and divorce and the issues of conjugal maintenance and child support. In criminal matters, Islamic law is confined in practice to various types of sexual offenses, failure to fast during the fasting month and non-payment of religious tithes and taxes.” (“Sacred Texts and Dangerous Words: The Politics of Law and Cultural Rationalization in Malaysia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35, no. 1 [1993]: pp. 78–79).
I discuss aspects of only Malaysian civil/secular law at the federal level because it is the Malaysian state’s juridical-legislative dimension that constructs and legitimizes all Malaysian women’s civil-political rights. For discussions on Malay women and Muslim family law, please consult Betty Jaime Chung and Ng Shui Meng, The Status of Women in Law: A Comparison of Four Asian Countries, Occasional Papers no. 49 (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1977); Jamilah Ariffin, Women and Development in Malaysia (Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 1992); and Raja Rohana Raja Mamat, The Role and Status of Malay Women in Malaysia: Social and Legal Perspectives (Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1991). Back.
Note 5: “The construction by the state of relations in the private domain, i.e., marriage and the family, is what has determined women’s status as citizens within the public domain.” Nira Yuval-Davis, “The Citizenship Debate: Women, Ethnic Processes and the State,” Feminist Review no. 39 (1991): 64. Of interest is that as late as the 1960s in Britain, the former colonial ruler of Malaya, immigration law reinforced men as heads of family and defined women “only (a) in relation to men; and (b) through the heterosexual nuclear family model” (Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and The Politics of Feminism, eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991], p. 26). Back.
Note 6: Jamilah Ariffin, Women and Development in Malaysia, pp. 128–131. Back.
Note 7: Federal Constitution (Kuala Lumpur: International Law Books Service, 1993). Back.
Note 8: “According to the origin myths of liberalism, men come out of the ‘state of nature’ to procure rights for themselves in society; they do not establish the state to protect or empower individuals inside families.” Wendy Brown, “Finding the Man in the State,” Feminist Studies 18, no. 1 (1992): 18. For classical liberal constructions of the state, see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. with an Introduction by C. B. MacPherson (London: Penguin Books, 1968), and John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). Back.
Note 9: As is known today, the classical liberal construction and location of the family in the nonpolitical and emotive realm obscures the fact that as late as the seventeenth century in Europe, there was no distinction between economic and domestic life (see Louis Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family [New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1978]). The shift from a family-based economy to a family-wage economy (or, production shifted outside the household) occurred during industrialization. For more details, see Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: In the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan, by Frederick Engels with an Introduction and Notes by Eleanor Burke Leacock [New York: International Publishers, 1972]). Back.
Note 10: This is most evident from the writings of Aristotle and St. Augustine, to that of Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel. Wendy Brown argues that: “Moreover, because the liberal state does not recognize the family as a political entity or reproduction as a social relation, women’s situation as unpaid workers within the family is depoliticized” (“Finding the Man,” p. 19). Back.
Note 11: Carol Pateman, “The Fraternal Social Contract,” in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane (London: Verso, 1988); Wendy Brown, “Finding the Man”; and Susan Tiano, “Public-Private Dichotomy: Theoretical Perspectives on Women in Development,” The Social Science Journal 21, no. 4 (1984): 11–28. Back.
Note 12: Mohanty., “Introduction,” p. 23. Back.
Note 13: Zainab Wahidin, “Engendering the NDP—An Afterthought,” Paper presented at the First ISIS Conference on Women, “Towards and Engendered Millennium,” Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 7–8, 1993, p. 5. Back.
Note 14: Linda Y. C. Lim, Women Workers in Multinational Corporations: The Case of the Electronics Industry in Malaysia and Singapore, Occasional Papers no. 9 (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1978); Mary Hancock, “Transnational Production and Women Workers,” in One Way Ticket: Migration and Female Labour, ed. Annie Phizacklea (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); and Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (New York: State University of New York Press, 1987). Back.
Note 15: Cited in Ong, Spirits of Resistance, p. 152. Rosalind Tong writes that, “The fact that nearly half of the work force is female indicates that capital wants and indeed needs women in the work force. What this bald statistic does not show, however, is that capital wants/needs women in the work force largely because women’s work does not command as much compensation as men’s work” (Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction [Boulder: Westview, 1989], pp. 57–8). Back.
Note 16: Jamilah Ariffin cited in Ong, “State versus Islam: Malay Families, Women’s Bodies and the Body Politics in Malaysia,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 2 (1990): 171. Ong’s article is reprinted in Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz, eds., Bewitching Women and Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Back.
