Paid to care:

Women’s experiences in non-profit/NGO work in Malaysia

Alifa Zafirah Bandali

2017

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of Gender and Cultural Studies

School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

The University of Sydney

Abstract

In this thesis, I revisit classical and influential feminist texts, mantras and ideologies
to analyse the experiences of women working in Malaysian-based women’s organisations:
International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW AP), Sisters In Islam and
Musawah, all of which are located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I argue that even in difficult
times, the women in my study continue to work for others because this is where they find
meaning in their professional and personal lives. I examine how they view their feminist
activism in an organisational setting and what this means to their greater identities. My
ethnographic study contributes to research on women and work, especially in the Southeast
Asian context. I identify how women are expected to use caring roles and emotion work
typical of the home in these working environments that also promote self-neglect and
overwork. While women experience trying moments in these spaces, they continue to work
for women’s rights because they are working for a larger cause and this satisfies them.

I follow Arlie Russell Hochschild’s emotional labour thesis to explore the merging of
home and work, and what this means to the intimate relationships women have to their work.
I identify how the idea that ‘work is good’, a common motto in these workplaces, functions
in professional and personal contexts. I extend Hochschild’s research to examine how
women’s intersecting identities shape why they continue to work in a sector that expects
them to give all of themselves. My research provides a gendered reading of non-profit/NGO
work focusing on the history of contemporary Malaysian women’s organisations, conflicting
feminist identities, how the personal becomes the professional, health implications, funding
challenges, and generational tensions in organisations that are rooted in wider feminist
debates.

ii
Acknowledgements

This study would not be possible without the generosity of the individuals who
accepted and encouraged my research. I am inspired by their passion, in particular the women
at International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific. The organisation continues to be
supportive of me, after all of these years. Thank you to Audrey and Dorathy who have given
me the opportunities to meet and speak to feminist activists in Malaysia and the wider region
of Southeast Asia.

It has been a privilege to work with Professor Elspeth Probyn as my supervisor who
has given me the strength to keep going and push the limits of my capabilities. Elspeth has
supported me every step of the way, and I truly admire her dedication to her students. To my
associate supervisor Associate Professor Tess Lea, the guidance and support you have given
me is unforgettable. Elspeth and Tess have been a great team and excellent supervisors to
have in my corner. I would also like to thank Dr. Fiona Allon for her early support in my
candidature. Thank you to Katie Poidomani of Edge Editing for editing this thesis in
accordance with university guidelines.

For those of you who know me, I cannot express enough my gratitude for the
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. In particular thank
you to Professor Meaghan Morris, Professor Catherine Driscoll, Associate Professor Ruth
Barcan, Dr. Anthea Taylor, Dr. Jennifer Germon, Dr. Liam Grealy and Dr. Astrida Neimanis.

I want to express my appreciation to my department’s post-graduate community. To

Christen Cornell, Grace Sharkey, Nina Serova, Lisa Hienze, Sean Fuller, Karen Wong,
Sophie Johnson, Karma Chahine, Jess Kean and so many more I cannot possibility list.
During the final and trying times, a big thank you to: Kate Johnston, Tim Steains, Mark
Peart, Paul Priday, Shima Shahbazi and Kate O’Halloran. Paul Kelaita and Sara Tomkins
who make me smarter every conversation we have and to many more conversations to come,
you both have enriched my learning process.

To my family, I am indebted to you for your support and always encouraging words
and wisdom. Thank you Nishrin, Aleem, Susan, Jonathan and my triangle Alia and Karim.
To my parents who have made everything possible Anvar and Naseem. Lastly, two very
important women Malek Bhimani and Shirin Jaffer – you both are always with me in spirit.

iii
Statement of Authenticity

This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work.
This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.

I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all
the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.

Signed:

Alifa Zafirah Bandali

June 23, 2017

iv
List of Abbreviations

AWAM All Women’s Action Society

AWAS Angkatan Wanita Sedar

AWID Association for Women’s Rights in Development

CAR Citizens Against Rape

CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women

FGE Fund for Gender Equality

FWCW Fourth World Conference on Women

HAWA Unit of Women’s Affairs

IMM Indian Independence Movement

INGO International Non-Governmental Organisation

IWRAW AP International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific

JAG Joint Action Group

JAG-VAW Joint Action Group against Violence Against Women

JD Juris Doctor

KANITA Women’s Development Research Centre

LRT Light Rapid Transit

MENA the Middle East and North Africa region

MFA Malaysian Feminist Activist

NCWO The National Council for Women’s Organisations

NEP New Economic Policy

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NGOs Non-Governmental Organisations

PAS Parti Islam Se-Malaysia

PO Program Officer

SCEF Southern Conference Educational Fund

UAFWHR Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights

UNCSW United Nations Commission on the Status of Women

UNIFEM United Nations Development Fund for Women

UMNO United Malay Nationalist Organisation

UPR Universal Periodic Review

USM Universiti Sains Malaysia

VAW Violence Against Women

WAO Women’s Aid Organisation

WCC Women’s Crisis Centre

WDC Women’s Development Collective

WLM Women’s Liberation Movement

WLMs Women’s Liberation Movements

WLUML Women Living Under Muslim Laws

YFA Young Feminist Activism

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Table of Contents

Abstract ..................................................................................................................................... ii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. iii

Statement of Authenticity .........................................................................................................iv

List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................................. v

Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1

From watching and doing to researching ............................................................................... 1

Hochschild as method ............................................................................................................ 3

Why Hochschild, after all of these years? ....................................................................... 12

Taking Hochschild into women’s organisations in Malaysia .......................................... 16

Women in ‘good work’ ........................................................................................................ 19

Thesis structure .................................................................................................................... 23

Chapter One – The history of contemporary women’s organisations in Malaysia .................. 27

On genealogy and Malaysian-based women’s organisations .............................................. 29

Malaysia’s colonial encounters ............................................................................................ 31

Women’s roles in resistance movements: Towards an independent Malaysia .................... 34

Post-independence Malaysia: Race and ethnicity-driven policies ....................................... 37

Enter ‘Asian Values’ ............................................................................................................ 42

Unity in diversity: The Violence Against Women campaign .............................................. 47

Influence of international and global women’s movements ................................................ 48

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 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 51

Chapter Two – Inside and outside of feminism: Are you a feminist? ..................................... 53

Feminist belongings ............................................................................................................. 54

Feminism at home ................................................................................................................ 57

Professional feminisms ........................................................................................................ 59

A concept-in-progress: The post-colonial subject in feminism ........................................... 64

Feminist ‘homes’ in the NGO sector ................................................................................... 69

Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 75

Chapter Three – The personal is the professional .................................................................... 78

Gendering institutions and workplaces ................................................................................ 80

Contextualising ‘the personal is political’ ........................................................................... 82

Experience as method: Women’s engagement in the non-profit/NGO sector ..................... 87

Blurring the domains between work and home ................................................................... 91

Complexities in doing ‘good work’ ..................................................................................... 94

Carried away with emotion .................................................................................................. 97

Switching off ........................................................................................................................ 98

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 100

Chapter Four – Breaking bodies: Looking after others and overlooking the self .................. 102

Women as carers: Gendered expectations from the home and their professionalised uses
............................................................................................................................................ 104

Women in non-profit work: Overrepresented and undervalued ........................................ 105

Private emotion management takes off in the public sphere ............................................. 111

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 Examining NGOs: A space for self-neglect....................................................................... 114

Individual and workplace responsibilities—Who shoulders the burden of thinking about

care? ................................................................................................................................... 118

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 121

Chapter Five – You have to fight for your rights, and for your funding ............................... 122

Funding realities: The politics behind women’s world conferences ................................. 128

Experiences on the ground: Women’s organisations and funding realities ....................... 132

Financial instability of NGOs and shifting workplace practices ....................................... 137

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 142

Chapter Six – Bridging the gap: Generational tensions in women’s organisations ............... 144

Feminist reworkings of Bourdieu ...................................................................................... 147

Whose capital counts? Emotional, cultural and economic capitals in women’s

organisations ...................................................................................................................... 152

Generational divides: Experiences of women in Malaysian women’s organisations ........ 156

Ruby: Profession – Passion – Pragmatics ...................................................................... 156

Wathshlah: In-between generations – Vocation – Career.............................................. 159

Natasha: Mentor/mentee – Mother/daughter – Matrophor ............................................ 163

The Islamic gendered habitus: Natasha and Ratna’s experiences ..................................... 166

Natasha: Family history – Education – Feminist activism ............................................ 167

Ratna: Mother – Accidental feminist – Activist ............................................................ 168

Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 173

Final conclusions ............................................................................................................... 174

ix
Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 180

Appendix 1: Details of the empirical study ........................................................................... 194

x
Introduction

When I embarked on my first internship abroad in 2010, I was heading to a

country I knew nothing about. My family asked me, “Why Malaysia?” I replied, “This
is where the organisation is located, they do good work on women’s rights.” I think I
had frightened both of my parents, their youngest (a girl no less) was going to be by
herself in a foreign country. Malaysia seemed far away, but once I arrived it felt
comfortable and like home. The day I arrived at International Women’s Rights Action
Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW AP)—also the primary field site of my thesis—I was
invigorated with their work on women’s human rights. What was only meant to be a
three-month internship extended into a four-month stay in Kuala Lumpur. I wanted to
continue working with the organisation and learn from the women in the office. As I
participated in many of the programs and projects, mostly from the sidelines, I saw
women give much of themselves to their work.

Working in non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is not particularly alluring,

there is little pay, there are constant pressures to overwork with no recognition, but
there is something about the work that keeps women there. I was inspired by their
passion and dedication to their work and from watching and participating I wanted to
research why they continue to work in the non-profit/NGO sector? What are their
motivations? How do they think about their emotional relationship to their work and
what does the work mean to them?

From watching and doing to researching

This particular period in my life led me to my PhD research, where I explore

women’s experiences in their work. The core of my study consisted of fieldwork where
I returned to IWRAW AP in 2014 and made subsequent field visits in 2015 and 2016
(see Appendix 1: Details of the empirical study). I chose IWRAW AP as my field site
for a few reasons. First, the organisation gave me opportunities to meet with feminist
activists from all over the world, and is the inspiration for this thesis. Second, I was
familiar with many of the women working at the organisation and I wanted to continue
to understand what the work means to them. Third, knowing that their work is difficult
and not something I could do myself, I wanted to open up spaces for these women’s
1
voices to be heard. Fieldwork often consisted of working out of IWRAW AP’s office in
Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur. The women I interviewed there were those who I saw day-
after-day during my participant observation. These women felt comfortable with me
wanting to hear more about their experiences and life histories and this led to more in-
depth interviews. Prior to entering the field, my curiosities of what I would find in my
research led to initial questions of what motivated women to volunteer/intern or work in
the non-profit/NGO sector; do they think they use emotions in their work; what are
some of the ways in which women manage their emotions; and how does the work
impact their personal lives?

At times I felt odd researching women at IWRAW AP, many of them are my
friends, mentors and women I respect, but I am also interested in opening up
possibilities between research and practice. Bridging this gap is a difficult task. Uma
Kothari notes the challenges in making a feminist intervention in the development
sector where “those engaged in the implementation of development [who] see
themselves primarily as practitioners, and therefore have little use for (meta) theory.”1
My research seeks to overcome the theory/practice gap to engage with theory in the
examination of the important work women do and often receive little recognition for.
Stuart Hall acknowledged that feminism is a major force in how we think and rethink
ideas. In the field of Cultural Studies, he argues, “It has, of course, brought whole new
concrete areas of inquiry, new sites of investigation into being within the Cultural
Studies agenda, as well as reshaping existing ones.”2

My research crosses the fields of Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and

Workplace Studies to foreground women’s experiences in their work. I return to
classical feminist texts, movements and debates. In Chapters One, Two and Three, I
highlight the importance of women’s movements and organisations in Malaysia, the
possibilities of women’s feminist identities working in women’s rights spaces and I
seek to re-energise the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ and use it to describe
how, for the women in my research, ‘the personal is professional’. I draw on iconic

1
Uma Kothari and Martin Minogue, eds., Development theory and practice: critical perspectives
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 51.
2
Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis, eds., Culture, Media, Language: Working
Papers in Cultural Studies 1972-79 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1980), 27.

2
feminist texts from Linda Alcoff, Teresa de Lauretis, Chandra Talpade Mohanty,
Elspeth Probyn, Carol Hanisch and others who have offered ways to approach current
debates within feminism, women’s movements and organisations. I extend on their
ideas with my own ethnographic research using their perspectives along with the
sociological approaches to gender in the workplace to examine emotion at work. Arlie
Russell Hochschild’s The Managed Heart imbues this thesis. The ethos of her 1983
study on flight attendants is reflected in its ability to take gender and emotion seriously
in the workplace, especially in service-related professions. I draw on Hochschild’s
methodology in two ways. First, I am interested in her concept of emotional labour and
its relevance to my study of women working in NGOs. Second, I draw on her
ethnographic account of flight attendants to follow women at work. I build on her
emotional labour thesis to include the feeling body and take from feminist reworkings
such as Diane Reay who has taken Pierre Bourdieu’s work on capital and habitus to
include a gendered perspective that allows us to develop and expand on his ideas. Her
readings of the affective gendered habitus and the construction of emotional capital as a
gendered capital are explored in Chapter Six to discuss the generational tensions in
women’s activism.3 Here I turn to my use of Hochschild’s ground-breaking research on
emotion in the workplace.

Hochschild as method

Before delving into Hochschild’s concepts and research, I want to flag that I use
the term work beyond its common sense understanding of what work is. I am interested
in what forms of labour are involved and the meaning behind work for the women in
my study.4 I use work to focus on the mundane tasks women engage in on a daily basis,
along with what it represents. Women in non-profit/NGOs gain satisfaction from their
work because it gives them a sense of self-fulfillment through an exchange of their
labour. This is more evident in my discussion of ‘good work’, a central theme in my
thesis and one that I use to examine women’s justification to overwork and the self-

3
Jenna Ward and Robert McMurray, The Dark Side of Emotional Labour (New York: Routledge, 2016),
92.
4
Lynne Pettinger, Jane Parry, Rebecca Taylor and Miriam Glucksmann, eds., A New Sociology of Work
(MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 9.

3
neglect they experience. In Chapter Four, I use this justification of self-sacrifice through
Marcel Mauss’ analysis on the gift exchange to investigate how women’s health is
affected by overcommitting themselves to their work.

Hochschild’s The Managed Heart is a pivotal text in how to explore human

emotions and how they are managed in the workplace. She uncovers the socialization of
emotions where private feelings are utilised in waged labour. The book is divided into
two parts. Part One/Private Life captures some of her main concerns and concepts that
individuals regulate in their daily lives. Part Two/Public Life describes what happens
when emotions are commodified and put to corporate use. Hochschild’s study (based in
the United States) provides an in-depth qualitative account of flight attendants, an
occupation reliant on emotional labour demands. Her emotional labour thesis has
contributed significantly to the debates on the role of emotions in not only the private
sphere but exposes jobs that require workers to engage in managing their emotions for
pay.

Hochschild’s analyses of emotion traces the term using both social and
psychological lenses. Hochschild’s article, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rulings, and Social
Structure” (which precedes the publication of The Managed Heart) digs deeper into the
origins of the word emotion. In this article Hochschild “proposes an emotion
management perspective as a lens through which to inspect the self, interaction and
structure.”5 The article is an exploration of how emotion can be viewed and assessed,
and Hochschild draws on Goffman’s and Freud’s theorisations of emotion. While I do
not focus on the term emotion and its origins in my thesis—for example, which
perspective (biological or psychological) is best suited for my own analysis—I focus on
Hochschild’s ideas on the socialisation of emotion, particularly her discussion of how
emotion relies on external factors and is constructed through socialisation via feeling
rules.

Hochschild’s emotional labour thesis has opened up the concept of work and
especially labour to encompass more than physical or mental aspects. Her research has
become influential “in academic disciplines as varied as organizational studies, critical

5
Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,” American Journal of
Sociology 85, no. 3 (1979): 551, http://jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/2778583.

4
management studies, human resource management, nursing, psychology and
sociology.”6 Robert McMurray and Jenna Ward’s The Dark Side of Emotional Labour
follows Hochschild’s original study to make a case for using her concepts in professions
where emotional labour is rewarding and positive.7 Realising the importance of
Hochschild’s 1983 study today, they argue:

What Hochschild’s work does highlight in sociological terms is the need to

understand such work-based performances as inherently complex emotional
interactions that shape and are shaped by our approach to organizing.8

Hochschild draws our attention to how emotion allows us to feel, and functions
as a form of labour. In So How’s the Family? Hochschild argues that without emotion
the world loses colour and meaning.9 She evaluates the underrated role of emotional
labour expected of certain forms of work. Drawing on her concepts and ethnographic
methodology, my study is informed by women’s experiences in their work that is
connected to their overall identities. In this way, Hochschild as method, frames my
study to examine: why women engage in work that is centred on the needs of others; the
gendered nature of their work; how the division of labour from the home extends into
the workplace through caring and emotional dispositions; and how women’s
intersecting identities blur the private and public spheres.

One of the major contributions of Hochschild’s ethnographic findings is the

importance of both personal and professional boundaries and the blurring of these
spaces. A common theme in Hochschild’s research, especially The Time Bind and The
Second Shift, is the merging of home and work and related shifts in home-work life
identities.10 The Time Bind, unlike The Managed Heart, follows workers into the home
and illustrates how home life has become work and work life has become represented as

6
McMurray and Ward, eds., The Dark Side of Emotional Labour, 6.
7
Ibid., 120.
8
Ibid., 6.
9
Arlie Russell Hochschild, So How’s the Family?: And Other Essays (CA: University of California
Press, 2013), 4, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/10.1525/j.ctt3fh2gr.
10
See also Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Time Bind: when work becomes home and home becomes work
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997); and Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Second Shift: working parents
and the revolution at home (New York: Viking, 1989), 44.

5
“home.” Here she traces AMERCO’s (A Fortune 500 Company based in the United
States) new family policy and its failure to make women and men take advantage of the
parental leave and part-time work arrangements available.11 The Second Shift focuses on
the intimate and complicated relationships of married couples (also located in the
United States), looking at how they view the gender division of labour at home and how
perceptions of equality were not necessarily reflected in their reality. Gender is central
to Hochschild’s research, revealing how identities are blurred in the workplace. While I
focus on Hochschild’s analysis from The Managed Heart, her greater impact on
research extends beyond the discipline of sociology as she foregrounds women’s
experiences in work, highlighting the gendered issues that arise in women’s increasing
participation in the workforce. Hochschild conveys the meaning of human relationships
and the network of obligation, emotion and care that bind people together.12

At the conceptual level, Hochschild gives us three key terms to use as tools,
including: feeling rules, emotion management and emotional labour. I begin by
discussing feeling rules because it is through them that Hochschild sets up the ideas of
emotion management and emotional labour. Feeling rules rely on what a person should
do in a given situation where outward emotion is expressed. In The Managed Heart,
Hochschild argues feeling rules are dependent upon context, culture, society and
location, suggesting: “Different social groups probably have special ways in which they
recognize feeling rules and give rule reminders, and the rules themselves probably vary
from group to group.”13 They rely on a consensus of what is acceptable and from there
assume a natural disposition of how emotion should be expressed in differing social
situations. Feeling rules are not an individual act of expressing emotion, but are based
on external factors, such as other actors who interpret what emotion is expressed and if
it follows the rules of a particular context. If feeling rules are socially constructed how
do we recognise them? According to Hochschild:

11
Irene Gotz, “Encountering Arlie Hochschild’s Concept of ‘Emotional Labor’,” In Pathways to
Empathy: New Studies on Commodification, Emotional Labor, and Time Binds, eds. Gertraud Koch and
Stefanie Everke Buchanan (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013), 184.
12
Amy S. Wharton, “The Sociology of Arlie Hochschild,” Work and Occupations 38, no. 4 (2011): 464,
doi: 10.1177/0730888411418921.
13
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 57.

6
 We do so by inspecting how we assess our feelings, how other people assess our
emotional display, and by sanctions issuing from ourselves and from them.
Different social groups probably have special ways in which they recognize
feeling rules and give rule reminders, and the rules themselves probably vary
from group to group…We also know feeling rules by the way others react to
what they think we are feeling. These external reactions or “claims”—both as
they are intended and as they are interpreted—vary in directness or strength.14

From Hochschild’s analysis of feeling rules, we can begin to understand the

connections between emotion management and emotional labour. It is clear in The
Managed Heart how emotions are socialised and are based upon various factors, such
as culture and context that shape how they are interpreted, resulting in set norms
governing how one should act and respond to situations. Feeling rules were apparent in
various forms across my research. For some of the women I interviewed it was how
they discussed their feminist identities depending on which audiences they were
speaking to. For others, it was how they moved in their working environments and
spaces where they had to embody their feminist activism. Feeling rules also extended
into spaces where workers engaged with participants of training programs and projects.
Often overseas programs and projects called for NGO workers to negotiate their own
identities within the limitations of representing the organisation, and this proved
challenging for the women in my research because working with women from differing
backgrounds was something they had to do, but not something they received training in.
The ease with which they handled these interactions was learned through experience.
Feeling rules then, in my research, came across in the standards of applying the ‘right’
emotions in conversation and interactions with others. As Hochschild argues “what is
rightly owed and owing in currency of feeling.”15 Furthermore, it is through feeling
rules we know what is owed in social encounters from our respected roles. As
Hochschild states, “We pay tribute to each other in the currency of the managing act. In
interaction we pay, overpay, underpay, play with paying, acknowledge our dues, and
pretend to pay, or acknowledge what is emotionally due to another person.”16 These

14
Ibid., 57-58.
15
Ibid., 18.
16
Ibid.

7
invisible rules enforce the notions of what emotions are expected and in what spaces. In
Chapter Three, I discuss this in relation to Sanyu’s experiences, one of my research
participants and a program officer at IWRAW AP, when she describes her role working
at a Gender Recovery Hospital in Nairobi, Kenya. She is told to control her emotions in
this particular environment and uses this early moment in her career to think through
how she wants to proceed working on women’s rights.

The second integral concept of Hochschild’s research is emotion management. It

is the term that follows feeling rules and gives us an entry point to discuss emotional
labour. Emotion management relies on the interactive account of emotion and how
feelings are constructed in the way we conduct ourselves both publically and privately.
Feeling rules guide emotion work by “establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation
that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of
observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a ways of talking
about them.”17 The primary connection between the terms feeling rules and emotion
management is how feeling rules govern emotion management by defining emotion.18
The gendering of emotion management is encapsulated by women taking on the role of
the emotion manager in the home as an offering and trade for economic support.19 A
woman offers this type of work to the man as a gift of labour she feels responsible for.
Using this gendered approach to emotion management illustrates how emotion work
relies on prescribed gender stereotypes, where the old idea or stereotype that women are
responsible for housework travels into categorisations of certain professions as feminine
and masculine. This is seen in how some working environments supposedly call for
‘feminine’ traits including caring and compassion. Tyler and Taylor also explore the
experiences of flight attendants in their research but through a feminist reworking of
Marcel Mauss’ The Gift. Their research is highlighted in Chapter Four to convey what
they call the ‘Exchange of Aesthetics’ that is embedded in the gendering of roles and
characteristics ascribed to women.

17
Ibid., 57.
18
Catherine Theodosius, “Recovering Emotion from Emotion Management,” Sociology 40, no. 5 (2006):
895, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/42858247.
19
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 20.

