Companionate Marriage and Contested Masculinity in Late-Modern Malaysia: Ambivalences, Anxieties, and Vulnerabilities

Abstract

Many parts of the world have seen a rise in companionate marriage, even though it is often imbued with ambivalences and anxieties, especially for women. Drawing on a series of mass-mediated scandals and on long-term fieldwork in the predominantly Muslim nation of Malaysia, this essay engages these dynamics, focusing on late-modern transformations in kinship and social relations and contested discourses of masculinity alleging that men are responsible for most ethical breaches and criminality. One of my two overarching goals is to demonstrate the value of providing a unified, historically informed analysis of kinship and gender that deals substantively with both normativity and transgression. The other is to analyze some of the diverse, locally specific ways that globally widespread sociohistorical trends involving the “loosening of constraints” and “increased choices” go hand in hand with new or more pronounced regimes of surveillance, discipline, and control.