Note 17: “Since many of the women workers live an ‘unchaperoned’ life without male relations to supervise them or to provide an anchor to the rest of Malay society, some inevitably relieve their daily drudgery with films or discos. Whatever the circumstances however, all workers tend to be tarred with the same slanderous brush, and they have been accorded the popular epithet, minah karan, which carries the sense of girls who seek thrills, like an electric current, or hot stuff.” Judith Nagata, The Reflowering of Malaysian Islam: Modern Religious Radicals and Their Roots (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984), p. 73. See also Margaret Scott, “Brave New World,” Far Eastern Economic Review (December 21, 1989): 32–34 Back.
Note 18: According to the Malaysian Family Life Survey, 36 percent of all women between the ages of 18 and 29 were married in 1970. By 1988, only 12 percent were married. The fertility rate declined from 6.8 percent in 1957 to 3.3 percent in 1990. See Saw Swee Hock’s Population of Peninsular Malaysia for additional data on Malaysian demographics (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1988). Back.
Note 19: For a discussion of Malay male villagers’ rejection of contraceptives, see Ong, “State Versus Islam.” Back.
Note 21: See Nagata, Reflowering; and Ong, “State Versus Islam” for detailed discussions Malay women’s adoption of the veil Back.
Note 22: Ong, “State Versus Islam,” p. 269 Back.
Note 23: Helen Arshat, et al., Marriage and Family Formation in Peninsular Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur: National Population and Family Development Board, 1989), p. 160. Back.
Note 24: Pavalavalli Govindasamy and Julie Da Vanzo, “Ethnicity and Fertility Differentials in Peninsular Malaysia. Do Policies Matter?” Population and Development Review 18, no. 2 (1992): 243–267. Back.
Note 25: R. Leete, “Dual Fertility Trends in Malaysia’s Multiethnic Society,” International Family Planning Perspectives 15, no. 2 (1989): 58–65. Back.
Note 26: Chee, “Babies to Order,” p. 167. Back.
Note 28: The unemployment rate in 1994 was 3 percent. In the proposed 1995 Malaysian budget, the state projected that the unemployment rate would decline to approximately 2.8 percent. See YB Dato’ Seri Anwar Ibrahim, “The 1995 Malaysian Budget Proposals,” Speech to Dewan Rakyat, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, October 28, 1994. The entire text is available on the Malaysia website of the World Wide Web at the time of this writing. Back.
Note 29: Datuk Paduka Napsiah Omar, Minister of National Unity and Social Development, “Keynote Address,” Presented at the First ISIS National Conference on Women, “Towards an Engendered Millennium,” Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, May 7–8, 1993. Back.
Note 30: “Thus, at the moment, the increased participation of women in the labor force does not really represent an emancipation but is mainly a reconstruction of women’s role within the sexual division of labor.” Mei Ling Yong and Kamal Salih, “The Malay Family, Structural Change and Transformation—A Research Proposal,” in Geography and Gender in the Third World, eds. Janet Momsen and Juliet Townsend (New York: State University of New York, 1987), p. 351. Back.
Note 31: Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986); Wazir Jahan Karim, “Malay Women’s Movements: Leadership and Processes of Change,” International Social Science Journal 35, no. 4 (1983): 719–731; Lenore Manderson, Women, Politics and Change: The Kaum Ibu Malaysia, 1945–1972 (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Virginia Dancz, Women and Party Politics in Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 32: M. Jacqui Alexander, “Redrafting Morality: The Postcolonial State and the Sexual Offenses Bill of Trinidad and Tobago,” in Third World Women, eds. Mohanty, Russo and Torres. Back.
Note 33: Some might argue that the failure to qualify for state approval is a blessing in disguise that socializes able-bodied Malaysians to serve themselves, as opposed to being served by others. If the patriarchal conceptualization of the relationship between gender and housework is unchallenged, then women still will remain the gender responsible for the performance of unpaid reproductive labor. Back.
Note 34: It is in this sense that marxist and socialist feminists agree that the “family” is more than an institution primarily characterized by love. It also can be a site of women’s subjugation. This is not to say that both schools of thought are able to agree on the root cause of female subjugation. The more orthodox marxist feminists such as Margaret Benston, Selma James, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa identify capitalism rather than patriarchy as the defining ideology of women’s oppression within the family. Socialist feminists such as Alison Jaggar assert otherwise. The “compromise” (for lack of a more appropriate word) is found in Heidi Hartmann’s work on dual systems or the way capitalism and patriarchy interact to doubly oppress women in the domestic domain. See Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6, no. 3 (1981): 366–394.