8
 When women’s roles as emotion managers from the home become
commodified, their labour is exchanged for value. This commodification happens
through a process called transmutation. As Hochschild writes she needs “a grand word
to point out a coherent pattern between occurrences that would otherwise seem totally
unconnected.”20 Hochschild’s discussion of transmutation is determined by the link
between a private act, for example attempting to enjoy a party, and a public act, such as
summoning up good feeling for a customer. She argues that transmutation relies on
three aspects of emotional life:

Emotion work, feeling rules and social exchange…Emotion work is no longer a

private act but a public act, feeling rules are no longer simply matters of
personal discretion, negotiated with another person in private but are spelled out
publically, social exchange is forced into narrow channels.21

After the transmutation is complete and private emotion work is exchanged for
commercial value, the commodification of private emotions then becomes a part of a
person’s job — this is what Hochschild calls emotional labour. This labour requires:

One to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance

that produces the proper state of mind in others—in this case, the sense of being
cared for in a convivial and safe place. This kind of labour calls for a
coordination of mind and feeling, and sometimes draws on a source of the self
that we honour as deep and integral to our individuality.22

Hochschild coined the term emotion labour, which includes how various aspects
of one’s identity have to work together, such as one’s ability to induce or suppress
emotion also involves one’s capability to act according to what is needed in a particular
context and situation. One of the problems with practicing emotional labour is:

Often part of an individual’s job to accept uneven exchanges, to be treated with

disrespect or anger by a client, all the while closeting into fantasy the anger one

20
Ibid., 19.
21
Ibid., 118-119.
22
Ibid., 7.

9
 would respond with. Where the customer is king, unequal exchanges are normal,
and from the beginning customer and client assume different rights to feeling
and display.23

The unequal exchanges between an individual and their job and their client, puts
the individual in a subordinate position where they have little agency. Workers use
emotional labour as a method to keep this relationship in favour of the client, leaving
them to internalise their ‘real’ feelings. Finally, as a term emotional labour has been
used to describe how the management of feeling creates publicly observable facial and
bodily display; emotional labour is sold for a wage and therefore has exchange value.24
Thinking about its presence in NGOs, Kathleen O’Reilly argues that NGO fieldworkers
are being pushed to use emotional labour practices in their work. For example, her
research found that NGO fieldworkers were told and trained to be empathetic to their
clients’ situations.25 Her research is focused on the Indian context where she has been
involved in many development projects. She captures the shifts towards a more
professionalised approach used by NGOs. The ‘corporate’ approach is increasingly
becoming an issue in non-profits and NGOs. On the one hand, many older activists and
experienced NGO fieldworkers are adamant about the altruistic grounding of NGOs and
on the other hand, those who are entering this profession see it as a career that involves
their passion.

In The Managed Heart, Hochschild illustrates that “The friction between

company speed-up and worker slowdown extends beyond display to emotional
labour.”26 She argues that when emotional expression enters the public realm, the
transmutation of emotion management to emotional labour occurs. Emotional labour
requires a service worker to utilise two types of acting methods: surface acting and deep
acting. Surface acting is “the art of an eyebrow raise here, an upper lip tightened there.
The actor does not really experience the world from an imperial viewpoint, but he

23
Ibid., 85-86.
24
Ibid., 7.
Kathleen O’Reilly, “‘We Are Not Contractors’: Professionalizing the Interactive Service Work of
25

NGOs in Rajasthan, India,” Economic Geography 87, no.2 (2011): 207-212.

26
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 128.

10
works at seeming to.”27 Deep acting methods are what really make up emotional labour.
She states, “There are two ways of doing deep acting. One is directly exhorting feeling,
the other by making indirect use of a trained imagination. Only the second is true
method acting.” Hochschild looks to Stanislawski’s method acting techniques to define
deep acting in her study. In this method, emotions are recalled from a personal
emotional memory. This is where one’s personal identity is blurred into one’s
professional identity.

For Hochschild deep acting methods can be dangerous for non-actors. It

rearranges a service worker’s personality in that she is selling her feelings as a
commodity; therefore deep acting is done too successfully. When flight attendants over-
identified with their work, and began to see their own identity as inextricable from the
image the company set out to portray, they are unable to distinguish clearly between
themselves and their roles.28 From this, we are able to see how performing at work
impacts one’s private life and how private life is used as a resource for work life. Using
life experience and the intersections of one’s identity is encouraged in NGO work.
Where this becomes difficult, is when the use of personal emotion is accepted.
Women’s personal lives are taken for granted.

Performing emotional labour presented by Ashforth and Humphrey is

“characterized as threatening one’s sense of authentic selfhood in that it requires
workers to evoke certain types of emotions while suppressing others.”29 What happened
evoked certain types of emotion while others are suppressed has been researched in
various service sector occupations. Some of the women in my research made the
conscious effort to manage their emotions. They understood that whether it was getting
along with colleagues in the office, attending conferences with major stakeholders and
donors or even at training with women and women’s groups, they were representing the
organisation and this came first. Making work a priority was common for the women in
my research. They would tell me, “it has to get done”, “whose else will do it” following

27
Ibid., 38.
28
Catherine Theodosius, Emotional Labour in Health Care: The Unmanaged Heart of Nursing (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 22-23.
29
Blake E. Ashforth and Ronald H. Humphrey, “Emotional Labor in Service Roles: The Influence of
Identity,” The Academy of Management Review 18, no.1 (1993): 148, http://www.jstor.org/stable/258824.

11
the mantra of “the work is good”. In my own experiences working with IWRAW AP
and even during my field site visits, I started to use this rationale. It is a contagious
workplace practice.

Why Hochschild, after all of these years?

While Hochschild has been significantly praised for her work on emotional
labour, its widespread adoption has also been criticised. There are many debates
surrounding the use and renditions of her research. The one I draw attention to here is
Sharon Bolton’s critique, as this has led to further debate. She argues, “Emotional
labour is appropriate for describing some but not all practices…”30 She identifies the
relevance of emotional labour but pushes to extend beyond Hochschild. The original
study of flight attendants and debt collectors has been included in studies examining
Disneyland workers, retail and childcare workers, schoolteachers, psychotherapists,
travel agents, call-centre workers, bar staff, waiters and many others, and has become a
part of the ‘emotional labour bandwagon’.31 Bolton’s critique is centred on how
emotional labour is now used as an all-encompassing way to think about emotion in the
workplace, and encourages research on various service sectors. However, I suggest that
Hochschild’s research remains a useful tool that offers researchers an entry way into
assessing emotion in the workplace, and encourages research on various service sectors.
Bolton’s suggestion that new strategies are needed to capture the many faces of emotion
work is valid, but needs to be understood in relation to Hochschild’s research rather
than instead of her research. For example, The Managed Heart does not delve into the
interrelations of flight attendants, and is primarily focused on the flight attendant-
passenger relationship, but critiques of this have spawned further research about this
dynamic. Research that builds on Hochschild’s work has led to new and innovative
studies involving emotion work. Further, by coining the term ‘emotional labour’,

30
Sharon C. Bolton, “Getting to the heart of emotional labour profess: a reply to Brook,” Work,
employment and society 23, no.3 (2009): 550, http://www.jsot.org/stable/23749214. For more on Bolton’s
research that explores emotion in the workplace, see also: Sharon Bolton, Emotion Management in the
Workplace (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Sharon Bolton, “Who cares: Offering emotion work
as a ‘gift’ in the nursing labour process,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 32, no.3 (2000): 580-586, doi:
10.1046/j.1365-2648.2000.01516.x.
31
Paul Brook, “The Alienated Heart: Hochschild’s ‘emotional labour’ thesis and the anticapitalist politics
of alienation,” Capital and Class 33, no.2 (2009): 8,
http//www.cseweb.org.uk.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au.

12
Hochschild opened up the discussion of what this concept could mean for future studies
and work that concentrated on emotion in the workplace, the commodification of it, and
the gendering of emotion in the workplace. As Paul Brook notes:

Hochschild’s theory of emotion, therefore, binds together the psychological and

the social into an interdependent and dynamic unity that is akin to Marx’s
ontology of the dialectical unity of the mind and body. It does this by integrating
the notions of emotion as a signal function—a biological sensory function—with
socially constructed prior expectations as indicative of the given self. Without
such a conceptualization, it would be incoherent to theorise alienated emotional
labour, for without a theory of human nature, how is it possible to identify an
alien condition that violates the individual?32

Paul Brook’s reading of Hochschild’s research focuses on a number of important

aspects. First, he examines her use of psychological and social perspectives in assessing
emotion. Second, he responds to scholars, such as Sharon Bolton, who critique
Hochschild’s research. He addresses critiques that argue Hochchild’s use of Marx’s
alienation theory is inadequate by calling on Hochschild’s critics to re-examine
Hochschild’s research, particularly how Hochschild’s study allows flight attendants to
give their accounts and interpretations of their work. In doing so, she captures how
flight attendants participated in everyday worker resistance:

Workers have also – in varying degrees – reclaimed control of their own smiles,
and their facial expressions in general…in the flight attendant’s work, smiling is
separated from its usual function, which is to express a personal feeling, and
attached to another one, expressing a company’s feeling. The company exhorts
them to smile more, and ‘more sincerely’, at an increasing number of
passengers. The workers respond to the speed-up with a slowdown: they smile
less broadly with a quick release and no sparkle in the eyes, thus dimming the
company’s message to the people. It is a war of smiles.33

32
Ibid.,13.
33
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 127.

13
 Even though the use of the concept in a broader sense has motivated a
tremendous amount of research some have argued, “It has been much less helpful in
providing theoretical guidance for or integration of the results generated by these bodies
of work.”34 In addition, when examining service workers we should be aware of the
double-edged aspects of service work and potential everyday resistance in one’s
approach to their work. Brook writes:

Customer service interactions are double-edged in that they possess the potential
to be subjectively satisfying as well as distressing for the worker…In essence,
they reject the notion that the experience of having one’s emotions commodified
is intrinsically alienating.35

Wharton does not disregard the emotional labour thesis completely and points
out that the initial use of emotional labour research focused on frontline service jobs,
but has gradually expanded to consider interactive work in its broadest sense.36 Calling
for greater attention to social psychological theories of emotion and emotional
experience, Smith-Lovin emphasises the study of emotion rather than emotional labour
as the best way forward for this line of research.37 Brook argues:

Devoid of an explicit class analysis. This undermines Hochschild’s argument in

explaining individual and collective responses, including resistance by
emotional labourers. She compounds this weakness with an insufficiently
dialectical analysis whereby she is unable to capture the complexity and
potential of contradictory dimensions in the emotional labour process.38

However the relevance of Hochschild’s research in the development sector,

especially in NGOs, brings fresh insights into ethnographic studies of these spaces.

34
Amy Wharton, “The Sociology of Emotional Labor,” Annual Review of Sociology 35, no.1 (2009): 161,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800073.
35
Brook, “The Alienated Heart,” 8.
36
Wharton, “The Sociology of Emotional Labor,” 150.
37
Ibid., 161.
38
Brook, “The Alienated Heart,” 10.

14
David Lewis and David Mosse contend that non-normative ethnographies, “can explore
the multiple rationalities of development.”39 They further argue:

Ethnography that focuses on the lifeworlds of staff…brings out the performative

aspects of development action and knowledge, and shows the work needed to
keep official representations and professional (as well as beneficiary) identities
in place while maintaining a degree of ambiguity and room for manoeuvring in
the world of development.40

I use an ethnographic approach to researching NGO workplaces that is coloured

by a gendered approach and a feminist agenda. I follow Rosalind Eyben’s work on
feminism, international aid and development, which is based on her personal
experiences working in women’s organisations and the relationships she developed. As
Eyben and Turquet state, “our approach takes seriously the notion of feminist
reflexivity. We ask what is it about our positionality that shapes both how any one of us
relates with others and how we choose to act.”41

In my fieldwork I used my own senses and through the involvement of my body

I try to understand whether the workers are deep acting or whether they are surface
acting and therefore performing a feeling.42 Gotz states, “Through participant
observation and individual narratives, we learn ‘what social situations or rules call
feelings forth or tuck them under’.”43 Gotz further argues:

39
David Lewis and David Mosse, eds., Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid
and Agencies (CT: Kumarian Press, 2006), 15. For more on critiques of the NGO sector, see also:
Anthony Bebbington “NGOs and uneven development: geographies of development intervention,”
Progress in Human Geography 28, no.6 (2004): 725-745, doi: 10.1191/0309132504ph516oa. Bebbington
et al. Can NGOs make a difference? The challenge of development alternatives (London: Zed books,
2008).
40
Lewis and Mosse, Development Brokers and Translators, 16-17.
41
Rosalind Eyben and Laura Turquet, eds. Feminists in Development Organizations: Change from the
margins (Rugby: Practical Action Publishing, 2013), 2-3.
42
Gotz, “Encountering Arlie Hochschild’s Concept of ‘Emotional Labor’,” 196.
43
Ibid.,197.

15
 Qualitative research produces deep insights into the construction of emotional
labor, as well as into the different ways in which workers and customers deal
with their feelings by adopting individual and collective social practices.44

Taking Hochschild into women’s organisations in Malaysia

Writing from the United States context, Hochschild’s earlier works, especially
The Managed Heart, The Time Bind and The Second Shift, are primarily focused on
middle-class American women. According to Hochschild:

Middle-class American women, tradition suggests, feel emotion more than men
do. The definitions of “emotional” and “cogitation” in the Random House
Dictionary of the English Language reflect a deeply rooted cultural idea. Yet
women are also thought to command “feminine wiles,” to have the capacity to
premeditate a sigh, an outburst of tears, or a flight of joy. In general, they are
thought to manage expression and feeling not only better but more often than
men do.45

However her research is more widely applicable. In Brooks and Devasahayam’s

research on gender in the labour market in Asia, they found:

In Southeast Asia, gender ideologies are heavily bound up with how the
identities of men and women are constructed. Despite social, cultural and
demographic changes in the region, women are still largely responsible for
emotion work…Discourses of gender in the region map out women’s primary
identities to be that of wives and mothers.46

Brooks and Devasahayam’s research aligns with Hochschild’s study concluding

that women are primarily responsible for emotion work. Brooks and Devasahayam’s
findings paint a picture of how gender ideologies are reinforced in Southeast Asia. I use

44
Ibid.,196.
45
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 164.
46
Ann Brooks and Theresa Devasahayam, Gender, Emotions and Labour Markets (London: Routledge,
2011), 32-33. See also: Ann Brooks, Gendered Work in Asian Societies: The New Economy and
Changing Labour Markets (Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006); and Ann Brooks,
Postfeminisms: Feminism, cultural theory and cultural forms, (London: Routledge, 1997).

16
their work as a starting point to think about gender norms and roles. Taking
Hochschild’s concepts to Malaysia and in particular, using them to examine women
working on women’s rights is challenging. It required unfolding the layers of the
different ways women come to their work, what their expectations are for themselves
and from the organisation, how they think about their overall identities and the blurring
of their personal and professional lives.

In Malaysia, as elsewhere, NGOs are embedded in larger politics that involve

funding, transparency and accountability structures. Women’s organisations are tied to
international and national women’s movements and alliances, which has seen crucial
shifts in policies in the period 1976–1985.47 Major women’s world conferences had an
important role to play in the Malaysian context of women’s organisations. It was at
these international platforms, where Malaysian women and women’s groups came
together to unite and fight for women’s rights at the global level. When they returned to
Malaysia, women took their experiences from these conferences and used them to fight
for women’s human rights at the national level. In particular, the Fourth World
Conference on Women (FWCW) held in Beijing is important to this thesis as this global
movement for women’s rights also impacted laws and policies at the national level in
Malaysia. This event also highlighted major issues and tensions in the global women’s
movement that was flawed from its beginnings by privileging the voices of particular
groups of women over others. Aihwa Ong argues that a logic of a strategic sisterhood
was used to think about the ultimate goal of advancing women’s rights over the
divisions between women and women’s groups who attended the event.48

This also brings up another issue that comes across in Chapter Five, where I
discuss funding. For too long there has been an uneven power imbalance between
women’s organisations located out of the Global North and Global South. I take from
Linda Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for Others” to think through who gets to
speak and in what spaces. Offering insights into how to proceed forward in the privilege

47
David Lewis and Nazneen Kanji, eds., Non-Governmental Organizations and Development (OX:
Routledge, 2009), 57.
48
Aihwa Ong, “Strategic Sisterhood or Sisters in Solidarity? Questions of Communitarianism and
Citizenship in Asia,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4, no.1 (1996): 107-135,
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.au/stable/20644642.

17
of speaking, Alcoff suggests we, “strive to create wherever possible the conditions for
dialogue and the practice of speaking with and to rather than speaking for others.”49
This is important to continued dialogues between women working in the Global North
and women working out of the Global South. It has been over 15 years since the Beijing
Platform for Action and women’s rights have stalled, especially in accessing funding. In
the unstable NGO environment where organisations are constantly seeking funding, I
explore what this means for women working at the intersections of those they are trying
to help in their work and institutional bureaucracies.

For the purpose of my research, I combine the terms non-profit and NGO to
construct non-profit/NGO as this was the way the women in my research described the
sector they work in. Their commitment to their work is not only based in the
organisations they work for, but in their being as activists and as feminist activists. As I
argue throughout this thesis, they bring their intersecting identities to work. However, in
development and specifically NGO literature, non-profits and NGOs are written about
separately and can be specific to country contexts. For example non-profit organisations
is a term that is used in the United States, and as David Lewis and Nazeen Kanji write,
“where the market is dominate, and where citizen organizations are rewarded with fiscal
benefits if they show that they are not commercial, profit-making entities and work for
the public good.”50 For them, NGOs are harder to pin down, but they describe NGO
structures as large or small, formal or informal, bureaucratic or flexible and can be
governmentally or externally donor-funded.51 Typical NGO stories are told from an
insider perspective with activist appeal that constructs NGOs as independent, value-
driven and accountable organisations.52 By drawing on both Lewis and Mosse and
Hochschild’s ethnographic approaches, I am able to highlight the importance of the
inner workings of women’s organisations and the women working in them.

49
Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20 (1991-1992): 23,
http://jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/1354221.
50
Lewis and Kanji, eds., Non-Governmental Organizations and Development, 7-8.
51
Ibid., 7.
52
David Mosse and David Lewis, eds., The Aid Effect: Giving and Government in International
Development (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 149.

18
Women in ‘good work’

In the Malaysian context, as Chapter One describes, women’s organisations

have been built on racial, ethnic and class hierarchies embedded in the colonial legacy
of divide and rule policies that have initiated new sets of racial and ethnic challenges
since the country received its independence in 1957. Race is a tense subject in Malaysia.
Despite promoting itself as a multicultural country, and one that celebrates all religions
and ethnicities, Malaysia also uses affirmative action policies in favour of the Malays
who receive educational and economic privileges in the country. The racial breakdown
of the country also reflects a disproportionately higher number of Malays, also called
bumiputras (translated as ‘sons of the soil’) who make up 67.4% of population.
Following the Malays are the Chinese who make up 24.6%, trailing them are the
Indians with 7.3% and the category of Other with 0.7%.53 In terms of religion, Islam is
practiced by 61.3% of the population, followed by 19.8% who are Buddhist, 9.2%
Christian and 6.3% Hindu.54 Racial hierarchies were less visible in my site visits to
IWRAW AP. As an international women’s organisation working out of Malaysia, it is
afforded greater leniency in how it employs women and operates as an NGO. Race and
ethnicity was more apparent in my visit to the Sisters In Islam office, this was conveyed
through the number of women wearing the tudong (term for veil in Malay). The
organisation only employs Muslims.

Initially when I began the interview process, I focused on the women of

IWRAW AP, from there I was introduced to women from other organisations which led
me to Sisters In Islam and Musawah. Sisters In Islam works at the national level and
similar to IWRAW AP emerged in the 1990s when contemporary women’s
organisations were forming in Malaysia. Sisters In Islam initially began as a reading
group of educated Muslim women who were activists, lawyers, academics, teachers and
journalists. The group’s first meetings were held in the home of Malaysian feminist
activist Zainah Anwar who also heads the global network offshoot of Sisters In Islam
called Musawah. From coming together to read the Quran, the organisation officially

53
Department of Statistics Malaysia, Official Portal, “Population Distribution and Basic Demographic
Characteristic Report 2010,” Department of Statistics Malaysia, last modified May 7, 2015,
http://Dosm.gov.my.
54
Ibid.

19
became Sisters In Islam in the early-1990s with the aim to “search for solutions to the
problem of discrimination against Muslim women in the name of Islam.”55

The research of this thesis included ethnographic observation and interviews

with women who engage in non-profit/NGO work, most of whom are affiliated with
IWRAW AP who are both local and have travelled from abroad to work at the
organisation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At Sisters In Islam, I had limited opportunity
to interview participants but was able to speak with its Executive Director Ratna on my
2015 field site visit. When I returned to Malaysia in 2016, I met with Natasha from
Musawah and both of these women brought me closer to understanding the
complexities of the different ways women come to their work, especially through
religious identity. Many of the women who participated in my research suggested that
they found satisfaction in their work and had achieved both work and life satisfaction
from working on women’s rights. Despite their continued participation in this
profession, they are challenged by NGO workplace practices that often neglect and
overwork individuals. The perceptions of NGOs are embedded in debates of what it
means to do ‘good work’ and at stake for the women in my research is the process of
deciding when they have had enough of it.56

Women working in organisations like IWRAW AP, Sisters In Islam and

Musawah have come to these organisations with a shared goal of raising awareness for
women’s rights. While their approaches may differ, I argue they all engage in ‘good
work’. The notion of ‘good work’ almost always came up in my interviews and multiple
times to describe instances where they justified working long hours because they are
doing ‘good work’ or rationalising the lack of recognition they receive from
management because the ‘work is good’. In any rendition of ‘good work’ this was the
intimate relationship women had to working in an NGO. Saan, one of the women I
interviewed from IWRAW AP said, “Good work, and it is like, the work that is of your
choice. The work that you know you have that satisfaction when you are doing it.” She,

55
Sisters In Islam, “The SIS Story,” Sisters In Islam, accessed December 19, 2016,
http://sistersinislam.org.my. See also International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific, “About
Us,” IWRAW AP, accessed December 19, 2006, iwraw-ap.org.
56
William Fisher, “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 26 (1997): 446, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/2952530.

20
along with the other women, in my research highlighted ‘good work’ as an expression
of ideas and ideologies. ‘Good work’, for Saan also suggests a psycho-social alignment
and the kind of blurring which makes professional work an extension of the self. Saan,
who began her professional career in the corporate sector, made a conscious decision to
transition into non-profit/NGO work. After years of feeling unhappy and dissatisfied in
the corporate sector, she went on to complete a Masters’ degree that focused on the
development sector. For Ruby who also came to NGO work from the corporate sector,
“good work is a noble profession, a martyrdom, you know, you have to sacrifice to do
good for people and that is the kind of thing that is still in a lot of organizations.” Work
is not only motivated by economic gain, but as I argue, impacts women’s greater being:
from their life histories and experiences to the ways in which they move in the world.
Integral to this thesis is how gender informs their commitment to their work.

Before turning to the structure of this thesis, I take this opportunity to talk about
my position as a researcher. I borrow from Elspeth Probyn’s “Glass Selves” to situate
my role and stake in my study. Probyn argues that the research project is one that is “a
tableau of selves: the self and me, the researcher, in relation to the selves of the girls
under study.”57 Using Probyn’s approach, my ‘tableau of selves’ involves my personal
experiences and life histories, my role as a researcher and my interactions with the
generous women who participated in my study. My research is informed by a concept
that I further explore in Chapter Six and that is, my gendered habitus, involving my
intersecting identities. I use my experiences as a Canadian woman pursuing my PhD in
Australia researching women in Malaysia where I crossed geographical and social
locations. Beginning this project, I was comfortable with pursuing research in Malaysia,
and in particular with IWRAW AP, an organisation I had worked with before. However,
as my research progressed, I began to see the interconnections between women and
women’s organisations working out of the Malaysian context. This was a turning point
in my research, as it led me to Sisters In Islam. This was an uncomfortable, but
productive element of my research. By having the opportunity to interview Ratna and
Natasha who work for women’s organisations framed through Islamic principles, I was
able to gain a better perspective of what was happening in women’s organisations in

Elspeth Probyn, “Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity, and the Research Project,” in The Oxford
57

Handbook of the Self, ed. Shaun Gallager (2011): 685, doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548019.003.0030.

