Gender, "Aliens", and the National Imaginary in Contemporary Malaysia.

In a period characterized by deepening disparities of wealth and population within and between nation-states, wars, and accelerated globalization, huge numbers of people have been displaced from their territories, brutally contained within them, or lost the freedom to move within or between national boundaries. With the relative cheapness of travel, there has been an unprecedented rise in the number of stateless people, identified by nation-states as either political or economic refugees (or even as criminals). There has also been the rise of legal and illegal labour migrants seeking temporary or permanent livelihoods beyond their natal state. Where the flow of such migration has commonly been from the South to the North, it has increasingly been occurring between countries of the South in recent decades (Abella 1995; Battistella 1998; Lim and Oishi 1996). Since the 1980s, literature on women as migrant workers has begun to emerge (Lim and Oishi 1996; Pettman 1996; Issues in Gender and Development 1993), and this paper examines the construction of gendered "aliens", particularly women as "aliens", through media stories, government policy statements and the treatment received by certain foreign workers in the case of Malaysia.

In so doing, I wish to argue that not only is contemporary Malaysia re-fashioning its national identity in response to "new outsiders" who are deemed the new "undesirable aliens", as also argued by Aguilar recently (1999, p. 318), but that this reconstituted national imaginary is profoundly shaped by ethno-nationalist, class-based, gendered, and sexualized factors. These new undesirables are principally labour migrants -- documented and undocumented -- from poorer neighbouring countries, especially Indonesia, but also the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. They stand in contradistinction to the long-established immigrants of an earlier, colonial period of global capitalist expansion, namely, the Chinese and Indians. I find it helpful to understand this process as a thoroughly gendered, ethno-nationalist, national imaginary, a concept which I explain below.

I am mindful of these factors as I write: women and men, often of particular ethnic and national affiliations, are differentially positioned as semi-skilled and unskilled labour migrants in Malaysia's public discourse;(1) the dividing line between legality and illegality is extremely blurred; and inter-government relations and geo-politics inevitably shape government and public discourses about labour immigrants. For these reasons, I see this paper as preliminary.

Having said that, my main concern is the differential emphasis given to gender, sexuality, ethno-nationality, and class in the construction of labour migrants -- particularly women -- as "aliens" (with all the negative connotations therein). To do this I examine debates concerning inter-marriage between Malaysian citizens and foreigners who are professionals as opposed to labourers; the "foreignness" of "aliens"; and the infantilization and dehumanization of labour migrants, particularly through a reading of media representations of domestic workers.

Some of the theoretical underpinnings of my argument concerning the notion of the national imaginary are outlined below, followed by a discussion of the Malaysian media (because this is the source of much of the material discussed in subsequent sections) and a section detailing the importance and place of unskilled and semi-skilled foreign workers in Malaysia. But let me first briefly look at the challenge that "aliens" pose for national sovereignty and human rights.

"Aliens", National Sovereignty, and Human Rights

Present-day terrestrial "aliens" are the living embodiment of a paradox that has emerged in the post-World War II era of capitalism, one that is encapsulated in the tension between national sovereignty and territorial preservation, on the one hand, and the principle of universal human rights enshrined in the preservation of the individual person, on the other (Soysal 1994, pp. 6-7). Globalization theorist, Saskia Sassen, locates the primary impetus for this tension as stemming simultaneously from economic globalization and a deepening international human rights regime (1996). As Sassen and others have observed, there is nothing like migration to throw down the gauntlet for government action. Indeed, it may be possible to interpret Malaysia's ongoing use of harsh laws such as the Internal Security Act, the Printing Presses and Publications Act, and the Official Secrets Act, as the government's fear of losing control in the face of criticisms and activities of non-government organizations (NGOs), such as Tenaganita (Women's Force) based in Kuala Lumpur and Aliran based in Penang, which have exposed the deprivations and exploitation that face foreign immigrant workers.

Whilst the Malaysian government has moved to investigate the immigration problem, by setting up a special committee, it has not made public its findings of a government inspection of immigration detention centres following the 1995 Tenaganita report of abuses,(2) nor has it ratified the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families.(3) Furthermore the government continues to harass those working on behalf of migrant workers and has failed to grapple with the issue of making contract workers' working conditions and wages equitable with those of Malaysian workers.

That there is not much political will on the part of the government, employers, or the public to improve the plight of immigrants is probably owing to the view that the country's future lies in the continuation of its hitherto rapid economic development; more specifically, that Malaysia must first develop economically (according to its own particular "Asian traditions" -- or "values" -- as Prime Minister Mahathir is wont to say) under firm political direction, before the nation-state can concern itself with political, social, and civil (that is, first- and second-generation) rights.(4) I also find it helpful to understand this lack of will as stemming from a re-fashioned national imaginary that renders these newest "aliens" as profoundly problematic despite being deeply useful to Malaysia's "development" and facilitating the rise of Malaysia's middle classes.