I believe that Jean Bethke Elshtain has a point when she criticizes marxist feminists for reducing the family to a set of economistic relations (Public Man, Private Women: Women in Social and Political Thought [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981]). Elshtain’s call for the return of the family as a last sanctuary (characterized by love) that protects members against the social ravages of capitalism is commendable and affirms the experiences of immigrant ethnic women and families in the advanced industrialized countries. Still, her solution is problematic in other contexts because it obscures the kinds of unequal distribution of social and economic power in household relations that may and do negatively affect some, but not all women’s everyday lives. Back.
Note 35: See, especially Heidi Hartmann, “Capitalism, Patriarchy and Job Segregation by Sex,” Signs 1, no. 3 (1976): 137–169; Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family (London: NLB, 1982); Kate Young, Carol Wolkowitz, and Roslyn McCullagh, Of Marriage and the Market: Women’s Subordination Internationally and Its Lessons (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); D. H. J. Morgan, The Family, Politics and Social Theory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985); and Tilly and Scott, Women, Work and Family. Back.
Note 36: See, especially, Jane Ursel, Private Lives, Public Policy: One Hundred Years of State Intervention in the Family (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1994); Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979; and Catherine MacKinnon, Toward A Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 37: R. W. Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). For direct and indirect criticisms for Connell, see especially, Mohanty, Russo, and Lourdes, Third World Women; bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984); Jacqueline Bhabha, Francesca Klug, and Sue Shutter, eds., Worlds Apart: Women Under Immigration and Nationality Law (London: Pluto Press, 1985); and Nira Yuval-Davis, “The Citizenship Debate: Women, Ethnic Processes and the State,” Feminist Review, no. 39 (1991): 56–68. Back.
Note 38: “In recent years, the nuclear family has been seen as one of the roots of the development of capitalism in North America, Europe, and even Japan. The Singapore government is not the first to embark on family reform to encourage the capitalist political economy.” Janet W. Salaff, State and Family in Singapore: Restructuring a Developing Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 266. See also Engels, Origin of the Family. Back.
Note 39: Salaff, State and Family, pp. 266–268. Back.
Note 41: “Few government departments and agencies offered childcare support services.” Tan Poo Chang, Status and Role of Malaysian Women in Development and Family Welfare: Policy Implications and Recommendations (Kuala Lumpur: National Population and Family Development Board and Ministry of National Unity and Social Development, 1992), p. 14. Back.
Note 42: Child Protection Act 1984 and 1991, and Care Centers Act 1993. See Kamariah Ismail’s work for a discussion on the absence of state regulation of creches (“Childcare Services for Working Women in Malaysia,” in Women and Work in Malaysia, eds. Hing Ai Yun and Rokiah Talib [Kuala Lumpur: Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of Malaya, National Population and Family Development Board, Ministry of National Unity and Social Development, 1986]). Back.
Note 43: Tan, Status and Role of Malaysian Women, p. 12. Back.
Note 44: Rohani A. Razak, “Women’s Labour Participation in Peninsular Malaysia,” in Report of the Malaysian Family Life Survey II 1988 (Kuala Lumpur: National Population and Family Development Board, 1992); Tan, Status and Role of Malaysian Women; and Nor Alemawati Mohamad Zain, “Childcare Providers in Peninsular Malaysia,” in Report of the Malaysian Family Life Survey II 1988. Back.
Note 45: Husna Sulaiman and Christina Lam, “Family Care and Interactive Time of Professional Mothers,” Malaysian Journal of Family Studies 1, no. 1 (1989): 14–24. Back.
Note 46: The Malay phrase is used to connote laziness. Its literal meaning is to sit down, cross one leg over the other, and then sway the top leg to symbolize a level of comfortability with one’s surrounding environment. Back.
Note 47: And, there are Malaysian women who religiously practice patriarchal definitions of women’s primary role and status as wives and mothers. During the first two weeks in February 1994 The Star published a series of responses to a letter written by a Malaysian man on the virtues of beating his wife. Most of the responses vehemently chastised the man. Yet, one Malaysian woman insisted that: “Regarding domestic irritations, I dare say some women can really irritate their husbands to the point of misery. The common ways are constant nagging, constant demand for money, disrespect for in-laws, neglect of children’s welfare, gossip with neighbours, comparing husbands with other men, sulking, denial of sex, refusal to cook, refusal to wash, and long absence from home to mention only a few” (The Star February 13, 1994). Back.