21
Malaysia beyond IWRAW AP, and even found something deeper within myself as a
conflicted Muslim woman. I realised that I had avoided Islamic women’s organisations
because of my unresolved religious background. In the introduction of her book
Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil, Katherine Bullock draws on her personal
experience of converting to Islam and how this impacted her research. She speaks of her
personal journey and its relevance in her research:

In 1991 I saw a news report on the television that showed Turkish women who
were returning to the veil. I felt shocked and saddened for them. “Poor things,” I
thought, “they are being brainwashed by their culture.” Like many Westerners, I
believed that Islam oppressed women and that the veil was a symbol of their
oppression. Imagine my surprise then, four years later, at seeing my own
reflection in a store window, dressed exactly like those oppressed women. I had
embarked on a spiritual journey during my Master’s degree that culminated four
years later in my conversion to Islam. The journey included moving from hatred
of Islam, to respect, to interest, to acceptance. 58

Bullock’s use of her personal narrative in her research is important in thinking

about the changes within her relationship with religion and religious practices. Yet
where she writes as a practicing Muslim woman at ease with her conversion, I write
from the position as a sometimes-practicing Muslim woman, where my religious
identity is still under construction.59

Being confronted with Islam was made visible in my interview with Ratna who
wore the headscarf. She brought me face-to-face with the visible gendered practice of
veiling and the issue of religious identity that I had skirted around. She, like Natasha,
used their religious identity in their work, which has impacted how I think about
motivating factors in why women come to this work and why they remain in a sector
that does not always look after them the way they look after others.

58
Katherine Bullock, Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern
Stereotypes (VA: IIIT, 2010), XVIIII.
59
Ibid., XVII.

22
Thesis structure

This thesis encapsulates the importance of women’s experiences engaging in

non-profit/NGO work. I use iconic feminist perspectives and interventions such as
Hochschild’s ideas on emotional labour and build on her work to include feminist
epistemologies and feminist interventions on Mauss’ gift exchange and Bourdieu’s
habitus to think about what the work means to the women in my study. Each chapter
interweaves feminist writings and perspectives to unfold how women think about the
greater identities in their work.

In Chapter One, I map the genealogy of women’s organisations in Malaysia. I

set the stage looking at contemporary women’s organisations in Malaysia, in particular
focusing on organisations, such as IWRAW AP and Sisters In Islam, and the histories
that have shaped them. I draw on Michel Foucault’s analysis on genealogy as a method
to explore how colonial divide and rule policies left behind by the British brought about
new challenges in governance in a post-independent Malaysia. I argue the ongoing
class, ethnic and racial divisions in the country have impacted women, women’s groups
and women’s organisations in Malaysia. My analysis examines how women’s
organisations are fraught with class, ethnic and racial tensions that have in turn shaped
women’s feminist activism.

Chapter Two takes feminism from the singular into the plural to highlight the
importance in its multiplicity. This chapter provides a reading of feminist theory,
drawing on Teresa de Lauretis’ work on the subject of feminism to explore being both
inside and outside the subject of feminism. This allows me a way to think through how
women identify as feminists (or not) and in what spaces. The chapter captures how
feminism is interpreted at both the individual and institutional levels in order to
illustrate the experiences of the women working at Sisters In Islam and IWRAW AP. I
argue their feminist position is blurred, intensified and complicated due to the merging
of their personal and professional identities. I investigate what it means to work in
women’s human rights organisations that are framed from feminist perspectives, and
how women find a sense of belonging in these spaces. I also concentrate on looking
beyond Western perspectives of feminism to highlight the post-colonial context that is
Malaysia and feminist discourses that have examined the post-colonial feminist subject.

23
 Chapter Three takes the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ and re-
energises it to capture how the personal is the professional for the women in my
research. I illustrate the challenges of ‘good work’ and focus on how women’s feminist
activism is bound up in their values and beliefs and altruism. As such, women have
trouble distinguishing clear boundaries between their home life and work life.

Chapter Four follows and builds on the previous chapters to illustrate how
continually working for others impacts the health of women in non-profit/NGO work.
This chapter examines the repercussions of overwork on women’s physical, mental and
emotional health. I return to Hochschild’s gendered analysis that considers women’s
unpaid labour and how it is commercialised and build on this to include Marcel Mauss’
seminal work The Gift and gendered readings of his ideas to examine why women in
this type of work offer their labour as a ‘gift’. This chapter also explores what kinds of
agency are afforded to not only the women of IWRAW AP, but also more broadly
women working in the non-profit/NGO sector.

Chapter Five examines how even ‘good work’ is grounded in economic realities
of a changing NGO landscape. The current economic climate is hard for NGOs,
especially NGOs like IWRAW AP and Sisters In Islam, which advocate for women’s
human rights. How does securing funding affect the longevity of its work? Noticeably,
there has been a shift from funding advocacy based organisations towards service based
organisations. This shift towards service based organisations is founded on the notion of
how effectively funds can be used by organisations and this is measured through
concrete results that service based organisations must provide. I consider how this
affects the workers of NGOs and the hiring practices of organisations and quality of
workers.

The final chapter, Chapter Six, ties together the thesis from the perspective of
the gendered habitus and women’s embodied feminist activism both personally and
professionally. The final chapter examines the gendered and feminist reworkings of
Bourdieu’s conceptions of the habitus and capital, and how the work also impacts the
feeling body. The chapter also considers the intergenerational tensions in these working
environments and the different relationships between women. In particular, I highlight
the vulnerable positions of younger feminists who are still finding their footing and
whose habitus are still being shaped.

24
 The significance of research conducted on women’s experiences in non-
profit/NGO work, especially in the Southeast Asian context conveys voices of the
unheard and often marginalised in research. Researchers are beginning to see the
importance of aid and development workers, as this is a growing field of research. One
of the major issues in the non-profit sector, especially for women, is the care that is
involved in their work and that is lacking in their own lives. As health becomes more of
a concern working in this sector, workers’ experiences of exhaustion are increasing.
This is a profession that asks workers to blur the boundaries of home and work and their
personal morals and ethics, which factors into how they see themselves in their overall
identities. In Malaysia, NGOs continue to operate under a code of silence, where
workers often do not speak up to address their own care needs. This is one of the
paradoxes of NGO work. At one level, the women in my research are dedicated to
promoting women’s rights and work to fight against discrimination and exploitation. At
another level, this is what NGO workers experience in their workplaces. These spaces
are the site for self-neglect which is perpetuated through mentalities such as ‘good
work’ and ‘working for others’. Despite the contradictions working in NGOs, the
women in my research find satisfaction in their work and continue to work in conditions
that promote practices of overwork. Calling for a change in workplace practice rather
than a change in profession, the women in my research are aware of the challenges
ahead of them where there are less numbers of women in the office who take on more
tasks, where their time with loved ones is limited, and where their hard work fails to get
recognised time after time. This is not a new revelation for women as women’s labour,
especially in the home, is often invisible; only when women engage in the workforce
are they taken seriously and even this is limited.

Taking a gendered approach to non-profit/NGO work and one that centres on

women’s voices allows us to focus on professions that rely on gendered stereotypes,
such as women as carers who are also responsible for emotion work. For the women in
my study, they felt underappreciated in their work, and this is a growing concern, not
only for them but also for the wider non-profit/NGO sector. Opening up the discussion
of those who do the work and what it means to them from a gendered and especially
feminist perspective focuses on why women continue to engage in work that takes on
care roles from the home into the workplace, and what is expected of them as women.
As the non-profit/NGO sector continues to change and rebrand itself towards an

25
increasingly corporate mentality, what does this mean for its workers? In particular,
what sorts of tensions arise not only in individual experiences, but between women, and
how do women cope with these challenges?

26
Chapter One – The history of contemporary women’s
organisations in Malaysia

I didn’t see what the big deal was on working specifically with women’s human
rights, but now I do, simply because [of] how ingrained the patriarchal norms
and how society is. You realise the importance of having specific work on
women’s human rights because until those structures and institutions are
completely dismantled women’s human rights will always be relevant.

Dorathy began working as a program officer at International Women’s Rights

Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW AP) in 2010. However, her NGO career started
much earlier during the 1997/1998 Reformasi period, a volatile political time in
Malaysia when civil society agencies protested the unfair firing of then Deputy Prime
Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Dorathy relates Reformasi as her ‘political awakening’. She
told me that the Reformasi movement showcased a lot of issues that for a very long time
most Malaysians were afraid to voice because of the government’s repressive laws.

Dorathy recalls that as a student at the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) during
the ‘reform’ movement, her lecturers would have discussions about the civil unrest and
protests in class, and this also inspired her interest in getting involved in the non-
profit/NGO sector. Her first job was with the Tenaganita, an organisation initially
dedicated to migrant rights, but now a women’s organisation for workers’ rights. While
Dorathy did not set out to work at IWRAW AP, she enjoys the work. Speaking about
her friends in the corporate sector, she says, “they feel an alienation of who they think
they should be or who they are, when I wonder why I do it, to a large extent, I am
actually happy and the work I do reflects that.”

Dorathy is a long-time friend of mine. She helped me gain entry into Malaysian
NGO circles, and introduced me to leading feminist activists who work at various
women’s organisations in Malaysia. We both started our journey at IWRAW AP just
months apart in 2010. She is a vibrant Indian Malaysian woman, who took an interest in
mentoring me during my internship. When I returned to Malaysia in 2014 for research
fieldwork and every subsequent trip thereafter, I saw Dorathy, and we would eat chilli

27
pan mee and talk about the ‘work’.60 The ‘work’ for us in this context is everything
about the non-profit/NGO sector, the changes we have seen, the challenges that persist
for those engaging in it and what is happening in the Malaysian context of women’s
organisations.

This chapter charts a history of contemporary Malaysian-based women’s

organisations and how they have come to be. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s
understanding of genealogy, most prominent in his texts Discipline and Punish (1975)
and The History of Sexuality Volume 1 (1978), I map contemporary women’s
movements and organisations in Malaysia from women’s participation in colonial
resistance movements to more recent ideological and political movements, such as
Islamic resurgence and universal human rights movements.61 I argue that women’s
organisations in Malaysia have been built on structures embedded in class, racial, and
ethnic tensions, most of which are rooted in a colonial divide and rule legacy. Despite
this, women working in these organisations have found their sense of feminist
belonging from their activism and in their identities founded in religion, class, ethnicity,
and race.

Since its independence in 1957, Malaysia has seen new sets of challenges in its
governance. This is in part due to leftover British colonial policies that used race as a
category to divide populations for a capitalist-driven political economy. Weiss states:

By the time the British departed, they had done all they could to ensure that a
team of race-based, moderate parties was prepared to take over, despite the fact
that other alternatives had already represented themselves and continue to press
for influence.62

60
Chilli pan mee is a spicy fried egg, pork noodle dish that is hard to find in Kuala Lumpur, because pork
is considered haram (forbidden) in Islam. It can be found in the outskirts of the city, such as Subang, a
predominantly ethnically Chinese area.
61
See also Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Penguin Books, 1978); and Michel Foucault, Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison
(London: Allen Lane, 1977).
62
Meredith Leigh Weiss, Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for Political Change in
Malaysia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 53.

28
 Malaysia’s political context remains fraught with ethnic, racial and gender
divisions. Notwithstanding this state of affairs in 2012, Prime Minister Najib Razak
claimed “There is no need for a women’s rights movement as we have from the start
acknowledged equal rights for women.”63 From his speech given at the 50th National
Women’s Day celebration, Razak went as far to say “the success of Malaysian women
is well known to the extent the men are said to be an endangered species.”64 His
depiction of gender equality in Malaysia does not reflect women’s everyday lived
realities. For example, women remain underrepresented in the paid workforce. As of
2015, women make up 46.1% of the workforce.65 Focusing on Malaysian-based
women’s organisations and the work they do allows us an entry point into the lives of
those working in these organisations and how these workplaces continue to operate in
various political climates that often favour patriarchal structures. To understand what
has shaped women’s feminist activism and the organisations they work for, it is
important to investigate Malaysia’s colonial and contemporary histories.

On genealogy and Malaysian-based women’s organisations

Foucault’s understanding of genealogy can be used to trace and draw out how
the present relies on the past. This method seeks to understand the history of the
present:

A genealogy should be seen as a kind of attempt to emancipate historical

knowledges from that subjection, to render them, that is, capable of opposition

63
Mohd Kamal bin Abdullah, “PM Najib: No need for women’s rights movement in Malaysia,”
Malaysians Must Know the TRUTH, last modified 1 Oct. 2012, accessed October 23, 2016,
http://malaysiansmustknowthetruth.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/pm-najib-no-need-for-womens-rights.html.
64
Ibid.
65
United States Department of State, “Malaysia 2015 Human Rights Report,” Bureau of Democracy,
Human rights and Labour, accessed October 23, 2016,
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/252989.pdf. For a continued discussion on women’s
contribution and participation in the labour market, see also United Nations Development Programme,
Malaysia Human Development Report 2013: Redesigning an Inclusive Future (Geneva: United Nations,
2014), xxi, 187-213.

29
 and struggle against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and scientific
discourse.66

In the Foucauldian sense, genealogy strips away the conventionality of how

historical events and moments are depicted. Foucault has a way of tracing history that
uses particular events and historical developments that are not chronologically unified,
but are multiple and discontinuous forms of knowledge. Elizabeth Stephens points out:

For Foucault, genealogy differs from traditional methods of historical inquiry in

two key ways. The first is that a genealogy does not provide a linear or
teleological narrative of historical events, nor does it concern itself with a search
for origins. Instead, it is comprised of a series of ‘accidents’ and ‘deviations’.67

Stephens concludes that a genealogy is a historical study that problematises the

cohesion of its own object of study.68 As it applies in this thesis, Foucault’s method of
genealogy works both as a historical narrative, and one that allows for the entwining of
ideological shifts that is encapsulated by Malaysia’s colonial histories to more recent
Islamic resurgence and global/universal human rights discourses in the country.

Foucault’s work on genealogy, like much of his writing, is gender blind.

Meaghan Morris highlights in The Pirate’s Fiancée that “any feminist drawn in to
sending Love Letters to Foucault would be in no danger of reciprocation.”69 Lois
McNay also points out that his work is inherently masculinist, “The critique is one-
sided, in that the subject has no density beyond that of an empty space or point of
convergence for various relations of force.”70 Despite the fact that “Foucault’s work is
not the work of a ladies’ man,” his theorisations have been extensively used in feminist

66
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 Michel
Foucault, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), 85. See also Barry Smart
Michel Foucault (Sussex: Ellis Horwood Limited, 1985).
67
Elizabeth Stephens, “Bad Feelings: An Affective Genealogy of Feminism,” Australian Feminist Review
30, no.85 (2015): 274. See also Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge.
Trans. Robert Hurley, (New York: Penguin Books, 1978).
68
Ibid., 274-275.
69
Meaghan Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancée (London: Verso, 1988), 55.
70
Lois McNay, Foucault: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 165.

30
interventions and research.71 I am drawn to his sense of genealogy, as it offers a way to
describe the complexities involved in the women’s movement and women’s
organisations in Malaysia, where a linear historical analysis would not suffice. What
makes Foucault’s genealogy method appealing is its ability to weave through historical
narratives and events that manifests in the present, but have been subjected to different
conditions over time. Therefore, the product of ongoing ethnic, class, societal, and
political tensions can be traced but not limited to Malaysia’s colonial past and the
legacy of the racially driven policies it left behind. The following section explores
Malaysia’s colonial encounters, sketching how colonial divide and rule policies
impacted Malaysian women.

Malaysia’s colonial encounters

Malacca is considered one of Malaysia’s most historical states. Malacca was a

significant and strategic location for trade and the movement of slaves and spices during
colonialism. Its use as a port was integral to colonialists because it linked China to India
and the near East. Malacca’s strategic use as a port for trade would be occupied by
many colonial rulers following the Portuguese. Succeeding the Portuguese colonial rule
in Malaysia were the Dutch who rebuilt the city and employed it mostly as a military
base to control the Straits of Malacca. Following the Dutch, the British took control of
Malaysia, and unlike their predecessors who used local labour in their colonies, the
British took a hands-on approach and influenced existing cultural and societal
practices.72 The British were attracted to Malaysia because of the tin mines and to a
lesser extent gold mines, but rubber soon became Malaya’s staple export.73 These
industries required a non-local workforce that was decided by the British. Where the
Dutch in Indonesia used the forced labour of the local Javanese population, the British
imported their workers from India and China. The British thought that recruiting

71
Morris, The Pirate’s Fiancée, 55.
72
Jamilah Ariffin, Women and development in Malaysia (Malaysia: Pelanduk Publications, 1992), 5.
73
The term Malaya is sometimes used interchangeably with Malaysia when discussing the country’s
history and in particular Malaysia’s colonial history. The significance of the word is rooted in pre-
independent Malaysia, which implicates what is known as the geographical region of Peninsula Malaysia.
Throughout British colonial rule Malaya took on different terminology. For example, when Peninsular
Malaysia and surrounding territories unified under the Malaysian Union in 1946 it became known as the
Federation of Malaya in 1948.

31
workers who were already familiar with colonial capitalist relations would ensure a
more productive and adaptable workforce. This helped bolster a colonial rhetoric based
on stereotypes of the local population. This colonial mentality used “the idea of the lazy
native to justify compulsion and unjust practices in the mobilisation of labour in the
colonies.”74 The British thus coordinated, promoted and politicised ethnic divisions
amongst dominated groups.

The negative portrayal of the local population by the British – that Malays were
‘traditional’ and living in archaic societies – had a twofold rationale. First, to ‘civilise’
the colonies under the guise of ‘the myth of the lazy native’ justified imported labour
from other colonies. In this way, the British controlled the whole system of relations in
Malaysia, particularly in economic life where they controlled plantations, mines,
railways, engineering firms, and commercial houses.75 Under British Malaysia there
was an absence of nation-building and self-government, as there was little political
room for local ethnic and racial groups to communicate with one another beyond the
needs of daily life. This was of strategic importance to the British, because keeping
different racial and ethnic groups from coming together enabled them to carry on with
their racially driven division of labour. For example, the British kept the Malays in rural
areas tying them to the land for rice production. The aim here was to keep Malays from
modernising, leaving them behind in development processes and preventing them from
forming any nationalist movements. This British strategy would come back to further
exacerbate ethnic tensions between the Malays and the Chinese after Malaysia’s
independence in 1957 leading up to the racial riots of 1969, which in turn fostered
major policy reforms in the 1970s, to be explored later in this chapter.

In “The meaning of race in Malaysia” Sharmani Gabriel examines racial politics

and discourses in Malaysia focusing on three principle frameworks. First, Gabriel
explores state discourses focused on the racial paradigm of Malay, Chinese, Indian and

74
Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A study of the image of the Malays, Filipinos and
Javanese from the 16th to the 20th century and its function in the ideology of colonial capitalism (London:
Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1977), 2.
75
T.H. Silcock and E.K. Fisk, The Political Economy of Independent Malaya: a case study in
development (London: Angus and Robertson LTD, 1963), 4. Referring to Malaya is a time in British
colonial rule from the 18th to the 20th centuries under both direct and indirect control of a set of states on
the Malay Peninsula and the island of Singapore before the Malayan Union was formed in 1946.

32
others that originated under British colonialism. Second, she argues academic
discourses are epistemologically and ontologically based in colonialist knowledge
production. Third, she examines the lived realities of individuals who are informed by
dominant racial and ethnic discourses. Gabriel is interested in contextualising and
articulating race in Malaysia in a way that articulates race to broader social structures,
processes and possibilities. Race operates as a category of privilege and hierarchy, and
in Malaysia, it is instrumental in perpetuating ethnic tensions. Gaik Khoo argues, “Race
relations in Malaysia are complicated by policies that favour the majority of Malays
under a discourse of Malay primacy and the privileging of Islam as the religion of the
majority ethnic group.”76 By setting up racial divisions in Malaysia the British built a
political economy that continues even in Malaysia’s post-colonial imagining of the
nation and its identity.77 Gabriel argues:

Viewing race as a colonialist discourse is to also foreground the political

economy of race. The British administrators introduced the notion of race as the
primary identity to cater to their vested economic interests in Malaya; race was
used to determine people’s place and function in the colonial economy.78

During World War Two, the Japanese disrupted the British racial order in the
political economy. The Japanese closed tin mines and stopped other economic sites
from functioning, thus changing the structure of British colonial rule by offering
support to Malay populations. Jamilah Ariffin explains:

To the Malays, the Japanese gave the impression that they would restore the
authority that was taken from them by the British. This encouraged many Malay
Nationalist movements and saw the formation of societies such as the Kesatuan
Melayu Muda (KMM). The Chinese were, however, treated badly by the
Japanese. This was due to the Japanese’ resentment towards the local Malayan
Chinese’ formal support for China during the Sino-Japan War. As a result, many

76
Gaik Cheng Khoo, “Introduction: theorizing different forms of belonging in a cosmopolitan Malaysia,”
Citizenship Studies 18, no.88 (2014): 791, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2014.964542.
77
Sharmani P. Gabriel, “The meaning of race in Malaysia: Colonial, post-colonial and possible new
conjunctures,” Ethnicities 15, no.6 (2015): 787, doi: 10.1177/1468796815570347.
78
Ibid., 783.

33
 Chinese joined the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA). The
Indians were generally left alone but many were enlisted to build the “death
railway” in Burma or join the Indian National Army to fight with the Japanese in
Burma.79

The Japanese rule may have been short lived, but this was an important period
for the Malays. Women used this moment to their advantage in colonial rule. After the
Japanese surrendered in World War Two, this began a new era for Malay women in
education, employment, migration and activism. As noted by Ng, Mohamad and beng
hui “The change of rulers, from British to Japanese, had a significant symbolic value. It
awakened the local population to the possibility of their own liberation.”80 From this
point on, anti-colonial movements, led by the Malays, helped Malaysia achieve its
independence from the British. However, Malay nationalism would also further ethnic
tensions and divisions in Malaysia.

Women’s roles in resistance movements: Towards an independent

Malaysia

In December 1945 until late 1946, after three years of Japanese rule, the British
sought to reassert their control by unifying Malayan states. Their aim was to set up a
government in the name of the British Crown. This would mean that Malay rulers –
sultans who had kept their positions during colonial rule – would cede their sovereignty.
Local Malay communities saw this as a problem, because sultans had been “a crucial
element of Malay communities.”81 Culturally, sultans embodied long traditions of
temporal and spiritual authority in Malay religious traditions.82 Hearing of the British
plan to remove these figureheads, the Malays took political action and formed the
United Malay Nationalist Organisation (UMNO), which mobilised both men and
women. Women were an integral part of UMNO protests and rallies. Women, such as

79
Ariffin, Women and development in Malaysia, 7.
80
Cecilia Ng, Maznah Mohamad and tan beng hui, Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia:
An Unsung (R)evolution (New York: Routledge, 2006), 17.
81
Richard Stubbs, Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948-1960
(Singapore: Marshall Cavedish International, 2004), 23.
82
Ibid.

34
Zaharah Binti Abdullah, are remembered for their stance: “We will not agree to the
Malaysian Union whatever happens. We make our protest strongly. We will work with
our men to regain our rights.”83 Abdullah and many other Malay women were integral
members in resistance movements. As one British colonial officer who witnessed the
protests wrote, “The most remarkable thing of all – was the part the women were
playing in this great national movement.”84 The Chinese and Indians were excluded
from UMNO movements, which were predominantly led by Malay nationalists.

