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Hoo, Regina Lei Kim (2024) Pussy envy: towards post-colonial agencies of feminine corporeality. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)]

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Abstract

Since Independence, the Malay-Muslim woman’s body has been the site of various discursive contests imposed onto her personhood as a consequence of the conflict between the state and religious “dakwa” movement, and later, their alliance. Significantly, these changes have displayed a contradiction. On one hand, it has been made permissible on account of the Malay woman’s active acquiescence, in aspiring to the paradigm of “ideal” Muslim womanhood and its moral and familial obligations. On the other hand, various studies have documented the different layers of resistance to Islamic heteropatriarchal hegemony that Malay women exhibited through cultural and informal means.

This dissertation seeks to investigate how this contradiction manifests in an impasse in the Malay woman’s body politic through a met resistance with the conscious and unconscious aspects of her corporeality. It takes the curious politicisation of the Malay vagina as an area of focus. As a reproductive organ, it has been the site of oppression and regulation, mirroring misogyny that seems to be commonplace in much of the modern world. But the Malay context also reveals a certain limit to its pacification.

For this reason, the social phenomena of “bau miss V”, described as the occurrence of vaginal odour, the scent of which is unique to the individual woman; and “nasi kangkang”, a Malay folk practice that makes use of the woman’s vaginal excrements to bend the will of her husband or lover, are used as case studies wherein the vagina is presumed less as a pacified organ than it is a site of discursive contestations. Insights from the findings will be developed by way of Kristeva’s theory of the abject, to determine how insubordination to the Malay heteropatriarchy is manifested within the female body.

Item Type:	Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Depositing User:	Hoo, Regina
Date Deposited:	02 Aug 2024 07:56
Last Modified:	02 Aug 2024 07:56
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/76764

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