Note 48: New Straits Times July 8, 1993. Back.
Note 49: New Straits Times November 12, 1991. Back.
Note 50: Interview on March 29, 1994 with the Deputy Counsel General of the Ministry of National Unity and Social Development, Kuala Lumpur. Back.
Note 51: Telephone interviews of representatives from four formal/regulated creches on 8 and March 9, 1994, and in-person interviews with three informal creches respectively on March 17 and 25, 1994, and April 18, 1994. Back.
Note 52: For summaries of the history of intellectual debates between Marxian and Weberian class theorists, see Stephen Edgell, Class (London: Routledge, 1993); Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, Class, Status and Power: A Reader in Social Stratification (New York: Free Press, 1966); Reinhard Bendix, “Inequality and Social Structure: A Comparison of Marx and Weber,” American Sociological Review 44 (1974): 149–191; Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Max Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); and Anthony Giddens and David Held, eds., Classes, Power and Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). Back.
Note 53: Weberians would conceptualize the middle class as permanently located in the center of the divide although each class contains status groups that have higher or lower status than each other, while orthodox Marxists would insist that the middle class, by nature, is “pseudo-proletarian.” Take for instance, the development of Marxist class theory. Marx, in Das Kapital volume I, argued that capitalist development would eventually eliminate the distinction between land and capital, and in the process lead to the emergence of two classes—capitalists and proletarians—with distinctly opposing interests. Marx predicted that the “dritte personen” of shopkeepers, lawyers, intellectuals, priests, and so forth, would disappear with the expansion of capitalist development because they were “unproductive workers.” However, by volume III, in which Marx had to confront the emergence of the corporation, he then revised his argument to allow for the growth of a managerial class (Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy trans. and ed. by N. I. Stone [London: Paul, Trench, and Trubner, 1904]). Even since then, latter-day Marxists have had to grapple theoretically with what is commonly referred to as the middle class. Some have remained true to the Marx of volume I by insisting that the middle class (“pseudo-proletarians”) is an aberration that, sooner or later, would be subsumed into the proletarian class (e.g., Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974]; and Guglielmo Carchedi, On the Economic Identification of Social Classes [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977]). Others argue that the middle class has become a legitimate class in and of itself (e.g., Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” in Between Labour and Capital, ed. P. Walker [Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979]). Back.
Note 54: Eric Olin Wright, “Reconstructing Class Analysis,” Paper presented at Work, Class and Culture Symposium, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, June 28–30, 1993; Scott McNall, Rhonda Levine, and Rick Fantasia, eds., Bringing Class Back In: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives (Boulder: Westview, 1991); Edgell, Class; and Malcolm Waters, “Collapse and Convergence in Class Theory: The Return of the Social in the Analysis of Stratification Arrangements,” Theory and Society 20, no. 2 (1991): 141–172. Back.
Note 55: “Class lies neither in structure nor agency alone but in their relations as it is historically produced, reproduced and transformed. That is, political and symbolic factors necessarily play a crucial role in the constitution of the middle class (and of any class, for that matter): class identifications, practices, and ‘lived experience’ are not ‘afterthoughts’ tacked on preexisting classes; they enter into the very making of these classes.” Löic J. D. Wacquant, “Making Class: The Middle Class(es) in Social Theory and Social Structure,” in Bringing Class Back In, eds. McNall, Levine, and Fantasia, p. 52. Back.
Note 56: Pierre Bourdieu, “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (1985): 730. For an analysis of the Marxian and Weberian origins of Bourdieu’s writings, see Rogers Brubaker, “Rethinking Classical Theory: The Sociological Vision of Pierre Bourdieu,” Theory and Society 14, no. 6 (1985): 745–775. Back.
Note 57: Benedict Anderson’s concept, “imagined community,” encapsulates the relationship between capitalist development, print technology, and the construction of national identity (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd. ed. [London: Verso, 1991]). Back.
Note 58: “Membership of the middle class is not, however, just a matter of levels of income and expenditure. It is sharply defined by social behaviour, reflecting what may be described as the privatization of the means of consumption, this is readily apparent from the contrast between middle-class and kampung [village] society.” H. W. Dick, “The Rise of a Middle Class and the Changing Concept of Equity in Indonesia: An Interpretation,” Indonesia no. 39 (1985): 75. Back.