Upper class Malay women were allowed (with permission from their families) to
engage in activism and resistance movements. In many cases, women leading the
campaigns were the wives and daughters of political leaders.85 While Malay women
could take part in resistance campaigns, they also faced internal ethnic and racial
discrimination based on their gender. Women censored their activism when they were
perceived as overstepping patriarchal structures, which still had a strong hold in
Malaysia.86 Women were only meant to fill complementary roles to men in these
movements. Seeking their own undertaking based on gender, Malay women grouped
together to form the Malay radical women’s movement Angkatan Wanita Sedar
(AWAS).

AWAS emerged post-World War Two as a left wing of the Malay Nationalist
Party. It formed in 1946 to promote Malay women’s rights. It specifically aimed to
unify Malay women, but had built alliances with non-Malay organisations. Following
World War Two, the rise in women’s associations reached all races and ethnicities. The
objectives of early Chinese and Indian women’s organisations centred on non-political
activities. For Indian and Chinese women, this included teaching skills, such as
cooking, needlework, and religious classes.87 Chinese women’s organisations involved
Buddhist nunneries and vegetarian houses. In 1917, prior to the associations formed

Syed Muhd Khairudin Aljunied, “Against Multiple Hegemonies: Radical Malay Women in Colonial
83

Malaya,” Journal of Social History 47, no.1 (2013): 154-156.

84
Aljunied, “Against Multiple Hegemonies,” 156.
85
Noraini Abdulla, “Women’s Participation in the Political Development Process in Malaysia,” In
Readings on Women and Development in Malaysia, ed., Jamilah Ariffin (Selangor: MPH Group
Publishing, 1994), 101.
86
Aljunied, “Against Multiple hegemonies,” 156-157.
87
Ariffin, Women and development in Malaysia, 8.

35
after World War Two, the Chinese Ladies Association of Singapore was formed for the
general improvement of young ladies.88 Dancz writes, “Classes were held in cooking,
pastry-making, sewing and embroidery. Its greatest achievement was permitting
Chinese women to interact with each other and share common interests.”89 Dancz’s
research describes the activities women engaged in, but does not discuss if these
organisations were politically motivated. Similarly, in Indian associations, the aim to
fulfil a social need concentrated on providing recreational facilities for their members,
and on celebrating Indian festival days.90 Voluntary associations and AWAS were
racially and ethnically based, however AWAS took part in nationalist movements
against the British, unlike the Chinese and Indian voluntary organisations. AWAS was
able to draw on their Malayness in their campaigning for the rights of Malay women.
As Aljunied argues, using their identity as the basis of their activism, they were also
“mired in the ethnic frame of reference that was institutionalised by the British.”91 The
early ethnic distinctions in women’s movements and organisations came to be structures
of the bedrock of women’s organisations. Cemented in women’s early activism are
racial and ethnic hierarchies inherited from colonial divide and rule policies.

When Chinese and Indian women were politically active, it was in relation to
their ‘home’ countries. This meant their political engagement was located in their
involvement with national resistance groups. Chinese women joined anarchist
movements and many more became members of the Communist Party.92 Indian women
residing in Malaysia also engaged in Indian resistance movements. In 1941, Chandra
Bose formed the Indian Independence Movement (IIM) in India and Indian women in
Malaysia were recruited to be part of the Rhani Jansi Regiment of the Indian Army.93
Chinese and Indian women’s citizenship in Malaysia under British rule during the

88
Virginia Dancz, Women and Party Politics in Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore: Oxford University
Press, 1987), 49.
89
Dancz, Women and Party Politics in Peninsular Malaysia, 49.
90
Ibid., 69.
91
Aljunied, “Against Multiple Hegemonies,” 160.
92
Mazna Mohamad, “The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity, and Democratization in Malaysia: Shifting
Interests and Identities,” In Gender Justice, Development, and Rights, eds. Maxine Molyneux and Shahra
Razavi (Oxford Scholarship Online, 2002), 353-355.
93
Ibid.

36
nationalist uprising “was an ambiguous notion.”94 Mohamad states, “Among Chinese
women, it was their schooling experience, moulded after the system in China, which
played a pivotal role in influencing their specific political involvements…Some of the
most active Indian women in the country also joined political movements engaged in
struggles in India.”95 This ethnic divide of women’s political activism carried through in
nationalist politics following independence in the formation of political parties. The
National Council for Women’s Organisations (NCWO) was set up as a non-partisan
organisation (although it is connected to governing bodies) to combat political and
organisational divisions between women to include a multi-ethnic collaboration.

Post-independence Malaysia: Race and ethnicity-driven policies

The NCWO was formed in 1962 and worked to overcome the segregation of
ethnicities in women’s early activism and political engagement. It served “to act as a
consultative and advisory body to raise the status of women and their participation in
national development.”96 Its vision to promote a society free from discrimination, meant
inclusivity at all levels, where women could enjoy equality through the promotion of
their human rights. Many of the organisation’s early leaders were elected because they
represented women from differing ethnic classes. This was in part due to the ethnic
inequalities represented in ethnic-based political parties that remained divided in
achieving advancements for women across race and ethnic boundaries.

In its beginnings, the NCWO focused on employment, more specifically on

women’s unequal pay. The organisation sought legislative reform for equal pay,
women’s equal access to public service jobs and marital rights.97 On paper, the NCWO
worked to overcome embedded structures of racial and ethnic divisions to promote
cross-party collaboration among women and politicians. In theory, the NCWO worked
to cut across ethnic, racial and class distinctions, but in practice the organisation only

94
Ibid.
95
Ibid.
96
National Council of Women’s Organisations Malaysia, “Vision/Mission,” NCWO, accessed December
10, 2016, http://www.ncwomalaysia.com/.
97
Mohamad, “The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity, and Democratization in Malaysia,” 354-357.

37
engaged in selective campaigns. The NCWO avoided issues that were considered
controversial, which included reforms in Sharia law. The organisation shied away from
internal Malay gender inequalities. The non-confrontational approach was also reflected
in the ‘equal rights for equal wages’ campaign, which was not extended to industrial
workers, but focused on white-collar professional workers.98 NCWO campaigns focused
on women from economically and educationally privileged classes, which left little
room or campaign attention for working class women. As a result, the NCWO did not
fulfil its goals of bridging ethnic divisions amongst women but continued to perpetuate
divides through its use of colonial logic that promoted a hierarchy through an ethno-
racial lens. This mentality would not only continue in both contemporary women’s
movements and organisations, but also in state-sanctioned policies that increased Malay
women’s participation in the public spheres through affirmative action policies.

Aihwa Ong highlights how race in Malaysia “has been based on a careful
demographic balancing of the ‘races’ (bangsa): Malays, who are all Muslim, and the
predominantly non-Muslim, Chinese and Indians.”99 Ong’s work examines ethno-racial
differences and differential treatment of populations that have dictated the lives of
Malaysians past and present. She establishes that “segments of the population are
differently disciplined and given differential privileges and protections, in relation to
their varying participation in globalised market activities.”100 Drawing attention to the
ethno-racial hierarchies in Malaysia, she refers to institutionalised preferences for the
Malays and indigenous groups, which make up the majority population of Malaysia:

These gradations of governing may be in a continuum, but they overlap with

pre-formed racial, religious and gender hierarchies, and further fragment
citizenship for people who are all, nominally speaking, citizens of the same
country.101

98
Ibid., 357-358.
99
Aihwa Ong, “State versus Islam: Malay families, women’s bodies, and the body politics in Malaysia,”
American ethnologist 17, no.2 (1990): 259,
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/645079.
100
Aihwa Ong, “Graduated Sovereignty in Southeast Asia,” Theory, Culture and Society 17, no.4 (2000):
65.
101
Ibid., 62.

38
 The institutionalised hierarchies she refers to are a part of what Ong calls
graduated sovereignty, which has been taken up to examine institutionalised privilege
in Malaysia and elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia. Ong has written extensively on
the divisions and prioritisations of populations. She is an expatriate of Malaysia, born in
Penang to a family of Chinese descent. Her 2006 book Neoliberalism as Exception
explores state sovereignty, citizenship, nation building and rights. She describes
Malaysia and citizen benefits based on race and ethnicity:

Special programs have awarded shares in state-held trusts, government

contracts, business credit, scholarships, business licenses, university admissions,
civil employment and jobs in large firms to Malay subjects. This, in effect, has
created the world’s first affirmative action system tied exclusively to ethnicity.
The pastoral power that has been employed on behalf of the Malays has
unevenly favoured the middle and upper classes, and Malays as a community
enjoy more rights, benefits and claims than non-Malays.102

From the 1970s, through the Fourth New Economic Policy the government
sought to reduce imbalances in ownership assets and wealth and provided assistance to
Malays and other indigenous groups.103 James Chin writes:

Malaysia’s affirmative action program was supposed to right a historical wrong.

In 1969, deadly racial riots broke out between Malays and Chinese in several
cities, and the country was placed under emergency rule. UNMO blamed British
colonialists for unrest, claiming that until Malaya’s independence in 1957 they
had sidelined Malays and favoured Chinese in the economy.104

Chin’s piece is directed at the ethno-racial tensions informed by policies to uplift

Malays where the UNMO justified its affirmative action policies that blamed British
colonial rule for ongoing ethnic and racial tensions in Malaysia. The deadly riots were
initiated on May 13, 1969, three days after the general election and just twelve years

102
Ibid., 59.
103
Ibid., 60.
104
James Chin, “The Costs of Malay Supremacy,” The New York Times, last modified August 27, 2015,
accessed March 23, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/opinion/the-costs-of-malay-
supremecy.html?_r=0.

39
after Malaysia’s Independence. Bloody violence between Chinese and Malay groups
spread across the Malayan peninsula with the exact numbers killed still unknown. The
riots protested Malay poverty, the majority of whom were peasants and forced the
government to rapidly adjust the relations between the state and the races. In this way,
the state focused its attention on the health and security of the Malays who
institutionally became the bumiputras, translated as ‘sons of the soil’. By implementing
policies in the 1970s to accommodate the bumiputras (Malays and indigenous groups),
Malays were granted economic and additional privileges over ethnic Chinese, Indians
and other minorities. These policies narrowed the gap between the Malays and the
Chinese, to counter colonial policies that tied the Malays to the land and to advance
their positions as modern and urban. Yet, as Ong argues, these policies have done little
to help poor Malays and have only benefited the wealthier classes and educated Malays.

Primarily geared to build a Malay middle class, the affirmative action policies
enforced an increase in employment and ownership of share capital. The New
Economic Policy (NEP) increased the Malay controlled equity capital from 2.4% to
30%. The NEP also inspired the state to administer a series of five-year plans, targeted
at Malays to become capitalists, professionals and workers who would then become
modern citizens.105 For example, state intervention in the peasant economy generated a
steady growth of Malays into the city. A significant number of those who migrated were
young women. Women’s economic participation was not intentional, but a result of
transnational corporations seeking to exploit women’s labour in electronic factories.
The demand for women’s labour in foreign manufacturing plants shifted the state’s
trajectory to create a Malay male working class. These labour-intensive outposts
became special economic zones, and were the sites of racial privilege, as corporations
were legally obliged to reserve 30% representation for Malays.

State intervention through the NEP generated growth in the peasant sector that
saw a gradual influx of Malays into the cities, most of whom were young women. These
women worked in urban free trade zones for large subsidiaries of transnational
corporations. By the late-1970s, approximately 80,000 of peasant girls between the ages

105
Ong, “State versus Islam,” 259.

40
of 16 and their mid-20s had been transformed into industrial labourers.106 Known as
‘the working daughters’ this introduced another important division of labour in the
household. Women’s entry into the paid workforce changed the gendered dynamic of a
predominantly male-centred public sphere. In the household, brothers of ‘the working
daughters’ saw this as an opportunity to selfishly hold onto their paychecks for
individual wealth. Therefore, ‘the working daughters’ were burdened with financially
supporting the household.

Women’s participation in special economic sectors played a significant role in

women’s emancipation through financial gains that shifted the gender division of
labour, challenging dominant patriarchal norms. This was a significant moment in
Malay history, as women had the money and social freedom to experiment with a new
sense of identity outside of the home, where they could define themselves through their
work.107 This newfound economic emancipation also led to the exploitation of women’s
labour. Chandra Talpade Mohanty observes:

Ong’s work illustrates the embodiment of sexist, racist stereotypes in the

recruitment of young Malay village women into factory work, and delineates
factors pertaining to their subjectivities. Thus, Malay women face economic
exploitation, sexual harassment, and various levels of discipline and surveillance
as workers.108

For the Malaysian state, women’s participation in the workforce worked on two
fronts. First, Malay women were economically contributing to the economy, which
followed the state’s desire to promote Malaysia as a modernising country. Second, these
women transgressed societal, religious and cultural norms. The state was faced with the
problem of keeping women as good economic contributors, but also keeping them as
good wives and mothers. It was at this pivotal point during Malaysia’s economic surge

106
Ibid., 265. See also, Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1987). In an ethnographic account Ong explores in depth Malay women
workers in Japanese factories. She argues these women are caught between their culture and industrial
production.
107
Ibid.
108
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 73.

41
that then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad ran a state wide anti-Western political
campaign emphasising the need for ‘Asian Values’, which contradicted his initiatives to
economically modernise Malaysia with foreign investment.

Enter ‘Asian Values’

The political ideology of ‘Asian Values’ was used to unite Southeast Asian
nations. After achieving independence, post-colonial countries in Asia formed alliances
and agreements to create an Asian identity. Leading the charge were former Prime
Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad and former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee
Kuan Yew. Their goal was to position Asia in opposition to the West. Originating in the
1980s, ‘Asian Values’ was a campaign to oppose Western individualism by promoting
communitarian collectivism of social interests.109 For Mohamad and Yew, ‘Asian
Values’ promoted ideals of harmony over personal freedom, valuing respect for
authority and strong leadership, a strong attachment to family and a complementary set
of gender relations. Chua Beng-Haut states, “Each of these countries has a place, an
idea of communitarianism within the respective formal national ideology that seeks to
project this idea onto the body politic. This has enabled each of the political leaders to
stress the communitarian ethic of his respective culture.”110 The discourse surrounding
‘Asian Values’ was based in regional unity but with nationalist characteristics. This
enabled Southeast Asian countries to unite under its larger Asian identity, but at the
national level, local racial and ethnic hierarchies and categorisations remained.

The importance of the rise of ‘Asian Values’ in my research is how it was used
to control women’s bodies. It aimed to confine women’s roles to the private sphere
complementing men’s roles in the public spheres. The moral project of the ‘Asian
Values’ discourse was quickly reframed ‘Asian Family Values’, which saw the Asian
family as in crisis. It harnessed concerns about families and marriages in trouble,
divorce, deviant youth, transgressive gender and sexual identities, crime and child

Maila Stivens, “‘Family values’ and Islamic revival: Gender, rights and state moral projects in
109

Malaysia,” Women’s Studies International Forum 29 (2006): 356, doi: 10.1016/j.wsif.2006.05.007.

110
Chua Beng-Huat, ““Asian-Values” Discourse and the Resurrection of the Social,” Positions: East Asia
cultures critique 7.2 (1999): 576, http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au.

42
abuse.111 The state moral project was cemented in Islamic values that tied the family
and gender relations to wider global contexts, but remained patriarchal in its gender
discrimination against women.112

‘Family development’ strategies aimed to regulate women’s bodies. In Malaysia,

this meant that ‘the working daughters’ would stay home if their husbands could afford
it, to raise children and take care of the home. Even for the poor, the ideal remained,
ensuring an unattainable goal for policy and thus ideological repetition. In an official
capacity, the state controlled the private sphere and this was enmeshed in two processes.
First, the social construction of gender and the family is always class-specific in its
effects. Second, among the middle class, conservative ideologies concerned with
preserving this class privilege linked the privatisation of female sexuality under a male
authority to benefit state social order and the body politic.113 Ong argues “The
consequence of this struggle of capitalist state versus Islamic umma has been an
intensification of gender inequality in Malay society.”114 Wider state ideologies
imposed nationalist Islamic rhetoric that divided groups of women by interfering in the
private spheres. Islamic revivalism in Malaysia followed the Islamic movements from
Arab countries:

These movements strive to ‘Islamize’ society by imposing a collective

enforcement of Islamic public morals. They seek to organize (or reorganize) the
practices of social life, including the minute details of family life, through the
implementation of what they deem as ‘truly Islamic’ or ‘authentic Islamic’
values. Their targets for this project of ‘Islamization’ are first and foremost
women – women’s rights and status in the family and society – and women’s
bodies.115

111
Stivens, “‘Family values’ and Islamic revival,” 355.
112
Ibid.
113
Ong, “State versus Islam,” 272.
114
Ibid.
115
Norani Othman, Zainah Anwar and Zaitun Mohamed Kasim, “Malaysia: Islamisation, Muslim politics
and state authoritarianism,” in Muslim Women and the Challenge of Islamic Extremism, ed. Norani
Othman (Malaysia: SIS Forum, 2013), 91.

43
 Islam in Malaysia was no longer a local culture and tradition, but replaced with
an ideological and ‘Arabised’ Islamic identity.116 Islamisation initiatives saw Islam as
the solution to a better society freed from the problems of contemporary society and
Western influences. This enabled Dakwah movements to gain momentum in Malaysia.
Mazna Mohamad argues, “When Malays reconstituted their identities to stamp their
exclusivity and separateness from non-Malays, Islam was used to redefine a new
identity.”117 Using Islam in this way also combatted cultural connotations left over from
British colonialism of Malays as inadequate and lazy. The impact of Islamic resurgence
movements in Malaysia from the 1970s into the 1980s involved the politics of culture,
religion, identity and nationalism that intertwined the relationship between state and
religion.

The colonial legacy of divide and rule via ethnicity and race continues to govern
the country today, which has also conflated race, ethnicity and religion through
categorisations of the Malays, the Chinese and the Indians. Here we can begin to see the
genealogical roots of present day conflicts. The ongoing racial and ethnic tensions in
Malaysia cannot be traced to a single origin, but are located in how colonial policies
have been taken up in post-Independent Malaysian politics and policies. Contemporary
Islamic resurgence movements that transpired in the 1970s onwards furthered tensions
between races and ethnicities. Therefore, the repercussions of Malaysia’s colonial
history, coupled with wider political and religious global movements, furthered racial
and ethnic tensions in the country. Tracing these political and ideological shifts in
Malaysia’s history “[r]ejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and
indefinite teleologies. [Opposing] itself to the search for ‘origins’.”118 The aim of this
chapter then, is not to search for the origins of contemporary women’s movements and
organisations, but how they have been built on existing racial and ethnic divisions.

116
Norani Othman, “Muslim women and the challenge of Islamic fundamentalism/extremism: An
overview of Southeast Asian Muslim women’s struggle for human rights and gender equality,” Women’s
Studies International Forum 29 (2006): 343,
http://dx.doi.org.exproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1016/j.wsif.2006.05.008.
117
Mazna Mohamad, “The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity, and Democratization in Malaysia,” 357.
118
Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 77.

44
 Where women and women’s groups were concerned, family laws that proved
problematic to Muslim women led to the formation of organisations such as Sisters In
Islam. The organisation began with a group of women in 1987 who questioned and
opposed the 1984 legislation of Islamic Family Laws. Academics, journalists, activists
and other women seeking change wanted to read the Quran for themselves, especially as
it related to women’s oppression.119 Starting as a reading group, “They began to meet
every week to study the Quran closely, especially verses used to justify domestic
violence and gender equality in general.”120 Opening up women’s groups and
organisations to Islam saw a continuation of remaining racial and ethnic hierarchies left
behind by the British that was also influenced by global Islamic movements,
constructing Malayness through race, ethnicity and religion. Islamic influence was also
bolstered by students returning from studies overseas, where many had become dakwah
leaders who opposed the newly economically successful Malays and their ‘nouveux-
riches’ lifestyle. Othman, Anwar and Kasim point out:

What began as the Islamization of society was transformed into a radical

political movement with the return of Malaysian students (from Britain and the
United States) who were exposed to the political Islam of the Muslim
Brotherhood (Egypt) and Jamaati Islami (Pakistan). Their unambiguous struggle
for an Islamic state and their denunciation of the secular, Westernized
governments in Muslim-dominated countries provided a powerful ideological
appeal to the young uprooted Malaysian students studying in the West.121

Using the Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) as the political party of their choosing,
dakwah leaders helped to fuel radical changes in Malaysia. PAS is known for its
conservative views on Islam and has a strong Malay following. The UMNO’s position
on Islam is through its ‘modern’ approach to Islam by introducing Islam-based banking,
insurance, tertiary education, and legislation. In efforts to maintain its political control
in Malaysia, UMNO have implemented various Islamisation policies and programs. In
1982, it introduced and amended Islamic laws. According to Othman, Anwar and

119
Sisters In Islam, “The SIS Story,” http://www.sistersinislam.org.my/.
120
Ziba Mir-Hosseini, “New Feminist Voices in Islam,” BARAZA! No. 4 (2010): 3-4.
121
Othman, Anwar and Kasim, “Malaysia: Islamisation, Muslim politics and state authoritarianism,” 85.

45
Kasim, “PAS’ conservatism, however, does not suggest that UMNO is somehow the
more progressive party…The laws passed under the UMNO-led government have
manifested themselves as only mildly less oppressive and anti-women than those of
PAS.”122 Both PAS and UMNO favour the Malay class and have used their political
platforms to influence their particular brands of Islam.

Towards the end of the 1980s some women’s and feminist groups began to
incorporate Islamic principles and interpretations of the Quran in their work. The
network called Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML) initiated a global
project of feminist dialogue and engagement with Islam. Organisations, such as the
Women’s Aid Organization (WAO), the Women’s Crisis Centre (WCC), Women’s
Development Collective (WDC), All Women’s Action Society (AWAM) and the
already mentioned Sisters In Islam, used Islam to frame their organisations as seeking to
reinterpret Islam from a feminist viewpoint.123 One of the major aims of the integration
of Islam into women’s organisations was to “keep clear of secular feminist discourses
and organisations.”124 There were clear signs of the emergence of a new consciousness
and a gender discourse that is feminist in its aspiration and demands, but Islamic in its
language and sources of legitimacy. Some versions of this new discourse came to be
labelled ‘Islamic feminism’.125 When the government implemented new Islamic family
laws in 1987, Muslim women in Malaysia did not turn their backs on Islam, but used
this as an opportunity to unite under Islamic feminism. This would prove difficult, as
many of the women working and leading these organisations were implicated in
universal discourses of women’s human rights, having attended global women’s
conferences or receiving tertiary educational opportunities overseas. These women were
educated, professional Muslim women who were still benefiting from state
institutionalised affirmative action policies. Ng et al. suggest, “Even the violence
against women (VAW) issue did not provide enough of a bridge to bring middle-class
Islamic women and feminist groups together.”126 Also contributing to the dichotomy

122
Ibid., 87.
123
Mohamad, “The Politics of Gender, Ethnicity, and Democratization in Malaysia,” 363.
124
Ng, Mohamad and beng hui, Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia, 29.
125
Mir-Hosseini, “New Feminist Voices in Islam,” 3.
126
Ng, Mohamad and beng hui, Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia, 29.

46
between the Islamic and the universal were the global Islamic revivalist movements that
called for a hyper-ethnicised feminine identity.

To rebuild the Malay-Muslim identity, the ideal Malay Muslim woman “sought
a psychological as well as pragmatic rationale to justify their choice of clothes, lifestyle
and social behaviour.”127 Furthermore, the project also aimed to dismantle ideas of a
universalised woman who was a non-Muslim or perceived Western in her ideologies
and beliefs. At this time many Muslim women returned to or took up veiling practices
to signify their religious piety. Maila Stivens writes “[The] rivalry among Islamization
projects have resulted in an intensification of Malay gender difference, segregation and
inequality.”128 This rivalry produced contradictory ideological convergence around
gender, and most relevant to the Asian Values discourses, gender and the family unit.

