Engaging with modernity: Malay women, non-Western soap opera and watching competencies

This thesis examines Malay women and their engagement with modernity. One of the most important cultural sites that Malay women can engage in contemporary Malaysia is non-Western soap opera. This television genre has been promoted by the Malaysian authorities as providing appropriate forms of modernity with culturally proximate values for audiences in Malaysia to emulate. The popularity of non-Western soap opera, however, has not been without its critics. Some have argued that non-Western soap operas corrode the standard of Malay womanhood, compromise cultural boundaries and undermine the state’s vision of Malaysian modernity. While this study employs audience ethnography to examine the consumption process of this popular television genre, it argues that Malay women are by no means naïve and unthinking viewers who passively consume non-Western soap opera. Rather they are more rightly seen as fluid consumers who engage with the consumption process as discerning viewers with sophisticated ‘watching competencies’ to deal with the content of these soap operas in a very subtle and complex ways. The field of non-Western soap opera consumption, defined by Malay women’s fluid engagement with global cultural influences on one hand, and the Malaysian state’s prescription of behaviour for its vision of a modern nation on the other, reveals something crucial about the continually renegotiated nature of the Malaysian modernity.