Note 59: Mahathir Mohamad, “The Second Outline Perspective Plan 1991–2000,” in Malaysia’s Vision 2020: Understanding the Concept, Implications and Challenges, ed. Ahmad Sarji Abdul Hamid (Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications, 1993), pp. 435–437. Back.
Note 60: For discussions of the media’s role in constructing a consumer-oriented version of modernity, see Anthony David Smith, Age of Behemoths: The Globalization of Mass Media Firms (London: Priority Press, 1991); and Herbert Schiller, Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (London: Oxford University Press, 1989). Back.
Note 61: Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1990). Back.
Note 62: Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Political Economy,” in Global Culture, ed. Featherstone, p. 299. Back.
Note 63: The other two television stations, RTM1 and RTM2 are owned and controlled by the state. See Gordon P. Means, Malaysian Politics: The Second Generation (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1991). For discussions of intricate cross-ownership of media and other corporations by UMNO, MCA and MIC, see the works of Edmund Terence Gomez. Back.
Note 64: Zaharom Nain, “The State, the Malaysian Press, and the War,” in Triumph and Image: The Media’s War in the Persian Gulf, eds. Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner, and Herbert Schiller (Boulder: Westview, 1992). Back.
Note 65: Means, The Second Generation, p. 140. Back.
Note 66: New Straits Times January 19, 1994. Back.
Note 67: “With the booming economy, Malaysians have more disposable income and many more middle class families can now indulge in recreational activities including water sports.” Business Times December 27, 1993. Back.
Note 68: The phrase “cultural industry” was coined by the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. See, for example, Theodore Adorno, “Television and Patterns of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (New York: Free Press, 1957); and Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). Culture industries encompass the structures and processes involved in the objectivation and mass commodification of cultural symbols (e.g., particular kinds of clothing, sports and art). Back.
Note 69: Since Lazarsfeld’s “limited effects paradigm,” communication scholars continue to debate the effects of advertising messages. Lazarsfeld argued in the 1940s, that audiences actively selected information for processing. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, critical scholars asserted to the contrary, thus strengthened developing states’ demand for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) that, in part, was designed to protect nonwestern cultures from the massive influx of western cultural industries. The failure of NWICO and the reemergence of the limited effects paradigm in the form of the “active audience” theory (e.g., one hundred or more cable channels to select from) appear to resurrect the argument that media audiences are active rather than passive in processing of information. Hamid Mowlana and Laurie Wilson argue that proponents and opponents of the “limited effects paradigm” miss the entire point that the structures and processes of owning, producing, and distributing information, are beyond the control of audiences in developing countries. Thus, “the software aspect of communication technology, for example, in the forms of programs, shows and film, enters into a national system seeking to reflect some popular cultural tastes; the product in turn feeds back into the system and reinforces that which has already been found popular” (The Passing of Modernity: Communication and the Transformation of Society [New York: Longman, 1990], pp. 96–97). Back.
Note 70: According to an official from the Ministry of Human Resources, the average income of a middle class person in 1994 was RM1000 per month. The average income of middle class families of civil servants was RM2000 per month, approximately RM500–800 less than their private sector counterparts. Back.
Note 71: In the last decade or so, privately owned Malaysian colleges offering twinning programs were established, especially in Kuala Lumpur. Twinning programs allow Malaysians to study at a private Malaysian college for the first two years, after which they are sent to universities/colleges abroad for the final year or two years of tertiary education. In this way, the cost of sending Malaysians overseas for the entire period of tertiary education is substantially reduced. Back.
Note 72: See the following for advertising strategies to promote Malaysian consumption of high-end consumer products: Deng Shengliang, Smita Jivan, and Mary-Louise Hassan, “Advertising in Malaysia: A Cultural Perspective,” International Journal of Advertising 13, no. 2 (1994): 153–166; Jonathan Karp, “Paper Chase,” Far Eastern Economic Review (October 6, 1994): 70–71; and Jo Anne Parke, “The Case for Going Global,” Target Marketing 17, no. 11 (1994): 8–13. Back.
Note 73: “Class situation thus intersects with the individual at the point of the market to provide for the emergence of social classes. . . . [T]he particular characteristic of these social classes is not simply that some have reward and opportunity advantages over others, but that they are able to maintain and even enhance those advantages by excluding the members of inferior groups.” Waters, “Collapse and Convergence,” p. 149–150 Back.
Note 74: For discussions on the meanings that inhere in visual texts, see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974). Back.
Note 75: Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Growth and Structural Change in the Malaysian Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 230. Back.
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