Unity in diversity: The Violence Against Women campaign

Clearly NCWO failed to bridge racial and ethnic divisions among women. In the
1980s and into the 1990s, women’s groups and organisations tried again to unite under
the issue of violence against women (VAW). Major women’s organisations formed
alliances between the Women’s Crisis Centre (WCC), Women’s Development
Collective (WDC), and All Women’s Action Society (AWAM). Many of the women
working in these organisations were middle class, urban women who often received
tertiary education in the West. Ng, Mohamad and beng hui describe the Joint Action
Group (JAG) against VAW coalition:

A group of about 20 women aged 20 and 30 came together in Petaling Jaya,

Selangor, to discuss issues related to the status of women in Malaysia, as well as
the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of the women had just
returned from studies abroad and been exposed to various social justice
movements such as the anti-Vietnam war and civil rights movement; others had

127
Ibid., 23.
128
Stivens, “‘Family values’ and Islamic revival,” 356.

47
 been involved in different causes locally. All had the common desire to improve
the lives of women in Malaysia.129

Initially, when women’s organisations aligned over the issue of VAW, many of
the organisations functioned as shelters for women suffering domestic abuse and these
spaces served as sites for counselling, legal assistance and advocacy. In the mid-1980s,
the media’s involvement helped women in the VAW campaign. In particular,
campaigns dedicated to fight rape, such as the Citizens Against Rape (CAR) campaign
began to gain traction. This was in response to many gruesome rape-murders of
children. In 1987, nine-year-old girl Ang Mei Hong was raped and brutally murdered on
her way home from buying breakfast nearby. This shocking case was used to accelerate
the government’s response to women’s issues.130 In 1989, the Malaysian Government
enacted a penal code specifically relating to rape. The CAR campaign was short-lived
and resulted in repressive state interventions that saw the jailing of women activists who
were accused of being Marxists working to overthrow the state. Having women’s voices
heard and having action taken in support of women was a small success.131

Influence of international and global women’s movements

Global conferences on women in the 1980s had been a factor in Malaysian

women’s movements and their early beginnings. For example, the 1985 Third World
Women’s Conference in Nairobi, Kenya resulted in the Malaysian Government
adopting strategies from the conference. At world conferences, both at the state and
individual level (through women’s experiences), women’s human rights campaigns
gained exposure in Malaysia and put women’s issues on the map. For instance, JAG-
VAW used the already mentioned slogan “the personal is political” in many of their
workshops. This feminist catchphrase was adopted to form collective decision-making
processes that would unite women from not only Western and Asian contexts at the

129
Ng, Mohamad and beng hui, Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Malaysia, 43.
130
Ibid., 44.
131
Ibid., 70.

48
global level, but could also work at the local level bridging disparities between differing
classes, races and ethnicities of women.

The establishment of contemporary women’s organisations in Malaysia is

closely tied to world women’s conferences. One of the first established units under the
Ministry of Women, Family and Community, the Unit of Women’s Affairs (HAWA)
was formed in 1983 after the Second World Conference. After the Third World
Women’s Conference in Nairobi, Kenya in 1985, the Malaysian Government adopted
seven of the eight ‘Forward Looking Strategies’ resulting from the conference with
future goals to enact the National Policy on Women in 1990.132 From both the top down
approach by the government and the bottom up approach of women’s groups, women’s
rights were becoming an area of concern in Malaysia. Universal feminist ideologies are
often pitted against Islamic frameworks and this friction is not only implicated in
women’s rights, but also in wider political, economic and global debates on Islam and
the West.133 Using the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (CEDAW) vision as the international bill of rights for women, the
United Nations codified gender rights, which play a major role for the women in my
research. Women’s organisations, such as IWRAW AP, are framed through the
convention and use it in all of its training and programs, highlighting the international
appeal of the organisation, and its roots in a universal approach to women’s rights.
Working from an Islamic position, while still using CEDAW, organisations such as
Sisters In Islam also use the convention as a strategy to hold Malaysia accountable for
the discrimination against women, in particular removing its reservations on the articles
pertaining to marriage and family.

World conferences dedicated to women were double-edged. On the one hand,

through gaining respect from the international community, the Malaysian Government

132
Sumayyah Amar, “Feminism Movement in Malaysia Ensnares the Future of the Country’s Women
and Children,” The Khilafah, last modified February 23, 2015, accessed July 17, 2016,
http://www.khilafah.com/feminism-movement-in-malaysia-ensnares-the-future-of-the-country’s-women-
and-children. Since the 1990s, the Malaysian Government has signed several international agreements to
improve women’s rights and has attempted to integrate these into national policies, but progress remains
stagnant. For more on this, see also: Sisters In Islam, “Closing the Gender Gap in The Star,” Sisters In
Islam, accessed March 20, 2015, http://www.sistersinislam.org.my/news.php?item.775.6.
See also Benjamin R. Barber’s Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy (New York:
133

Ballantine Books, 2001).

49
became more active in taking seriously women’s rights. On the other hand, this
increased tensions between universal feminist approaches to women’s rights and
‘indigenous’ frameworks, such as Islamic feminist approaches to women’s rights, which
coincidentally also travelled to Malaysia through Islamisation movements from the
Middle East. Ideologically, Islamic feminism and universal feminism were pitted
against each other in Malaysia to form a national identity reflected in political agendas,
such as ‘Asian Values’ discourses and Islamic resurgence movements, to control
women’s bodies. International approaches to women’s rights and ‘global sisterhood’
movements proved controversial to the diversities of women represented under this
alliance.

Contemporary women’s organisations in Malaysia do not fit neatly into an either

universal or particular categorisation or a linear history of existence, but are
representative of a discontinuous and unsteady lineage. Organisations such as Sisters In
Islam, which began as a reading group in the late-1980s and officially became a
women’s organisation in the early-1990s, framed itself through Islam responding to
Islamisation movements and new Islamic laws of the government. Malaysian feminist
activist Zainah Anwar of Sisters In Islam and Musawah sought to open up the ways in
which women could engage with Islam. Returning to the organisation’s work, Sisters In
Islam promotes the idea that both men and women are equal under Islam, that men do
not have the right to beat their wives and that polygamy is not an inherent right of
Islam.134 Sisters In Islam is also affiliated with international organisations and global
partners and engages in the United Nations treaty body reviews, such as CEDAW
sessions and the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process. While their work focuses
on Islamic law and women’s rights, the organisation uses both the universal human
rights discourses embedded in the United Nations conventions in addition to re-
interpretation of Islamic holy texts such as the Quran and Hadith. In the 1990s, Sisters
In Islam, along with other national-level women’s organisations in Malaysia, turned
towards using Islam as a tool in their work. As Teresa de Lauretis argues the subject of

134
Layali Eshqaidef, “Mapping the History and Development of Islam and Feminism,” BARAZA! No.6
(2010): 8-9.

50
feminism is “not unified but rather multiple, and not so much divided as
contradicted.”135

Conclusion

This chapter has mapped the history of contemporary Malaysian women’s

organisations. As Dorathy began this chapter with the importance of women’s human
rights and the larger feminist project for women’s organisations, she also lives the day-
to-day realities of negotiating her feminist identity working at IWRAW AP. She is
faced with working from a United Nations codified lens of women’s rights in the
Malaysian context as an Indian Malaysian woman. This becomes difficult for her and
many of the women in my study, as women’s organisations in Malaysia have divided
themselves along the lines of race, ethnicity and religion. This stems from Malaysia’s
colonial history, when women’s unequal participation in resistance movements and
women’s early activism to fight against British colonial rule signalled the beginnings of
ethno-racial divisions amongst women and women’s groups. This stratification is also
implicated in wider colonial, political, social, and economic structures left behind by the
British. In attempts to combat divisions between groups of women, the NCWO was
created to fix and bridge the ethnic divisions among women. However, the NCWO
could not overcome years of ingrained colonial divide and rule strategies among ethnic
groups and worked for only a select and privileged group of women who were usually
educated and professional women of the middle classes or higher.

Islamisation movements and changing government policies that favoured the

Malays have furthered ethnic tensions in the country that have also seeped into the
everyday realities of Malaysians. Women’s movements and organisations have been
plagued with ongoing divisions between women and their work on women’s issues. To
rectify this, many women’s organisations and groups attempted to coalesce over the
issue of VAW, but even this effort was futile as many of the women leading the charge
in these initiatives still belonged to privileged groups.

135
Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: essays on theory, film, and fiction (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1987), 2.

51
 I have discussed in this chapter the events, histories and policies that have
influenced women’s organisations in Malaysia. A recurring theme in these organisations
are the deeply embedded class, racial and ethnic divisions and tensions that segregated
women’s activism in independence movements, in post-independent Malaysia and in
the formation of contemporary women’s movements and autonomous and semi-
autonomous women’s organisations. Tensions, contradictions and complexities among
women and women’s movements is not of course particular to Malaysia, but as will be
explored throughout this thesis, have plagued wider feminist debates. Drawing on de
Lauretis’ discussion on the subject of feminism, the following chapter examines for
whom and where is feminism a home?

52
Chapter Two – Inside and outside of feminism: Are you a
feminist?

This question is confronting especially in the context of the everyday realities of

women working in Malaysian-based women’s organisations. It is still associated with
negative stereotypes that continue to plague its understandings, interpretations and
embodiments. Like many others, I have been asked this question numerous times in my
life, and I answer differently depending on the context, situation and circumstance.
During my fieldwork interviews I was nervous about asking my interviewees if they
were feminists. I did not ask this question outright, instead I asked them questions like:
what does it mean to work in a feminist organisation? How they think about feminism
at work and how does feminism resonate with them personally? Some of the women in
my study firmly identified as feminists, asking: “how could you not be?” and others
found themselves at odds with this label, and shared their experiences inside and outside
of feminism. As we saw towards the end of the last chapter, de Lauretis forcefully
argues the difficulties in the contradictions residing in feminism. She critically engages
with the terms gender, women and feminism to discuss “the uncomfortable condition of
being at once inside and outside gender” to open up the possibilities in feminist
research.136

de Lauretis’ 1987 Technologies of Gender gives us a way to theorise gender

beyond the lens of sexual difference. Breaking away from the limitations of this
approach rooted in the man/woman binary, de Lauretis opens up terms used in feminist
theory, such as “gender” and “woman”, and suggests a series of four propositions in the
construction of gender. For de Lauretis gender is a representation, it is the result of
representation and self-representation, it continues to be replicated and re-emphasised in
expected and alternative spaces, and through its construction it is deconstructed and
then reconstructed.137 The fourth proposition is especially important to my research
because it is where she examines, “For gender, like the real, is not only the effect of
representation but also its excess, what remains outside discourse as a potential trauma

136
Ibid., 11.
137
Ibid., 3.

53
which can rupture or destabilize, if not contained, any representation.”138 de Lauretis
critically engages with the female subject of feminism to construct one that can move
“across a multiplicity of discourses, positions, and meanings, which are often in conflict
with one another and inherently (historically) contradictory.”139

If women working in women’s organisations are deemed feminists by default,

how does this impact their greater identities? In this chapter, I use iconic feminist texts
to consider the present-day quandary many NGO women’s rights workers find
themselves in. I draw on feminist scholarship to discuss how one can be inside and
outside of feminism. For the purpose of my research, I am not interested in defining
feminism, but rather seeing how it can be used to describe the experiences of women in
my research, as well as how they negotiate their feminist identities. I also consider what
feminism represents in the post-colonial context of Malaysia. Nkolika Ijoema Aniekwu
argues, “The writings and activism of many women in post-colonial contexts or in
developing areas around the world have challenged the idea that there should be
‘commonality’ or ‘globality’ in the forms of feminist expression and activism.”140 I take
from Aniekwu’s lead to discuss the multiplicity of feminist voices and interpretations to
include the contradictions and complexities within feminist spaces and discourses.

Feminist belongings

The three of us are sitting in a noisy Indian restaurant located in the heart of
Georgetown, Penang. Sharon is a Chinese Malaysian woman with a short almost buzzed
haircut wearing thinly framed glasses. Ruby is an Indian Malaysian woman; she has
slicked black short hair, also wearing glasses. They are colleagues working for an NGO
in Penang focused on gender issues. Ruby and I met at a conference hosted by the
Women’s Development Research Centre (KANITA) at Universiti Sains Malaysia
(USM). I was presenting my research for the first time in my candidature, and Ruby,
who did not present a paper, had come to hear about research on gender. In their work

138
Ibid., 3.
139
Ibid., x.
140
Nkolika Ijeoma Aniekwu, “Converging Constructions: A Historical Perspective on Sexuality and
Feminism in Post-Colonial Africa,” African Sociological Review 10, no.1 (2006): 150,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/afrisocirevi.10.1.143.

54
as NGO program officers they take concepts and make them accessible to a wide range
of populations. Sharon’s understanding of feminism is based on her experiences as an
educated ethnic Chinese woman. While she said, “My uncles, my aunts and my mom all
went to college and university and went on to get their degrees, some of them even got
their PhDs,” she also noted, “The power relations I see in my home are very patriarchal,
there is a certain expectation that women in my family are to be educated, but when
these women have children, then the children take the primary focus over her career.”
This double bind is common for women. In Malaysia, women are represented in high
numbers in higher education, but are underrepresented in the workforce. Care
responsibilities consistently fall on women’s shoulders.

Sharon and Ruby were forthcoming about the role feminism plays in their
greater identities. Sharon’s feminism involves the intersections of her class, education
and ethnicity. Ruby’s understanding of feminism is located in wider feminist debates.
Missing from the feminist conversation, according the Ruby, were voices of those who
do not fit into mainstream feminism. To find her own sense of feminist belonging, she
uses ideas from lesbian activists and feminists, as well as concepts such as
intersectionality and queer theory. Ruby’s ability to take from feminist theories as they
apply to her is reminiscent of Moira Gatens’ description of the feminist theorist who “is
a kind of patchwork-quilter, taking bits and pieces from here and there in an attempt to
offer an account of women’s social and political being that would be adequate to basic
female principles.”141

I have raised de Lauretis’ importance in theory, and here I focus on how her
epistemological shift affects the whole of feminism, theory and practice. de Lauretis
develops a subject of feminism that is not bound in a singular definition of feminist
identity, but is multiple.142 de Lauretis draws and extends on the works of Louis
Althusser and Michel Foucault to build her subject in feminism, taking from Althusser

141
Moira Gatens, Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1991), 1, 137.
142
Teresa de Lauretis, “Displacing Hegemonic Discourses,” UCSC, accessed July 28, 2014,
http://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/PUBS/Inscriptions/vol_3-4/delauretis.html.
55
that “All ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete
individuals as subjects” then alters our perspective:

If I substitute gender for ideology, the statement still works, but with a slight
shift of the terms: Gender has the function (which defines it) of constituting
concrete individuals as men and women.143

By re-conceptualising Althusser’s original argument, de Lauretis illustrates the

shift in relations between gender and ideology. She states, “The shift from ‘subjects’ to
‘men and women’ marks the conceptual distance between two orders of discourse, the
discourse of philosophy or political theory and the discourse of ‘reality’.”144 de Lauretis
tackles what Linda Alcoff considers one of the dilemmas facing feminist theorists: that
“our very self-definition is grounded in a concept that we must deconstruct and de-
essentialise in all of its aspects.”145 Like Alcoff, de Lauretis offers a way to think about
the gendered subject:

A subject [is] constituted in gender, to be sure, though not by sexual difference

alone, but rather across languages and cultural representations; a subject en-
gendered in the experiencing of race and class, as well as sexual relations; a
subject, therefore, not unified but rather multiple, and not so much divided as
contradicted.146

I use her approach on gender and the feminist subject to convey the complexity
of what it means being a feminist in women’s organisations. Women in these spaces are
often hailed as feminists, but how they embody feminism in their personal lives may tell
a different and conflicted story than their professional work. Alcoff’s article, “Cultural
Feminism versus Post-Structuralism” was written a year after de Lauretis’ Technologies
of Gender. Building on de Lauretis’ earlier text Alice Doesn’t, Alcoff illustrates the
development of de Lauretis’ argument in Technologies of Gender. Alcoff examines the

143
de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 6.
144
Ibid.
145
Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,”
Signs 13, no.3 (1988): 406, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/3174166.
146
de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 2.

56
possibilities of de Lauretis’ ideas that give agency to the subject while at the same time
is located in ideological processes.147 Their conceptions and analysis of the ways sexual
difference has been written about in feminist theory and moving towards a more
comprehensive subject position of and categorisation of woman, remain integral in
current feminist debates and politics.148

Feminism at home

The moral policing of Muslim women in Malaysia, especially Malay women is

entrenched in religious ideologies and practices, such as veiling, that continue to
reinforce men’s and women’s gender roles both in the private and public spheres. Malay
women are often coded through the practice of veiling. Through dress, women’s bodies
have become visible and political. Malay women are taught that it is their duty to their
parents, families and ultimately God to represent themselves as good Muslim women.
This rhetoric is emphasised in mainstream media, in schools and in the family. These
spaces, most of which are controlled by men, are used to perpetuate dominant religious
and heteronormative representations of men and women. When I interviewed Suraya,
she talked to me about growing up in a Malay household. At first, hearing her family is
Malay is surprising, because she does not conform to the typical representations of a
Malay woman. This is visible: she does not wear the tudong (Malaysian for veil) at
work nor does she wear the baju kurung, the knee-length loose-fitting blouse that is
worn over pants or a long skirt. She is aware that she does not fit the idealised Malay
woman and addresses this in our interview. She told me that she has five siblings and
they all live at home with her parents on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. Suraya,
however, lives in the city. She has a male housemate, and along with her choice not to
veil, has caused a strained relationship with her family. She does not subscribe to the
prescribed gender roles of her family and is viewed as an outsider.

Aware that she is not supported at home, she finds a sense of belonging in the
work she does at IWRAW AP. Working on women’s rights has allowed her to think
about why she does not fit in with her family and how she is perceived as a woman. She

147
Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism,” 432, 424-425.
148
Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism,” 407.

57
constructs her feminist identity through her work. Being in her mid-20s, Suraya is
personally connected to the women in one of the major programs she works on dealing
with young Malaysian feminist activists. Despite her family’s ambivalence or lack of
care about the work she does, she is able to focus on what the work means in wider
feminist politics.

Thinking about the contradictions within feminism and the gender division of
labour in her home, she reflected on a confronting incident she had with her father:

We have this porch in front of the house and there is an unspoken thing that
women do not sit there. One day I was reading my book, doing my own thing
and then my dad looks at me, “Aya [what her father calls her] go make us some
coffee.” [She replies] “No, I don’t want to, I am here happily and why don’t you
ask my brothers, why don’t you make it yourself and why do you ask me?” I
told him off and said, “Dad, I am reading my book, can you ask my brother to
do it?” And he wouldn’t talk to me for two months after that.

Suraya discovered what happens when she pushes back against her father who is
the moral authority and power bearer in her family. Even on a seemingly trivial matter,
she challenged the gendered space of her family home. While Suraya finds (to some
extent) agency by talking back to her father, her actions are still viewed as political even
at the micro level. Alcoff suggests that a woman’s position is not inert, but she is an
active agent in her identity making. She draws on de Lauretis’ argument to convey “that
the identity of a woman is the product of her own interpretation and reconstruction of
her history, as mediated through the cultural discursive context to which she has
access.”149 As such, Suraya’s position as a woman in her family and in her work brings
out her feminist identity that has meaning from her own position as a subject
multiple.150

149
Ibid., 434.
150
Ibid.

58
Professional feminisms

Wathshlah is a former program officer at IWRAW AP and continues to act as a

resource person for the organisation. She now works as an independent consultant for
women’s organisations. Wathshlah was unhappy in the corporate sector and went back
to school to do a Masters in Counselling. Her first encounter with a women’s
organisation was with the Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO), this is where she says, “I
really got into women’s human rights.” For her, feminism became more familiar when
she started working in women’s organisations, she uses feminism not as concept or
theory, but as a way of life. She says, “It’s really about equality, it’s about processes,
about democracy and recognising your integrity as a woman. It is so many things, you
need to make sure it is part of everything you do, not only principles on paper, you
know?” She continues, “I could join the corporate sector (not saying she would) and
bring in the feminist perspective and my approach. It is not just an NGO thing,
feminism is beyond NGO work and beyond activism, it is really the principles you
live.”

In the wider NGO sector there is a growing fear of the professionalisation of

women’s movements and organisations. But there is also pressure on women to identify
as feminists.151 When this came up in my interview with Natasha from Musawah, she
spoke of the underlying tensions where women have their feminist activist credentials
questioned. By drawing attention to whose feminist activism is legitimate, Natasha also
reflects on the generational, ethnic and organisational differences between women’s
organisations in Malaysia. In particular, she sees that some prominent Malaysian
feminist activists portray their brand of feminism as the ideal. Natasha explains this is
due to their long-time service to women’s movements and what they have experienced
in women’s organisations. She also notes, this ideal is no longer applicable because of
changes and shifts in the sector. This remains an issue in women’s organisations, as
they were founded on activism and movements, but are now embedded in the wider

151
Srila Roy, “The Indian Women’s Movement: Within and Beyond NGOization,” Journal of South
Asian Development 10, no.1 (2015): 107, doi: 10.1177/0973174114567368.

59
non-profit/NGO sector, where they have to conform to funding and transparency
policies. In Chapter Five, I further explore the politics of funding and women’s NGOs.

The women who pioneered contemporary women’s movements in Asia have

worked hard to see the advancement of women’s rights. Sunila Abeysekera who was
once the Executive Director of IWRAW AP and the founder of the Women’s Media
Collective in Colombo, Sri Lanka was a leading feminist activist in Asia. Abeysekera is
critical of what she sees as the current culture of women’s human rights workers:

I see very few young women identifying as feminists. With the new virtual
forms of organizing I see how there is little sense nowadays of the need for
‘women only’ spaces. For example, when organizing among social media, they
do not see it is an issue if it is a man or woman blogging or tweeting…I am
amused when I hear a women’s rights worker say I am not a feminist, when in
fact through their work they do challenge male control and patriarchy but they
do not like to see themselves as feminist. I think the stereotype of feminists in
the 1960s as ‘home breakers’ and ‘trouble makers’ remains in Asia.152

Abeysekera was born in Sri Lanka to a progressive family. She received her
education in Colombo where she became politically active in the mid-1970s in the civil
rights movement. She worked with many organisations over the years and her activism
has attracted negative criticism, but as she stated in an interview “when everyone is
criticising you…then you are doing the right thing.”153 She is politically invested in
feminism, but has problems understanding why young women have trouble identifying
as a feminist. In what follows, I draw on another interview with a woman named Sally
to consider the complexity of feminist identity for younger women.

When I entered the field, my goal was to re-attune myself with the daily working
rhythms of IWRAW AP, but many of the personnel had changed over the course of my

152
Wendy Harcourt, “Crossborder Feminisms Wendy Harcourt in Conversation with Srilatha Batliwala,
Sunila Abeysekera and Rawwida Baksh,” Development 55, no.2 (2012): 193-194, doi:
10.1057/dev.2012.12.
153
Margalit Fox, “Sunila Abeysekera, Sri Lankan Human Rights Activist, Dies at 61,” The New York
Times, last modified September 13, 2013, accessed December 26, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/world/asia/sunila-abeysekera-human-rights-activist-in-sri-lanka-
dies-at-61.