Alien Others and the National Imaginary

There is now a rich and diverse literature providing insights into the gendered, sexualized, and racialized constructions of the "other". Much of this draws upon feminist, post-colonial, and psychoanalytical theories in which the "other" is understood as indicative of the separation of the self from an other.(5) Respectively, "woman" is man's other (de Beauvoir 1972); the child discovers itself as a separate being upon (only partially) recognizing itself in the mirror; and the colonized subject is the colonizer's other (Said 1978; Fanon 1967). To complicate matters, Lacan also theorized the Other, with the capital "O" as the Symbolic Other "in whose gaze the subject gains identity" (Ashcroft et al. 1998, p. 170). Whilst this Symbolic Other may be embodied in the figure of the mother, the father, or the colonizer, it is not necessarily corporeal. It may be represented through a phallic, patriarchal, or imperialist order.

Racial stereotyping and the kinds of bodily inscriptions that diverse scholars such as Gilman (1985), Stoler (1991), hooks (1998), and Said (1978) have written about and that filmmaker, Fatimah Tobing Rony, has demonstrated in On Cannibalism (1994), have long informed us of the colonialist constructions of non-Whites as primitive, libidinous, chaotic, de-cultured, and objectified bodies, according to Western modes of binary thinking. Racialized and "classed" bodies, moreover, are routinely gendered and sexualized in such a way as to render them as objects both of desire and repulsion.

Such constructions have specific resonances in colonial and post-colonial Malay(si)a: for example, in the image of the "lazy (Malay) native" (Syed Hussein Alatas 1977) and the broader saliency of the "inscrutable (Chinese) Oriental". Other images stem from the ambivalencies surrounding European relations with Asians. Bruce Lockhart imagines his former Malay lover, Amai, in her forties, as a beetlenut-chewing, gap-toothed hag before meeting her after a twenty-five-year absence from Malaya (Lockhart 1936, 1932). European men spoke of their discomfort in the presence of "alien outlooks" when the idea of establishing a multi-racial social club was mooted in Malaya (Butcher 1979, p. 189), and a memsahib, frustrated at her inability to communicate, wrote of the "stolid yellow faces" of her Chinese servants (cited in Brownfoot 1984, p. 196). Another European woman wrote to a Malayan English-language newspaper in 1922 expressing her revulsion at the possibility of being confronted by "a Tuan along with his native fancy driving about together in a car" ("All White" cited in Butcher 1979, p. 203, my emphasis). Related images have been nonetheless potent in post-colonial times, particularly evident in the writings of the current Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad (for example, Mahathir 1970), and a series of standoffs between Mahathir and successive Australian Prime Ministers from Bob Hawke on. We have only to think of the orientalist imagery of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's television series Embassy, screened in the early 1990s in Australia. Set "somewhere" in Southeast Asia (as the opening scene of a map indicated), in a supposedly fictionalized, despotic-riven Muslim country called Ragaan, which featured certain requisite orientalist characters, Prime Minister Mahathir expressed outrage that it seemed to be modelled on Malaysia (see Perera 1993; Mitchell 1993; Kessler 1991).

The point I want to make here is that whilst a great deal of scholarly work has been done on the consequences of colonialist constructions of otherness for colonized subjects in relation to colonizers, there has been less recognition of its role in ethno-nationalist constructions and geo-politics within the region; for example, the ways in which Malaysia positions itself in relation to its poorer, labour-sending, Asian neighbours and the fact that Prime Minister Mahathir has been keen to establish Malaysia as pre-eminent in the region in recent years (as exemplified in his proposal for an East Asian Economic Caucus).(6)

I want now to show how notions of the other link with the construction of a "national imaginary" and indicate the usefulness of the latter in thinking about the ambivalent place of labour migrants as alien others in Malaysia's national development.

In referring to the notion of a national imaginary, I am borrowing from anthropologist Annette Hamilton.(7) Drawing on Benedict Anderson's notion of "imagined communities", Edward Said's construction of "the Orient", Emile Durkheim's "conscience collective" and Jacques Lacan's "imaginary space", it involves the all-too-familiar threat of "outsiders" to "insiders" -- as Hamilton writes, the "means by which contemporary social orders are able to produce images of themselves against others (Hamilton 1990, p. 16) -- which has intensified with increasing globalization and led to the kinds of discourses we are used to hearing in relation to refugees and most forms of migration around the world.

It also involves the imaginary as the space of the mirror-relationship. In Lacan's psychoanalytic tradition, this typically refers to the stage of infant development when the child "sees" itself in the mirror and does not recognize its self/itself (or rather becomes aware of itself as a separate being). In the process, it sees another/an other. By extension, the citizen fails to see that immigrant part of the self when looking in the…