60
time there, as did the location of the office. Sally was one of the first women I
interviewed. She was an energetic early-20s Caucasian Australian woman who came to
IWRAW AP as an intern. This was all very familiar, as this was how I began my
journey with the organisation. When feminism came up in our interview, Sally stated,
“That it has a negative connotation for my generation back home.” The feminist she is
referring to is the stereotype of the 1970s woman who burned her bra. Fearing that she
may be identified in the same way, she notes that she is not particularly radical. She
adds, “You can be a feminist without being ‘hardcore’.” There are several feminist
archetypes, including the Liberal, the Marxist, the Radical, and the Eco, but Sally’s
feminist point of reference, and the one she is uncomfortable with, is the stereotypical
anti-male lesbian.154

Chilla Bulbeck’s study on feminism also explores how the women in her
research viewed themselves within and outside of the concept. The women she
interviews, “approved at least some of feminism’s victories, even though many rejected
feminism, [because of its association] with bra-burning, radical lesbians and Germaine
Greer.”155 I ask Sally if she thinks the word feminist has evolved since the 1970s, and
she says yes. When I follow up to ask whether she thinks younger women see
themselves as advocates for women’s rights, she says some of the younger generation
feel the fight for equality is over. This is not isolated to Sally’s experience. As Elspeth
Probyn argues, “Feminism opens a discursive space that can be quickly filled with non-
feminists as well as younger women who can claim that feminism is no longer needed,
that they have the rights that their mothers worked for.”156 How an individual chooses to
define themselves within or around feminist ideologies is not specific or contained to
any specific geographical location. Feminism is an issue that crosses borders and
boundaries, especially in light of transnational activism and women’s movements across
the globe. Being inside and outside of ideology is not a matter of doing feminism right,
but is a lived reality that enables women working in organisations like IWRAW AP and

Chilla Bulbeck, Living Feminism: The Impact of the Women’s Movement on Three Generations of
154

Australian Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147.

155
Ibid., 144.
Elspeth Probyn, “This Body Which is Not One: Speaking an Embodied Self,” Hypatia 6, no.3 (2008):
156

118, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable /3809842.

61
even Sisters In Islam to straddle the lines of feminism, allowing for changes in their
subjectivity. Sally draws our attention to the paradoxical nature of being inside and
outside of feminism while she engages in feminist work, there are times she does not
want to identify as a feminist.

When Sally speaks about her internship and her academic studies to her friends,
she talks about human rights law to divert attention away from the specificity of
women’s human rights. She repositions her professional work to match how she wants
to be perceived by different audiences in her personal life. She acknowledges that with
certain groups of people she can describe her work more specifically as women’s
human rights, but she decides which audiences and at what times. I ask Sally how she
talks about her internship with her friends back home, and what she says she does. Sally
thinks about this question long and hard before replying. Sally gives me an example of
who she would alter her response for, “I will say to some people who I think are
particularly macho, that I am working in human rights law and I will expand if they ask
more questions.” Sally negotiates her feminist identity depending on what she feels is
expected of her by her audience. She does not want to be associated with a particular
brand of feminism, therefore she repositions her professional feminist identity. The way
Sally negotiates between her personal and professional feminism is understandable.
While my experiences and life history differ from Sally’s, I also interned with IWRAW
AP and am familiar with their projects, such as CEDAW training, and many of their
major programs, such as Global to Local. This program in particular is the pinnacle of
the internship experience with the organisation. Interns travel with one or two program
officers (in rotation) to Geneva where they assist and attend a CEDAW session. Before
the sessions take place, IWRAW AP offers CEDAW training to NGO activists whose
countries are reporting. The trainings cover the main principles of the convention, how
to lobby committee members, and how to prepare the oral statements they present in
front of the committee.

I interviewed Sally before she left for Geneva. I can only speak for myself and
from my experiences, but I found that it was only after engaging with women activists
in Geneva that I began to see who the work was helping and why it is so important. I
met a Ugandan woman activist who at the time in 2010 was no longer able to reside in
the country because of her LGBT advocacy and activism. Uganda was one of the

62
countries reporting at this session and she came to give her oral statement to the
CEDAW committee to advocate for LGBT persons. This was at a time when Uganda
was about to pass the Anti-Homosexuality Bill. She came across as abrupt and harsh,
and at first I thought she hated me. I was a young and naïve intern at the time, and only
weeks into my internship with IWRAW AP. I also had not experienced the same
struggles, I could not know what it feels like to have my rights taken away and fear
persecution. I tried to draw on my family background to make a personal connection. I
have roots in Uganda and in her hometown of Kampala. She was not interested.
Dorathy my mentor and roommate in Geneva told me that it was common for activists
to come across as terse. They are used to fighting, their activism is their identity. Years
later in 2014 when I came back to IWRAW AP, I met Sanyu, a Kenyan woman who
was just starting her role as a program officer. She spoke in depth of her experiences in
activism in the African context. She says the term activist is so ‘loaded’ and often it
comes with a checklist: have you been imprisoned? Have you been abused by the
police? How many times have you been arrested? This put into perspective what I
encountered with the Ugandan activist in Geneva and how concepts like activism and
feminism are embodied based on contexts, experiences and life histories.

The program Global to Local is also tiring. For two weeks, resource persons
(who lead CEDAW training), program officers and interns work 14 days straight (there
are no days off during this time). This takes a lot of mental, physical and emotional
energy. In particular, interacting with women from various country-contexts and
making sure their needs are met. There is no training for these social exchanges;
learning is through experience. Program officers who have attended Global to Local
know how to conduct and move within NGO and UN spaces. For ‘newbies’ this takes
time and a lot of watching. It is about noticing what participants want to gain from the
sessions and trainings, what is at stake for them and what this means in their respected
country-contexts. What may seem like unimportant intern tasks, such as checking
PowerPoint’s, printing NGO oral statements and emailing participants and partnering
organisations, have larger implications in non-profit/NGO work. Completing these daily
tasks could mean the difference between the CEDAW Committee hearing about the
persecution of LGBT communities, where they are able to hold government’s
responsible through the process of the CEDAW sessions. Drawing on Wathshlah,
Sunila, Sally, Sanyu’s and even my own experience in women’s human rights work, we

63
can see that the work is rewarding, despite some of the challenges of negotiating
feminism, experience and emotions.

A concept-in-progress: The post-colonial subject in feminism

Just write this book down, there is this African American women’s group called
INCITE! They have written this fabulous book called The Revolution Will Not
Be Funded. [I am inspired even in reciting the title of the book].

This book was recommended to me by a Malaysian Feminist Activist (MFA).157

She was excited about the text, because of its resonance with resistance and the ongoing
tensions between the Global North and Global South in NGO spaces. The book is
inspired by Gil Scott-Heron, an American poet, musician and author. She recites, “The
revolution will not be televised, it will not be televised, and I tell you my brother the
revolution will be live.”158 This activist is influenced by black American women like
bell hooks who have fought for spaces in feminism, calling them brave women “who
don’t put up with shit.” Moved by their words and actions, she says women in the
Global South have a lot to learn from African American women. Speaking to the ‘white
savior complex’ she sees:

A very strong First World/Third World analysis, you give me any situation, I see
it and it bugs me, you know. When I go to the United Nations Commission on
the Status of Women (UNCSW) all I see is white women lording it over brown
women, you know, I don’t see it as in any way a symmetrical space.

As an Indian Malaysian woman, she feels the racial difference in NGO and
feminist spaces. Uma Kothari argues that race is concealed in non-profits and NGOs
and that these are thought to be “non-racialised spaces and outside of racialised

157
This activist wishes to remain anonymous in relation to having direct quotes used in this thesis. I call
her the Malaysian Feminist Activist, because that is how she describes herself and will refer to her as
MFA from this point on.
158
I have quoted from this Malaysian feminist activist here, but she is referencing Gil Scott-Heron’s best-
known composition “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and how black feminists have drawn on his
work to open up spaces in the non-profit sector. See also INCITE Women of Color Against Violence, The
Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit/Industrial Complex (Cambridge, MA: South End
Press, 2007).

64
histories.”159 Problematising this, MFA points out the contentions of race. Growing up
in Malaysia, she has also experienced racial discrimination in a society that privileges
the Malays. When race comes up in her profession, and in international spaces, she also
feels marginalised, where she says, “I see women in the North having power and
women in the South coming there and trying to squeeze into spaces that are narrow
already.” Feeling beaten, she is adamant that the dynamics between the North and South
have not shifted, but that they have become entrenched, “So, if you kiss ass to white
women, you will probably be moving up a notch.” Responding to larger feminist
concerns, and drawing on Alcoff’s notions of speaking for others discussed in the
Introduction, she brings up who has the privilege to speak and in what spaces. MFA not
only highlights the uneven power relationship between women, but how germane it is to
consider the post-colonial feminist subject.

For post-colonial countries such as Malaysia, feminism has been viewed as an

export from the West. However, as Chapter One highlighted, Malaysian women have
played several roles in independence movements. While Malay women were on the
front lines of nationalist movements in Malaysia, Indian and Chinese women also took
part in movements that were located in their ethnic-nationalist identities from India and
China. The influential feminist thinker from the Global South Kumari Jayawardene
argues:

Feminism is generally thought of as a recent phenomenon, rooted in Western

society, and people tend to overlook the fact that the word was in common usage
in Europe and elsewhere in the [nineteenth] and [twentieth] centuries, to signify
agitation on issues concerning women…The concept of feminism has also been
the cause of much confusion in Third World countries. It has variously been
alleged by traditionalists, political conservatives and even certain leftists, that
feminism is a product of ‘decadent’ Western capitalism.160

159
Uma Kothari, “An agenda for thinking about ‘race’ in development,” Progress in Development Studies
6, no.1 (2006): 9-12, doi: 10.1191/1464993406ps124oa.
160
Kumari Jayawardene, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Press, 1986), 2.
See also the introduction of Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York:
Routledge: 1993) for further discussion on the history of feminist epistemology and the struggles women
encounter to having their understandings of the world legitimated.

65
As Judith Butler writes on the unified and dominant views of feminism:

This form of feminist theorizing has come under criticism for its efforts to
colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly Western
notions of oppression, but because they tend as well to construct a ‘Third World’
or even an ‘Orient’ in which gender oppression is subtly explained as
symptomatic of an essential, non-Western barbarism.161

Mohanty’s work has also elaborated on the othering of non-Western/Western

women in feminism and women’s movements. Mohanty’s powerful text “Under
Western Eyes” gained support from gender studies and post-colonial studies and has
been translated in several languages since its publication. Her essay questions the
dominant discourses of feminism where she argues:

[W]estern feminist discourse, by assuming women as a coherent, already

constituted group which is placed in kinship, legal and other structures, defines
third-world women as subjects outside of social relations, instead of looking at
the way women are constituted as women through these very structures.162

By addressing the power relations within feminism itself, she points out the
dominant structures and where they are located. She exposes the Eurocentric and false
universalisation of women as a category of identification. She argues this is in the self-
interest of Western feminism.163 Opening up the category of women then observes the
differences of women and their representations, which aligns with de Lauretis’ approach
and considers the expansion of women’s experiences beyond the First World.164
Mohanty suggests that for too long the Third World has been defined through
oppression, but what has not been captured in detail is the historical complexities and

161
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1990), 3.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,”
162

Feminist Review 30, no.1 (1988): 80, doi: 10.1057/fr.1988.42.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ““Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through
163

Anticapitalist Struggles,” Signs 28, no.2 (2003): 501, doi: 10.1086/342914.

164
I use the First World here to represent dominant discourses that get represented in feminism and are
often prioritised.

66
struggles involved in changing oppressive relationships.165 Mohanty deconstructs the
all-encompassing category of women:

Women as a category of analysis, or: we are all sisters in struggle. By women as

a category of analysis, I am referring to the crucial presupposition that all of us
of the same gender, across the classes and cultures are somehow socially
constituted as a homogenous group identifiable prior to the process of
analysis.166

Mohanty charts “the location of feminist scholarship within a global political

economic framework dominated by the ‘First World’.”167 When Mohanty originally
wrote “Under Western Eyes” she was examining what she then called the First and
Third Worlds. While this language has morphed into the North/South distinction this
linguistic shift is not my concern as I am focused on the power imbalances located
within these semantic divisions.

Tejaswini Niranjana reconstructs the feminist subject to include the post-

colonial context. She proposes that the post-colonial political subject is one that
includes the feminist subject: a subject-in-transition. This enables a way to historicise
this subject and in turn “mark its supplementarity.”168 This is informed in how women
are identified as either Third World Women, Women of Colour or anything that
specifies them as non-Western women. Looking beyond Western interpretations of
feminism, she builds on feminist discourses to include Asian perceptions and
viewpoints.169 While Niranjana explores the feminist subject through translation and
Mohanty uses the representation of ‘Third World’ feminisms and the making of the

165
Mohanty, ““Under Western Eyes” Revisited,” 501.
166
Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” 65.
167
Mohanty, ““Under Western Eyes” Revisited,” 501.
168
Tejaswini Niranjana, “Feminism and Translation in India: Contexts, Politics, Futures,” Cultural
Dynamics 10, no.2 (1998): 135, doi: http://doi-
org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/10.1177/092137409801000204. Niranjana also explores feminism in
the South Asian context and how it is used by Indian women and if they identify with the term. See also:
Tejaswini Niranjana, “Feminism and Cultural Studies in Asia,” interventions 9, no.2 (2007): 209-218,
doi: 10.1080/13698010701409152.
See also Uma Narayan, “The Project of Feminist Epistemology: Perspectives from a Nonwestern
169

Feminist,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, 213-224
(New York: Routledge, 2004).

67
Third World woman, both Niranjana and Mohanty are concerned with the historical
complexities of the feminist subject. The ‘subject-in-translation’ identified by Niranjana
is similar to de Lauretis’ feminist subject and what Mohanty explores in her analysis of
the categorisation of women.170 Niranjana and Mohanty’s interrogation of feminism, in
tandem with de Lauretis’ approach, address the differences between and among women,
and illustrate the diversities within feminist scholarship. As Alcoff puts it, “The strength
of Lauretis’ approach is that she never loses sight of the political imperative of feminist
theory, and, thus, never forgets that we must seek not only to describe this relation in
which women’s subjectivity is grounded but also to change it.”171 Feminism’s political
imperative is also manifested through its ability to be reflexive through building,
revisiting and reconstructing ideas.

Returning to her original “Under Western Eyes” essay, Mohanty reflects on its
meaning for transnational feminism, and how her position has changed over time:

What are the challenges facing transnational feminist practice at the beginning
of the twenty-first century? How have the possibilities of feminist cross-cultural
work developed and shifted? What is the intellectual, political and institutional
context that informs my own shifts and new commitments at the time of this
writing? What categories of scholarly and political identification have changed
since 1986? What has remained the same? I wish to begin a dialogue between
the intentions, effects, and political choices that underwrote “Under Western
Eyes” in the mid-1980s and those I would make today. I hope it provokes others
to ask similar questions about our individual and collective projects in feminist
studies.172

Mohanty acknowledges that her essay “Under Western Eyes” was her first
publication after completing her PhD; however, “It remains the one that marks my
presence in the international feminist community.”173 In her re-visited work, she reflects
on her then newly appointed academic position as a woman of colour in a

170
Niranjana, “Feminism and Translation in India,” 135.
171
Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism,” 422.
172
Mohanty, ““Under Western Eyes” Revisited,’” 500.
173
Ibid., 499.

68
predominantly white United States academic institution. Determined to make her mark
in this environment, she carved out a space for the marginalised, and scholars like
herself.174 Her original essay is still used and taught in gender studies courses, and
remains a seminal piece of feminist scholarship that deconstructs feminism and opens it
up to possibilities outside of the Western context.

Feminist ‘homes’ in the NGO sector

I now want to turn to what feminist ‘homes’ in the NGO sector could look like
in the Malaysian context. In a co-authored chapter written by Chandra Talpade Mohanty
and Biddy Martin titled “What’s Home Got to Do with It?” they seek to develop an
understanding of women’s multiple subject positions.175 Mohanty and Martin take into
consideration their feminist politics and use it in their configuration of home as a
concept and a way to think about belonging in feminism. Inderpal Grewal and Victoria
Bernal write of the NGO sector and feminism, “As feminist research makes clear,
gender can best be understood as relational and as always in process, and NGOs now
play a role in the processes through which gender is constructed and reimagined.”176 As
we have seen, these spaces illustrate the everyday lived realities and contradictions
within feminism. Women working in these organisations can agree upon the importance
of using a feminist lens working on the promotion of women’s rights. However, they
are still working within a context that is fraught with ideological and political tensions
related to Malaysia’s post-colonial situation, economic constraints and wider systemic
gender inequalities.

The divisions among women’s groups often divide ideologies, such as the
universal versus the particular, the international versus the national, and more specific
to Malaysia, the universal versus the Islamic. These dichotomies are based in clear
distinctions and binary logic. Countering these frameworks, I argue feminist spaces,
such as women’s organisations, weave in and out of diversities and ideologies, which

174
Ibid., 503.
175
Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism,” 420. Located in footnote 35.
176
Inderpal Grewal and Victoria Bernal, Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 305.

69
often brings together various interpretations of feminisms. For instance, Sisters In Islam
was influenced by women’s world conferences, global Islamic resurgence movements
and nationally charged VAW campaigns. Using the United Nations CEDAW
framework, IWRAW AP takes the position of a universal feminist organisation. The
founding members of IWRAW AP saw universal feminism as space for all women.
Their motivation to be inclusive is also problematic, because it assumes that all women
share the same discriminations and life experiences. Mohanty, de Lauretis and
Niranjana have pointed out this is not the case, and this is an existing issue and
contradiction within feminism.

Mohanty and Martin’s “What’s Home Got to Do with It?” unsettles boundaries
within feminism. They re-evaluate experience, identity and political perspective, which
they also argue is impacted by the role of community in relation to experience and
history. Mohanty and Martin began working on their project after visiting their
respective ‘homes’ in Virginia and Mumbai in 1984. These visits were “fraught with
conflict, loss, memories and desires.”177 Mohanty and Martin’s homes are spatially and
geographically very different, but they share in thinking about their relationships and
appeal of “home” as a concept in feminism. According to Mohanty and Martin:

What we have tried to draw out of this text is the way in which it unsettles not
only any notion of feminism as an all-encompassing home, but also the
assumption that there are discrete, coherent and absolutely separate identities—
homes within feminism, so to speak—based on absolute divisions between
various sexual, racial or ethnic identities.178

The text they are referring to is Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives
on Anti-Semitism and Racism, where contributors like Minnie Bruce Pratt question “the
all-too-common conflation of experience, identity and political perspective.”179 Seeking
to push against white Western feminism, Mohanty and Martin challenge the totalisation

177
Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Biddy Martin, “What’s Home Got to Do with It? (with Biddy Martin),”
In Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (United States: Duke
University Press, 2004), 86.
178
Ibid.
179
Ibid.

70
of feminist discourses that often centres on distinctions between Western and non-
Western, white and non-white and so on to engage in a dialogue that offers an
alternative way to think about binary distinctions and polarising ideologies. They focus
on the tensions within feminism and examine feminism through its multiplicity rather
than distinct divisions.

As NGO feminist ‘homes’, IWRAW AP and Sisters In Islam work for the same
goal of gender equality. Working at the international level of women’s human rights,
IWRAW AP is framed through the United Nations approach to women’s rights and
follows the principles of CEDAW. Where these organisations differ is Sisters In Islam’s
use of Islamic and United Nations inflected understandings of feminism in its work.
Women who are not Muslim do not have the opportunity to work at Sisters In Islam
who use affirmative action policies based on religious identity. This hiring policy has
had mixed receptions. On the one hand, it excludes women who are not Muslim, and
follows a similar state-sanctioned affirmative action trajectory. On the other hand, it
also provides a space for Muslim women to use their religious identity to fight against
the repressive and political uses of dominant patriarchal Islam. Both perspectives
highlight the ongoing divisions between ethnic and religious groups in the country.

To discuss NGO ‘homes’ I begin by discussing my visits to Sisters In Islam and

IWRAW AP, and their geographic locations in Kuala Lumpur. IWRAW AP is located
in the busy expatriate area called Bangsar. The office is smaller in comparison to Sisters
In Islam, but is situated near a busy Light Rapid Transit (LRT) train stop. It is easy to
get to by train, bus or taxi. In contrast, Sisters In Islam is hidden away in a suburb called
Petaling Jaya, a residential area outside of the city. To get to the Sisters In Islam office
is difficult. Taking a taxi from KL Sentral (one of the major transportation hubs), I
learned, is not easy. As a non-resident of Kuala Lumpur and without the MyTaxi
application on my phone, my option was to take the LRT train from KL Sentral to
Petaling Jaya, where I found a taxi near the station stop. I was lucky the taxi driver
knew where he was going, because I did not. We passed through rows and rows of
gated houses, in Malaysia, most houses look like compounds, something I am not
familiar with growing up in Canada. We finally arrived at Sisters In Islam; it is the last
house, green-gated with no signage. This is strategic. The organisation is the recipient
of hate by local religious leaders and mainstream media. Zainah Anwar, a leading

71
Malaysian feminist activist and founding member of both Sisters In Islam and Musawah
says, “We are challenged about our right to speak about Islam because we are not
mullahs [religious leaders]. We are told that we are not educated in the religion.”180
Refusing this sentiment, Anwar insists on the important work Sisters In Islam and
Musawah do to promote women’s rights. Sisters In Islam, a place where women seek
refuge and even obtain legal counsel, find the location ideal. Many of the founding
members of Sisters In Islam are lawyers, and the organisation offers legal aid services,
usually to women who are seeking divorce, which is a difficult process in the gender-
biased Sharia courts.

When I finally figured out how to use the doorbell, I entered the workspace. I
waited for Ratna, the Executive Director of Sisters In Islam so as not to draw attention
to myself. When Ratna greeted me, she had a large presence, and welcomed me into her
office. Our interview was during Ramadan, and aware she could be fasting, I profusely
thanked her for agreeing to my interview. When I learnt she was fasting I worried that I
was making her talk too much. I thought she was thirsty and I felt guilty. During the
interview, I asked her if it was okay to continue numerous times. She said she grew up
fasting and it was no big deal. When Ratna told me about Sisters In Islam, her voice
clear and melodic. She explained that she came to the organisation from the corporate
sector, a common thread for a few of the women in my research. Coming to women’s
human rights work from outside of the women’s movement is becoming an increasingly
popular option for women. While they earn significantly less money than they would in
the corporate sector, they are satisfied because they feel they are making a difference in
people’s lives. This is true for Ratna, she credits Sisters In Islam in helping her think
about her feminist politics and views on gender relations. Beginning to see the unequal
gender dynamics played out in Malaysian society, she questions her Muslim identity.
She says:

It was always clear to me after I joined Sisters in Islam; it was very easy for me
to see the bigger picture, the whole gender relation and the whole damage that

180
Sheila Nair, “Challenging the Mullahs,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 9, no.2 (2007): 242,
doi: 10.1080/14616740701259952.

72
 patriarchal interpretation and misogynist messages within that interpretation has
monopolized the Muslim society and I could relate to that.

Feminist principles have given Ratna strength and a new perspective on the
world, where “everything makes sense, even when you count discrimination and hear of
it, you know why it is happening.” Drawing on her experiences working at Sisters In
Islam and the changes she sees within herself, she also considers her home within
feminism that incorporates her ethnic and religious identities. She finds a sense of
belonging at Sisters In Islam, because she grew up and continues practicing Islam, and
sees this as a way to merge her personal and professional relationship to her faith. The
changes she has seen in herself are also transferred to her three sons who have become
more aware of gender inequality and negative stereotypes of feminism in Malaysia.

In my interviews with the women working outside of Sisters In Islam, and

primarily at IWRAW AP, their work focused primarily on feminist principles based in
the Western context of Geneva where CEDAW sessions are located. Women’s NGOs in
post-colonial contexts such as Malaysia have limited access to resources, but have their
agendas dictated from outside of their national contexts. Working from the United
Nations feminist lens of women’s human rights also impacts their feminist identities
and how they understand themselves from their national contexts using international
ideologies. However, the universal feminist home, via platforms like CEDAW,
continues to be a site of contention for these women. It is open to everyone, but therein
lies the challenge of this space. Who is able to enter this home? Who is able to find
comfort in this home? How is home complicated by difference? There are no simple
answers to these questions, but as MFA explains, “So many women join the women’s
movement with this idea that in this space I will be understood, in this space I will find
community, in this space I will experience solidarity.” Wanting to find comfort in the
universal feminist home some women have been heartbroken because of tensions and
existing hierarchies from the women’s movements. Mohanty and Martin argue:

Each of us carries around those growing-up places, the institutions, a sort of

backdrop, a stage set. So often we act out the present against the backdrop of the
past, within a frame of perception that is so familiar, so safe that it is terrifying

73
 to risk changing it even when we know our perceptions are distorted, limited,
constricted by that old view.181

What Mohanty and Martin put forward is relevant to how our experiences and
locations (both geographic and social) contribute to our sense of belonging, where we
think we fit in and how this comes to be. The women in this chapter are clear that their
commitment to working in women’s organisations can “either be for yourself to work
through, your karma or to work through your story of abuse or your narrative of being
neglected, or whatever it is that drew you into being able to see suffering in other
people’s lives.” MFA points out that women are trying to work out something within
themselves and use women’s movements to do this, because they imagine them as a
place of refuge, a safe home. Mohanty and Martin’s analysis of feminist homes and
homes within feminism reaches the wide breadth of feminist identities and allows for an
examination that is not limited by dichotomies such as the universal and the Islamic. We
can see women’s experiences and their feminism is not limited by these distinctions, but
are multiple in the way they come to their feminism and how they choose to embody it.

I return to the notion of the global ‘sisterhood’, which is problematic as it is still

necessary in thinking about solidarity movements for women’s rights. Aihwa Ong
explains that after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing there was a sense
of achievement for women’s rights. She does not ignore the gap between northern and
southern women’s groups, but uses the ‘strategic sisterhood’ as a way to confront the
entanglement in the globalisation of women’s rights:

The term strategic sisterhood implies a contingent North-South feminist

partnership for intervention in different countries where the gender gap is
pervasive, but it also suggests a transnational notion of citizenship for all
women, regardless of their economic, cultural or national differences.182

181
Mohanty and Martin, “What’s Home Got to Do with It?” 90.
182
Aihwa Ong, “Strategic Sisterhood or Sisters in Solidarity?”109. See also L. Amede Obiora’s
“Feminism, Globalization and Culture: After Beijing,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 4, no.2
(1997): 355-406, for a continued exploration of Ong’s article and her discussion of culture in defining
feminist agendas and issues surrounding women’s oppression.

74
 Strategic sisterhood is a solidarity that is aware of inequalities between women,
but is fueled by the greater disparities and inequalities between men and women. It
offers an alternative to critique between northern and southern women, and, as Ong
suggests, it opens the possibility for women’s movements to negotiate and make partial
collaborations between feminists in different countries.183 She exemplifies de Lauretis’
assertions that:

In spite of the divergences, the political and personal differences, and the pain
that surround feminist debates within and across racial, ethnic, and sexual lines,
we may be encouraged in the hope that feminism will continue to develop a
radical theory and a practice of sociocultural transformation.184

The discussion that women’s organisations are fraught with gender, class,
ethnic, racial and religious tensions is important, as it takes into consideration the
differences among women, but as de Lauretis reminds us, we cannot give up on the
potential to build solidarity among these divisions. Opening up the discussion and
keeping feminist debates alive is politically imperative for women’s organisations and
wider feminist circles. However, focusing on these debates from only a critical
perspective is limiting, but we must find ways to see the potential of these debates for
practical uses and strategies in women’s human rights initiatives and gender equality.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have highlighted how feminist analysis and theories,

specifically through the perspectives of de Lauretis, recognise the multiplicity involved
in feminism. This becomes important in the post-colonial feminist project that also
examines the singularity involved in terms like women and feminism. Through
women’s experiences, it became clear there was no single way of approaching women’s
human rights work and how women come to understand themselves inside and outside
of feminism. For some of the women in my study, feminism is more than a concept, but
a way of life, and ultimately a way they seek to make change in the world. For others, it

183
Ibid.,134-135.
184
de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 11.

75
is tricky, difficult and embedded in negative stereotypes and representations. Being
identified as a feminist has many layers and is constantly being negotiated and
renegotiated.

The experiences illustrated in this chapter reveal the contradictions of how

women view themselves within women’s organisations that are framed through
feminism but are complicated by their day-to-day lives. Women in non-profit/NGOs are
interpellated as feminists through their professional work, but their experiences do not
always reflect this identification. Some women have incorporated feminist principles in
their personal lives, explaining that you cannot be in this type of work without being a
feminist. Other women interviewed were not convinced of their feminist identity and
illustrated the complexities of their personal and professional feminisms. The blurring
of the personal and the professional has been discussed through feminist ideologies in
this chapter and will be developed in the following chapter to discuss women’s
commitment and passion towards their work and how they think about merging these
spaces.

I have also discussed the post-colonial feminist project, as it remains a

significant influence on this thesis. This intervention gives voice to the marginalised
and often neglected groups. I have drawn on Jayawardena, Niranjana and Mohanty,
prominent post-colonial feminist thinkers to think through the Malaysian context and
feminist identities. I have also used Mohanty and Martin’s analysis to argue women’s
embodied feminist activism is related to where they find a sense of feminist belonging,
a place they can call home and find comfort. Feminist homes are also implicated in
larger debates surrounding the universal and the particular and, as the women in my
research illustrate, this is not a simple matter of if they are a feminist or not, but are
situated in their greater identities.

If being a feminist is a part of one’s professional obligation, then why are so

many women hesitant to be called a feminist or identify as one? As de Lauretis,
Mohanty and Niranjana remind us, the ways in which women are represented and
constructed differ and the intersections of their embodied experiences are not unified,
but are multiple. The motivations for working in women’s organisations involve various
degrees of first-hand experience with women’s movements and more specifically
women’s human rights initiatives. International conferences, such as the Fourth World

76
Conference on Women held in Beijing see the promotion of women’s issues on the
global level. This was a crucial setting for women’s rights activists to recognise critical
issues faced by women. I have pointed out that global women’s conferences have also
been critiqued for proposing that women’s experiences are shared, but that they are still
important for women’s solidarity movements. In the next chapter, I follow on iconic
feminist texts to examine the relevance of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is the
political’ and how for the women in my research the personal is the professional. I
consider how women blur their professional and personal boundaries and what this
means to them in their greater identities.

77
Chapter Three – The personal is the professional

On my first field site visit to IWARAW AP, I noticed the office had more desks
than women working at them. As each week passed, and program officers would leave
and return to and from programs and consultations abroad, I desk-hopped. When I
finally settled in, I ended up sitting across from Dorathy, and behind me sat Saan and
Sanyu. There was little talking in the office. The loudest noises I heard were the sounds
of keys typing. I was interested to hear about Sanyu’s experiences, because she is from
Nairobi, a place I have visited but have little knowledge of in terms of the non-
profit/NGO sector. Sanyu is bubbly and energetic. She has worked for human rights
organisations in the past and says, “What makes human rights work and women’s
human rights is that ideology and shared values and morals are a part of your belief
system…it is part of your greater identity.” After high school, she took a gap year and
volunteered at the Nairobi Women’s Hospital with victims of gender-based violence.
Knowing that the non-profit/NGO sector was the professional path for her, she began
her professional career working for an international NGO (INGO) in New Delhi and
spent three years focused on advocacy for African countries that involved civil society
issues and the promotion of civil and political rights. Sanyu embodies how the personal
becomes the professional, following the feminist catchphrase the ‘personal is political’
made famous by United States feminist Carol Hanisch. The phrase was originally used
in the late-1960s and 1970s by women’s groups and movements who applied the slogan
to discuss and dissect experiences of women’s oppression, discrimination and
stereotyping. Hanisch’s essay titled “The Personal Is Political” was featured in
Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt’s Notes from the Second Year: Women’s
Liberation.185

In the last chapter I explored the ways in which feminism sometimes operates as
a home, and sometimes as an uncomfortable subject position for women. This chapter
takes the 1970s’ rallying cry, the ‘personal is political’, and examines how it can
illuminate the present day situation for women working in women’s rights

185
See also Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, eds., Notes from the Second Year: Women’s
Liberation: Major Writings of the Radical Feminists (New York: Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt,
1970), 76-78. When I refer to the title of Hanisch’s paper I use “The Personal Is Political” and when I
refer to the slogan I use ‘the personal is political’.

78
organisations. The day-to-day routine in women’s organisations is not particularly
glamourous. Often, it involves sitting in front of a desktop computer checking and
responding to emails. Women’s feminist activism now entails women sitting at their
desks rather than protesting in the streets.

This is something of a shock for women like Shanthi Dariam, one of IWRAW
AP’s founding members, for whom CEDAW’s promotion of women’s rights has been
life changing. Her commitment to women’s human rights is shaped by this framework
and her own experiences with gender discrimination in Malaysia. What is clear from her
feminist activist beginnings is the need to fight for better policies and laws that support
women. She participated in the 1980s women’s movements in Malaysia and her
experiences have enabled her to continue to focus on women’s rights. However, this is
increasingly becoming blurry for women entering non-profits and NGOs. They have not
shared in the same experiences of major global conferences or early feminist activist
meetings and protests that have resulted in the creation of women’s organisations
working out of the country today. As such, the feminist mantra of the ‘personal is
political’ has different meanings for women and their feminist activism. Experience
here plays a vital role in women’s organisations, and I argue has changed the way the
‘personal is political’ is embodied, especially for younger women entering this sector.

Carol Hanisch’s use of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ highlighted
how the personal or the domestic realm of women’s activities needed to be made public.
This has been central to women engaging in non-profit/NGO work. Women’s
commitment to their work has meaning, even in the administrative tasks that they do
because they see the bigger picture of helping others. Younger women entering this
profession are also motivated by both their personal activism and making it a career.
However, as we will see in this chapter, their passion and commitment is often
questioned by their older feminist colleagues. This strains the relationships among
women in these organisations, and leaves younger women searching for answers as to
why they continue working in the non-profit/NGO sector. In this chapter, I argue that
for these women in my research, the personal is the professional.

79
Gendering institutions and workplaces

Sociologist Joan Acker calls for a systematic theory of gender to encompass

issues surrounding the gender segregation of work, how organisations disseminate
forms of cultural reproduction, which in turn construct gender, and gender’s role in
producing organisational processes and pressures.186 In their 1990 research, Grossman
and Chester point out that less attention has been given to the experiences of work for
women. Studies had not considered how women view themselves as workers, how they
experience their work and the meaning they make of it in context to the rest of their
lives.187 More recent literature on women’s participation in the formal economy has
examined the commodification and blurring boundaries between the public and private
spheres.188 According to Rosemary Pringle, “Once we start thinking about the range of
work that women actually do, it also becomes clear that the problem for women is not
necessarily that they have been excluded from work but that they have too much
work.”189 The blurriness of home and work then becomes difficult for women to make
clear distinctions between their personal and private lives. Hochschild argues: “…it is
necessary for scholars working in this area to widen their perspectives and to include in
their research both work cultures and the private life worlds of the actors.”190 Her
research thinks through the complexities of home and work and what this means for
individuals’ greater identities.

Hochschild’s 1983 seminal text The Managed Heart, which has been discussed
in the Introduction of this thesis, is an exploration of emotion in the workplace. In
particular Hochschild convincingly examines the gendered realities of service-based
professions such as flight attendants. In her study of Delta Airlines, Hochschild uses

186
Joan Acker, “Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies: A Theory of Gendered Organizations,” Gender and Society 4,
no.2 (1990): 140, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/189609.
187
Hildreth Y. Grossman and Nia Lane Chester, eds., The Experience of Meaning of Work in Women’s
Lives (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990), 2.
188
Pettinger et al., eds., A New Sociology of Work, 6.
189
Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle, eds. Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender
Divisions (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992), 123, 131. For more on the gendering of work and the divisions
between men and women, see also: Ann Game and Rosemary Pringle, Gender and Work (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 1983).
190
Gotz, “Encountering Arlie Hochschild’s Concept of ‘Emotional Labor,’ 185.

80
women’s experiences to convey some of their emotional responses, which in turn
affects their performance at work. As one flight attendant recalls:

I guess it was on a flight when a lady spat at me that I decided I’d had enough. I
tried. God knows, I tried my damnedest. I went along with the program, I was
being genuinely nice to people. But it didn’t work. I reject what the company
wants from me emotionally.191

Hochschild’s research illustrates the consequences of using personal feeling and

emotion at work. I use her emotional labour thesis to examine non-profit/NGO work
and extend her ideas to ask what is at stake for women engaging in women’s human
rights work where there may be a moral professional obligation. Rebecca Taylor’s study
“Rethinking voluntary work” lends itself as an approach to examine paid and unpaid
workers. Her research follows two organisations, one that is local and informal and the
other a national and highly organised workplace. She found that “Understanding a
person’s unpaid work in relation to their paid work and their economic and social
position is crucial.”192 A more holistic perspective on a person’s working life would
give rise to a more “textured and complete picture of people’s work practices and
choices.”193 This is relevant in the ongoing discussion about whether the non-
profit/NGO sector is becoming more corporatised.

Kathleen O’Reilly argues the goal of NGOs is not to increase profits, but to
implement successful projects. However, the increasing shift to secure donor funding
has resulted in questioning NGO workers’ passion and the intimate relationship they
have to their work. O’Reilly maintains, “Fieldworkers are no longer hired because of
their commitment to social service.”194 In her study examining NGO workers in
Rajasthan, India she saw the struggles between participants in her research. She
acknowledges these workplace conflicts were due to changing hiring practices that saw
a more corporatised NGO worker, which is becoming more of a concern in the future of

191
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 38-39.
Rebecca F. Taylor, “Rethinking voluntary work,” in A New Sociology of Work, eds. Pettinger et al.,
192

(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005), 135.

193
Ibid.
194
O’Reilly, “‘We Are Not Contractors’,” 209.

81
the NGO sector. The corporatised NGO worker threatens the altruistic nature of non-
profits and NGOs, as they do not invest their personal politics, feelings and emotions in
their work. While this chapter does not give an in-depth analysis of the corporatisation
of non-profits and NGOs, it is important to flag this development in the sector, as from
the current literature and my observations, future research on NGOs will be impacted by
increasing corporate practices and strategies. Embedded in NGO workplace practices
and perceptions are the selflessness of its workers. This is where I draw on the ‘personal
is political’ to frame women’s experiences in their work and enmeshing the personal in
the professional.

Contextualising ‘the personal is political’

Carol Hanisch’s “The Personal Is Political” is a widely published and reprinted

paper that has been circulated in various languages throughout the world. The paper was
originally written in response to the attack on the radical feminist movement by the
Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF) in the United States.195 Hanisch’s paper
came out of the struggles she and the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM)
experienced from those who either wanted to stop it or to push it into a watered down
direction.196 Talking from their experience and feelings enabled women to map their
common connections and, although women were often critiqued for having ‘therapy
sessions’ this communication proved invaluable to a greater awareness of women’s
lived realities and commonalities.197 The meaningfulness of the slogan is still utilised in
women’s movements and activism today, as it has travelled all over the world. The
slogan was first introduced into Malaysia when a group of young activists came
together in Petaling Jaya, Kuala Lumpur on International Women’s Day in 1985. They
discussed the status of women in the country, as many of them had just returned from

195
Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political: Introduction” Carol Hanisch, accessed September 20, 2014,
http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PersonalisPol.pdf. In a 2006 website introduction, Hanisch
remarks she did not give the paper its title, but the editors of Notes from the Second Year, Firestone and
Koedt.
196
Ibid. While Hanisch worked with the SCEF, she noticed the staff, including both men and women,
criticized women’s capacity building and groups that discussed their oppression as she says, “personal
therapy”—and certainly “not political.”
197
Ibid.

82
overseas, where they had been exposed to various social justice movements as a way for
women to unite in a collective decision-making process.198

Hanisch was writing from personal experience and her paper sought to examine
what it meant to be a movement woman in the WLM. She describes movement women
as strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing and able to be in control of their own
lives.199 She highlights that as a movement woman, “To admit to the problems in my
life is to be deemed weak. So I want to be a strong woman, in movement terms, and not
admit I have any real problems that I cannot find a personal solution to (except those
directly related to the capitalist system).”200 Hanisch speaks to the ideals she needed to
publically uphold and privately manage, and the challenges of finding solutions to
everyday lived realities, beyond a non-resolving complaint mode. I argue what Hanisch
describes as a ‘movement woman’ is reflected in the dispositions of women working in
the non-profit/NGO sector. For the women I interviewed, maintaining ideal standards of
how to approach their work was based upon their ability to work for others, to sacrifice
not only their physical and mental selves, but also their emotional selves. Women
working for IWRAW AP, Sisters In Islam and other women’s organisations in Malaysia
draw on their use of the intimate feelings they have for women’s human rights work.

In Hochschild’s study of Delta Airlines, flight attendants are told to think about
passengers as someone they know. For example, as one graduate at Delta Airlines in
Hochschild’s research says, “You see your sister’s eyes in someone sitting at that seat.
That makes you want to put out for them. I like to think of the cabin as the living room
of my own home.”201 Wathshlah also acknowledges that her activism is personal and
sometimes illogical. She says when you personalise it, “It involves emotion and it is
how you manage emotion.” By making the work personal, she forgets about office
politics and ‘dramas’ because “At the end of the day, the work is the most important

198
Ng, Mohamad and beng hui, Feminism and the women’s movement in Malaysia, 43.
199
Carol Hanisch, “The Personal is Political,”
http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PersonalisPol.pdf.
200
Ibid.
201
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 105.

83
thing.” However, the Malaysian Feminist Activist (MFA) found women’s organisations
challenging workplaces:

Why are our workplaces not sort of tingle and zing with justice and liberation
and a sense of freedom and why are we all so bogged down and so burdened and
heavy and why are we not enjoying ourselves and yet we are doing such
important work? And this brings in the questions of so, then perhaps you have
done this to yourself and you have this commitment to the work, but things in
your personal life could be disastrous, but how does this then affect the
commitment to your work as the years go by?

MFA highlights important and ongoing issues in the non-profit/NGO sector.

Having passion for the work may not be enough to sustain working conditions that
promote overwork, sacrifices to their health and time spent away from loved ones.
Aware that women come to the work with different expectations and motivations, MFA
also considers the longevity of continuing in the work. “[We need to ask] is there the
commitment to the work, are you still committed and are you still putting in what you
can?” MFA signals what Hochschild identifies as the issues that can arise when
personal emotion enters the workplace, such as the over-commitment towards work and
the potential of burnout.

If women’s commitment to non-profit/NGO work is expected to be emotionally

driven through passion, then when do emotions become a problem at work? Sanyu
recalls her volunteer experience at the Nairobi Women’s Hospital:

I was engaging with survivors of gang rape and I am an emotional being. I

remember crying, [and] at lunch time [I would] go into the bathroom and cry
and one of the older counsellors would be like, “Sanyu, you have to be careful,
you don’t internalize everything because you are not going to make it.” And I
was like, “What do you mean, make it in life? Make it in my internship? Do you
want to be more specific?” And she was like, “You are not going to make it.”
And I kept asking her, “How can you not internalize it, how can you separate
it?” And she didn’t give me any answers.

The idea that non-profit/NGO work is morally inspired is not a new revelation.
However, when personal emotion is involved in the work, this becomes difficult to
84
manage, especially when there is no training for NGO workers for how to control their
emotions in these spaces. Sanyu quickly learns from her experience at the Women’s
Hospital that certain types of emotions are unacceptable in the workplace. It is only
after her colleague scolds her for crying that she realises that she should have kept a
stronger disposition, separating herself from heavy issues such as the ramifications of
rape. This is where the personal becomes professional for her. How can she separate her
own personal investment in the prevention of violence against women when this is what
drew her into this organisation? This is also one of the contradictions in women’s
organisations, as the work is driven by passion and dedication to work for others, but
when they become ‘too invested’ or ‘too emotional’ it is seen as an issue.

Here I turn to Adrienne Rich’s work and her experiences in the Women’s
Liberation Movements (WLMs). Rich has not only been closely linked with the United
States WLM, but she has spent time as a writer, a teacher, an editor-publisher, a
pamphleteer, a lecturer, and a self-proclaimed sometime activist, and most importantly,
a poet.202 In Blood, Bread, and Poetry Rich argues:

By the end of the 1960s, the personal is the political [was necessary] …because
in other political movements of that decade the power relation of men to women,
the question of women’s roles and men’s roles, had been dismissed.203

For Rich, writing as a woman and out of a woman’s body focuses on women
directly. She says, “To take women’s existence seriously as theme and source for art
was something I had been hungering to do, needing to do, all my writing.”204 Rich uses
her writing to reflect on her experiences to open up the space for women to have an art
of their own, “Remind[ing] us of our history and what might be; to show us our true
faces—all of them.”205 When Rich writes about the body, she considers the difference
between ‘the body’ and ‘my body’:

202
Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1986), Forward.
203
Ibid.,181.
204
Ibid.
205
Ibid.

85
 When I write “the body,” I see nothing in particular. To write “my body”
plunges me into lived experience, particularly: I see scars, disfigurements,
discolorations, damages, losses, as well as what pleases me.206

Rich reflects on what is at stake when we think of how the body is located,
especially through the use of ‘my body’ and the importance of her own position and life
history:

Bones [well-nourished] from the placenta; the teeth of a middle class person
seen by the dentist twice a year from childhood. White skin, marked and scarred
by three pregnancies, an elected sterilization, progressive arthritis, four joint
operations, calcium deposits, no rapes, no abortions, long hours at a
typewriter—my own, not a typing pool—and so forth. To say “the body” lifts
me away from what has given me a primary perspective.207

Writing from her located experience, “Rich has to move both outwards and
inwards, outwards to social structures, power groups and political relationships and
inwards in her own psyche, desires, conscience.”208 Here the politics of location extends
beyond geographical location to encompass the social, the cultural, and the political
ways in which we can then understand ourselves phenomenologically. Rich’s work can
be utilised in an intersectional examination of race, class, gender and sexuality. In
writing this thesis and more specifically this chapter, I reflected on my own position just
as Rich does in her writing. Like Rich, I too have the teeth of a middle class person seen
by the dentist twice a year from childhood. I am not white skinned, but have been
afforded many similar privileges based on my Canadian citizenship and accent. But
being marked by brown skin has factored into how I am able to move in the world. In
particular, as a researcher my Indian background gained me a form of ethnic capital that
connected me to women who are Indian and Indian Malaysian, because of the colour of
my skin. However, this ethnic capital is contextual and in other situations, the colour of

206
Ibid., 215.
207
Ibid.
Mary Eagleton, “Adrienne Rich, Location and the Body,” Journal of Gender Studies 9, no.3 (2000):
208

300, doi: 10.1080/713678003.

86
my skin is not looked upon as a way to gain entry or access to certain groups and
spaces, but forms a wall of discrimination.

Bringing together the personal and the professional mirrors Western feminist
sentiments that incorporate personal politics into public spaces and politics. As
Shulamith Firestone, a radical feminist of the 1970s, states:

The feminist movement is the first to combine effectively the “personal” with
the “political.” It is developing a new way of relating, a new political style, one
that will eventually reconcile the personal—always the feminine prerogative—
with the public, with the “world outside,” to restore that world to its emotions,
and literally to its senses.209

Linking the ‘personal’ to the ‘political’ enabled feminists to find a way to

connect personal histories and experiences into public life. By developing this new
political style, feminists have been able to write and re-write stories to include
experiences that are enriched by reflexive practices. The construction of feminist-
knowledge production through the personal has generated platforms for women’s voices
and experiences to be heard. This becomes important for women engaging in non-
profit/NGO work, because their work is engrained in both their personal and
professional histories.

Experience as method: Women’s engagement in the non-profit/NGO

sector

In non-profit/NGO work, it is difficult to neglect the role of experience because

often it is what motivates individuals to get involved in this sector. It could be from a
personal experience, witnessing something or a result of multiple experiences coming
together. As Dorathy says, “[Growing] up in a very devout Catholic family from a very
small town, it is part of your upbringing that you must do good, that you must be a good
person, that you were put on earth for something better.” What she indicates here is that

209
Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (London: Jonathan Cape
LTD 1971), 43.

87
“the personal” can be tied to wider projects. Drawing on Rich and other feminists to
account for how experience ‘works’, Elspeth Probyn states:

I want to extend the reach of these momentary flashes of gendered selves. I want
to stretch my experience beyond merely personal, not as a way of transcendence
but as a way of reaching her experiences, the experiences and selves of
women.210

Probyn utilises experience as “a mode of theorising.”211 She considers what

experience is and what it can do. Most germane to my thesis is how Probyn thinks
through the female experience as a mode of mapping connections between and among
women. From this understanding, we can use experience as a method to explore the
lived realities of women as individuals and as a group, or a class, as de Lauretis would
frame it. Using the lived realities and life histories of women positions them both inside
and outside of gender representations. Probyn proposes that experience can work on two
registers. First, at an ontological level, “the concept of experience posits a separate
realm of existence – it testifies to the gendered, sexual and racial facticity of being in
the social; it can be called an immediate experiential self.”212 Second, “At an
epistemological level, the self is revealed in its conditions of possibility; here
experience is recognised as more obviously discursive and can be used overtly to
politicise the ontological.”213 She argues for both of these levels, “The experiential self
and the politicisation of experience – are necessary as the conditions of possibility for
alternative speaking positions within cultural theory.”214 If experience is used
epistemologically, then “experience provides evidence of the interrelation of structural
determination and individual relationships which compose social formation.”215 She
highlights how knowledge is known and represented and how this is then depicted in
the real—the lived reality.

210
Elspeth Probyn, Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1993), 3.
211
Ibid.
212
Ibid., 14.
213
Ibid.
214
Ibid.
215
Ibid., 17.

88
 Yet, the use of experience has not always been welcomed, even in feminist
research. Feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott points out the problems with its use in
her essay Evidence of Experience. Scott addresses how “subjects are constituted
discursively and experience is a linguistic event (it doesn’t happen outside established
meanings), but neither is it confined to a fixed order of meaning.”216 Scott signifies that
experience confirms what is already known and also upsets what has been taken for
granted. For example, how we can learn from what we see, but not everyone may see
the same images, and learn the same lessons at the same time or in the same way.217
Mohanty is also wary of how experience can universalise women’s experiences when
we “fail to examine the cultural processes that engender experiences and identities.”218
Mohanty’s critiques of experience differ from Scott’s in that Mohanty recognises that
experience is still vital in sharing stories. In her theorisations of Third World feminism,
Mohanty investigates the power in ‘the histories from below’ and the tensions and
contradictions within experience. Experience, for her, is not just what has been
recorded, but how it is recorded, the way we read from recorded experience, and how
we choose to use these records.219 This trajectory allows us to see the importance of
experience and, as feminist philosopher Linda Alcoff notes: experiences are layered.220
Experiences build on each other and “our past [produces] a set of sedimentations that
contribute to interpretive processes.”221 Alcoff situates experience in wider epistemic
debates. She states, “Experience is a slippery word, and it is not one that philosophers
today generally like to use. It can be used to refer minimally to the contents of one’s
perception, or, more maximally, to a thick and rich set of sensations, or to a cognitively
and affectively loaded attitude about an event.”222 In this way, she is also interested in

216
Joan Wallach Scott, “Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no.44 (1991): 780,
http://wwwjstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/1343743.
217
Ibid., 793.
218
Shari Stone-Mediatore, “Chandra Talpade Mohanty and the Revaluing of ‘Experience’,” Hypatia 13,
no.3 (1998): 122, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/3810641.
219
Ibid.,123, 130.
220
Linda Martín Alcoff, “Sexual Violations and the Question of Experience,” New Literary History 45,
no.3 (2014): 458, http://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2014.0030.
221
Ibid.
222
Ibid., 446.

89
how experience is not just about what has been recorded, but who records this and what
can be read from this recording.

Bringing together the ontological and epistemological grounds of experience

allows us to cross boundaries in research and gives voice to those who are often
neglected or left out of dominant discourse.223 Feminist interventions and research have
further developed the ways in which we can locate individual experience and situates
them in wider structures and debates that strengthen the ways in which knowledge is
produced. Putting experience to work, my workplace ethnography captures the realities
that highlight women’s stories, especially ones that are rarely told. The focus for the
women in my research has always been to represent the voices and rights of others. The
more interviews I conducted with non-profit/NGO workers, the clearer it became that
they are uncomfortable speaking about themselves and their experiences. Their
emphasis on the importance of others almost always took priority in their narratives.
This was conveyed through their responses that the work may be challenging, but it is
‘good work’. They rationalised their self-sacrifice, because there are bigger issues than
themselves. In saying this, they were still aware of their investment in their work.
Speaking to the complexities of this, Sanyu recalls:

Unless in your personal life you make a conscious effort for [your] values to
always translate and not just when you are dealing with [such as] advocacy or
research specific cases. It is just so hard and I think we just very easily
compartmentalise. So for instance you may operate in an environment
professionally where it is all about feminism and equality, but in your personal
life that may not translate, but that may not solely be your problem that may be
the society or your partner or the space you are operating in or what you choose
to take or not to take, I think it is so complex.

On the one hand, women who use their personal experience and politics in their
work can be thought of as passionate and committed, or in Hanisch’s terms a real
‘movement woman’, it can create tensions in their personal lives. On the other hand,

223
For more on experience and the use of affect and embodiment, see Alison Phipps, “Whose personal is
more political? Experience in contemporary feminist politics,” Feminist Theory 17, no.3 (2016): 303-321,
doi: 10.1177/1464700116663831.

90
compartmentalising work and home is not an easy feat in this type of work, because it is
enmeshed in their values and belief systems. Striking the right balance of work and
home then becomes complicated in the name and justification for the work. The
boundary blur between work and home continues to have women thinking about how
they can, or, if they can strike a balance between the two worlds.

Blurring the domains between work and home

Work and home, public and private spheres: these are the familiar and well-worn
categories which we use to talk about the main divisions in our lives. We make
these structural distinctions so routinely that they seem self-evident.224

Gendered representations of the private and public spheres stem from larger
political, societal and cultural practices. For example, in Rosemary Pringle’s analysis,
secretaries are:

Vulnerable to a blurring of boundaries between home and work. In the first

place, the tasks overlap…They were reminded to clean and dust, empty the ash
trays regularly, open the windows and adjust the curtains, keep an emergency
supply of aspirin, bandaids and so on…the work can involve very long hours,
while bosses exercise power by deliberately challenging the boundary.225

As we have seen care is a major part of non-profit/NGO workplaces. It works on

multiple levels, as women have to care for others in their work, they have to care for the
work, which in turn leaves them neglecting their own care. Always thinking about
others has several harmful effects. MFA tells me that at the pinnacle of her NGO career
her mind was always buzzing and she received affirmation to overwork and live a
‘fairly self-abusive lifestyle.” When I interviewed her, she was relaxed. Through her
experiences of neglecting herself for so long, she now centres her needs over her work.
However, she still encounters pressures to overwork:

224
Rosemary Pringle, Secretaries Talk: Sexuality, Power and Work (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1988),
213.
225
Ibid., 216.

91
 Thursday night at seven o’clock they tell me to do a piece of work to prepare for
the post-meeting which includes summarising everything that has been said in
the first three days and then proposing a new draft of the program or book. I said
to them “If you want me to do this, this is going to take me through the night,
yeah?” And what I was told by the feminists in the room and there were so many
feminists in the room in charge that “yeah, well it’s not easy work, but
somebody’s got to do it.”

The non-profit/NGO sector relies on the absence of clear structures and policies
in place to support workers’ care. While flexibility is often viewed as a positive aspect
in workplaces, it is through this plasticity that NGO work impedes on personal time.
The notion that ‘somebody’s got to do it’ reinforces how essential it is for the work to
get done relating to the ‘good work’ mentality. Whether you are at the office, or
conducting training outside of the office, it is always about the work, because activism
is thought to be a part of one’s overall performance of commitment.

Baillie Smith and Jenkins argue that “Such blurring is…an integral part of the
very nature of activism—the participants’ politics and commitments to social justice are
embedded in their everyday practices, including, but certainly not limited to, their jobs
as NGO workers.”226 Their study examines the subjectivities of activists in local Indian
NGOs and the relationship between cosmopolitanism and activism.227 One activist in
their study stated, “Activism is not kind of easy, you know, once you start something,
when it’s on the move, it doesn’t allow you to sleep sometimes.”228 This mentality and
approach then consumes those engaging in this type of work, committed on multiple
and often self-sacrificing levels that have consequences that impact more than the
personal and professional boundary blur, but workers’ health. This will be further
explored in the following chapter, where I examine how women in this type of work
think about their health encompassing their physical, mental and emotional health.

Matt Baillie Smith and Katy Jenkins, “Existing at the Interface: Indian NGO Activists as Strategic
226

Cosmopolitans,” Antipode 44, no.3 (2011): 643, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00888.x.

227
Ibid., 641.
228
Ibid.,643.

92
 The tensions that surface when work-life becomes home-life and vice versa is
not specific to non-profit/NGO work as has been illustrated by Pringle’s study on
secretaries and Hoschchild’s analysis on flight attendants. It is becoming increasingly
significant to examine how individuals think about their greater identity (involving both
private and public representations) especially, considering work-life balance initiatives
and the impact of round-the-clock communication technologies on people’s working
lives. Melissa Gregg argues that the concept of overtime has shifted and instead of
counting and measuring working hours, work is measured by tasks completed.229 Gregg
follows research on teleworking to illustrate how working from home opens up the
possibilities for women in particular to balance childcare and work.230 However,
working from home is not always the viable option, while in theory it offers flexibility,
it still promotes the mentality ‘to get the work done’ and makes it easier to do so. This
is one of the reasons why NGO workers may seek clear distinctions and boundaries
between their home and work spheres. Audrey recounts, “So, the work that I do at
IWRAW AP, I see in more of a professional sense, it’s mainly in applying the
knowledge I have on certain level concepts.” Audrey is the program manager at
IWRAW AP; she is in her 40s and began working with the organisation as a program
officer. She is one of the longest serving staff members continuing at IWRAW AP.
Unlike Wathshlah and Sanyu, she makes clear divisions in her personal and professional
lives. For her, what she does in her professional work is not a part of her personal
activism, which she describes, “[is] more rooted at the national level. I work with
activist groups that supply services to displaced or migrant refugee populations, but this
is completely outside of my work.” Despite, her attempt to make clear divisions
between her personal and professional activisms, Audrey did see there were connections
between the two worlds, but still considers:

In my personal perspective, I see that as my activism…Maybe it is a personal

call for me that I separate what I call activism as my personal time and what I do
at IWRAW Asia Pacific is more about…kind of a professional space.

Melissa Gregg, “The Normalisation of Flexible Female Labour in the Information Economy,”
229

Feminist Media Studies 8, no.3 (2008): 292, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14680770802217311.

230
Ibid.

93
 Audrey’s experiences convey an alternative approach to the work. She makes
the conscious effort not to bring in her personal activism. This may be due to her
position as a program manager who has less direct involvement with women and
women’s groups than program officers or even her experience working with the
organisation for over a decade. Most of Audrey’s workplace duties include filling in
funding reports and acting as a liaison between program officers and other stakeholders,
such as the organisations’ board members. She is happy with her current role in the
organisation, as she sees the work in a professional sense. The following and final
sections of this chapter are dedicated to the complexities involved in ‘good work’, the
emotional aspects of it and where burnout finds its way in the non-profit/NGO sector.

Complexities in doing ‘good work’

While Hochschild’s research is located in the United States context of service

industries, she gives us an entry point to think about the changing non-profit/NGO
sector and the shifting hiring practices that has seen a new kind of NGO worker, one
that is perceived as less committed and passionate towards their work. The deep and
surface acting methods that Hochschild draws our attention to, and that are utilised in
service-based professions threaten NGO workplaces because they are not driven by
activism, passion, politics or dedication. Hochschild tells us that emotional labour is
dangerous for individuals and their overall identities, as it blurs the emotional
relationship they have to their work. However, in women’s organisations, workers are
encouraged to draw on the deeper connection they have to their work. Their morals,
values, feminist and activist politics are perceived as assets in these organisations. This
is what makes this service-based profession different from others because it is values-
based and brings in wider personal politics in the professional sphere.

The idea ‘the work is good’ was often spoken of by my interviewees and used as
a justification for long hours and office politics. In his article called “Doing Good?”
William Fisher argues that, “perceptions of NGOs are tied up with contested notions of
what it means to ‘do good’. At stake are the very notion of the ‘good’ and the processes

94
of deciding what it is and how to pursue it.”231 For the women in my research, simply
put ‘doing good’ is helping others. It relies on individual perceptions of what ‘good
work’ is, not only for those who are doing it, but those who have a stake in it. This is
where non-profit/NGO work differs from other service-based occupations, as it is
embedded in elements of self-sacrifice for a greater ideological and moral investment. It
becomes a part of an individual’s overall disposition, where one embodies overwork
under the rationale “somebody’s got to do it” that people’s lives depend on their work
and gives them reason to work harder. I should note this mentality was internalised by
the women in my research, but it is also related to the relationships that organisations
have with external donors and partnering organisations who all ask of these women in
different ways.

Despite how much time women gave to their work and to others, they also found
time to help me with my research. My interviews with participants usually lasted about
an hour and at IWRAW AP, this meant interviews took place after lunch. Mornings for
the women of IWRAW AP were busy, one of the first tasks is to check and respond to
emails. Women were most productive at this time. Afternoons were a good time for
interviews here, because most of the pressing work matters had been resolved. My
interviews with other NGO program officers were usually conducted after working
hours. For instance, Natasha and I met at seven in the evening, as this was the only time
she had. When we introduced ourselves, she immediately told me she had to leave
before nine, because she had a work call to get back to when she got home. This is the
life for many of the women I interviewed, where they constantly think about the work
and take it home with them. Where Gregg sees some of the beneficial aspects of
teleworking, in the NGO sector, this often results in overwork. This is ingrained in the
mentality to work for others, Dorathy once explained that at times she gets worried on
the weekends, because she is not checking her work email and fears she may be missing
important emails that need responding. Emails are important at IWRAW AP, as this is
the primary method of communication and where most of the staff’s hours are spent.

I have conveyed many of the challenges that persist merging the personal and
professional, and here I turn my attention to depict why women continue to engage in

231
Fisher, “Doing Good,” 446.

95
‘good work’. I draw on my interview with Sanyu; she maintained that while many of
her friends’ happiness was related to economic security, for her, job success via
financial gain was not her primary concern when she began her career in activism. She
relates her happiness to what she is doing and the impact of her work:

In terms of success—mortgages, houses, cars, but then, yeah, that is when I

realized take a step back… I firmly believe everyone has their own race, but it is
so easy to think about a small area ten people, eight are doing fabulously
(economic wise) and there are two that aren’t and it is so easy for the two to
question why they aren’t, and it goes back down to maybe they didn’t pick the
right career, and so, I just have to realise that no, I actually enjoy what I do and
if it doesn’t translate into monetary terms, I am happy as an individual and have
no regrets.

From Sanyu’s perspective, her professional work will always be committed to

human rights. She says, “Human rights for life, it will always be human rights for life.”
She elaborates that the impact she is making in her work is centred on the dignity of a
human being and that ‘good work’ is not about making a profit for profit sake, but is
rooted in human rights and principles. She also speaks of the realities of engaging in
non-profit/NGO work and the financial insecurity and disparity between working in the
not-for-profit sector and corporate sector:

At 22, I didn’t care about the money, I didn’t care about the money per se, but
there is a difference being short of money and being able to live…comfortably,
so could I have a child now and take my child to the kind of school that I went
to on my salary, no, and does that bother me? Yeah, it does.

What becomes evident then is that ‘good work’ with its principles and
ideological underpinnings are important, it is not economically valued in the same way
as other professions. For some, financial security may not pose a problem. However, for
others, as in Sanyu’s case, it impacts personal ambitions, such as her ability to have and
to properly educate a child. Women’s personal investment in this work “consider[s] the
persona, and often relatively hidden, narratives of activists…provides the opportunity to

96
develop a less institutionalised understanding of civil society.”232 By conveying the
experiences of individuals and their everyday struggles, and their identification and
pursuit of alternatives, we can become familiar with how they see themselves through
‘good work’. 233 Sanyu is not motivated by economic success, but she would also like to
be paid adequately for the work she does. Having a connection to the work is important
in any profession. It can be a driving force in finding happiness at work, but in work
that is not always about tangible results and in rooted advocacy initiatives, it is
challenging for women to see the changes they are making in society.

Many of my interviewees struggled to identify clear and distinct boundaries

between home and work, because they found that the two spheres were interconnected,
because of moral and ethical ideals that may have been instilled in them from a young
age or as a result of early activism. They also expressed the sentiment of ‘good work’
was at times enough to sustain long working hours. However, constantly thinking about
the work may have made them highly principled individuals, but what about the
everyday lived realities of these workers? What about their financial (in)securities?
What about their long-term health when they continue to self-sacrifice themselves for
others? These recurring questions are important to consider in relation to how those
engaging in ‘good work’ think about rationalising their passion and commitment
towards their work.

Carried away with emotion

Earlier in this chapter, Sanyu shared with us the negative impact emotion can
have in the workplace. Realising there are situations and contexts where emotions are
induced and or suppressed, women negotiate their emotional selves in their work.
Emotion work, according to Hochschild, is an art that is fundamental in social
exchanges, where the “cost is usually worth the fundamental benefit.”234 In activism, it
is what drives individuals through passion and commitment. Wathshlah also notes that
emotions are a part of her activism and that is about learning how to manage them at

232
Smith and Jenkins, “Existing at the Interface: Indian NGO Activists as Strategic Cosmopolitans,” 641.
233
Ibid.
234
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 21.

97
work. She says, “I can be absolutely carried away by my emotions, and I can be
screaming at someone, but at the end of the day, I have to do it in a constructive manner
that the end result is something I want to see.” Her passion is controlled in the
workplace. Despite bodily and biological processes of emotion, Hoschchild states:

When we manage emotion, we are partly managing a bodily preparation for a

consciously or unconsciously anticipated deed. This is why emotion work is
work, and why estrangement from emotion is estrangement from something of
importance and weight.235

What makes emotional labour conflicting for the women in Malaysian-based

women’s organisations is how they internalise emotion in their work, how they read
social exchanges and situations and when to know where to feel. It is also expected in
NGOs that individuals come with this training, and it is experience-based therefore
emotions are negotiated and renegotiated and questioned in these working
environments.

Switching off

Anne-Meike Fechter argues for the importance in examining the intertwining of

altruistic and professional motives and what they tell us about aid workers.236 She
reveals the gap and “the failure – or refusal – to consider the ‘care for the self’ as well
as the ‘care for the other’.”237 To a lesser degree, the popular notion that aid workers are
selfless heroes who rescue others from potentially endangering themselves takes shape
in the non-profit/NGO sector.238 In the context of non-profit/NGO spaces, workers do
not see themselves as heroes that risk their lives for others, but use their work to help
others meanwhile finding happiness within themselves. As a concept happiness is used

235
Ibid., 230.
236
Anne-Meike Fechter, “‘Living well’ while ‘doing good’? (Missing) debates on altruism and
professionalism in aid work,” Third World Quarterly 33, no.8 (2012): 1489, doi:
10.1080/09700161.2012.698133.
237
Ibid.
238
Ibid.

98
to express feelings of joy and satisfaction. Wanting to find happiness in work, Sanyu
says, “You will spend most of your time at work, so if you are not happy at work, I have
a hard time believing you are happy.”

When I asked her if there is a balance in how the personal and the professional
spaces blur, she replied, “No, because I believe the professional impacts the personal.”
Furthermore, when I asked if the personal impacts the professional, she responded “To a
certain extent, yeah” and when I asked what her balance was, there was no
straightforward answer, but in her words, she expressed:

Yeah, you know where it gets complicated because unless in your personal life
you make a conscious effort for those values to always translate and not just
when you are dealing with advocacy or research or specific cases. It is just so
hard and I think we just very easily compartmentalise…so for instance, you may
operate in an environment professionally where it is all about feminism and
equality, but in your personal life that may not translate, but that may not solely
be your problem that may be the society or your partner or the space you are
operating in or what you choose to take or not to take, I think it is so complex.

This complexity Sanyu addresses is one of the challenges that the women of
IWRAW AP and other Malaysian-based women’s organisations face, straddling the
lines of home and work. Some respond by strictly containing these spaces, while others
find that approach problematic and not conducive to non-profit/NGO work. Hochschild
notes the human costs of emotional labour are related to three stances: first, the
worker’s identity is too entangled in their job and they risk burning out; second, the
worker makes clear distinctions between home and work and is less likely to suffer burn
out. In this situation, she presents herself as an actor with no personal investment
towards the people she is helping and working for. Third, as Hochschild states, “the
worker distinguishes herself from her act, does not blame herself for this, and sees the
job as positively requiring the capacity to act; for this worker there is some risk of
estrangement from acting altogether, and some cynicism about it.”239 Highlighted
through the narratives of Sanyu, Wathshlah, MFA, Dorathy and to a lesser extent

239
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 187.

99
Audrey are the ways in which they fulfill the first stance that Hochschild describes in
their continued dedication for the work. In insisting that their passion is an essential
form of commitment, they are fully self-policing emotional labourers. According to
Hochschild, a “sense of emotional numbness [which] reduces stress…Burnout spares
the person in the short term, but it may have a serious long-term cost.”240 In the case of
non-profit/NGO work, when individuals lose commitment towards the work, they also
lose access to feeling, and with this, “[loss of] a central means of interpreting the world
around us.”241 Being driven by passion or the rhetoric ‘that the work is good’ and a
desire to work harder and longer was a common thread in my interviews. While some
non-profit/NGO workers maintain these spaces can be separated, this distinction
becomes slippery when they are asked to discuss how they negotiate between their work
and home lives.

Conclusion

This chapter has drawn on the feminist mantra ‘the personal is political’ used by
renowned feminists, such as Carol Hanisch and Adrienne Rich, in order to convey the
importance of feminist perspectives in non-profit/NGO work. The slogan has been used
in women’s movements across various global contexts. In particular, it pushes me to
think through how people move in the world, especially as it relates to the personal
entering the professional. It provides a way to theorise what experience is and what it
can do. This mode of theorising is significant to capture the blurring of the personal and
the professional spaces. In particular, when the ‘movement women’ in WLMs in the
United States used experience in their activism, it was to improve the lives of all
women. This is true for the women engaging in women’s human rights work; they too,
seek to better the lives of women.

The everyday lived realities of women in the non-profit/NGO sector

demonstrates some of the complexities they face as their personal lives, inevitably,
merge with their professional lives. Over my multiple fieldwork site visits, I watched
women work and talked to them about how they saw themselves in their work. Their

240
Ibid., 188.
241
Ibid.

100
personal motivations—whether through their religious identity, their early activist
careers and being politically engaged in civil society movements and their commitment
to human rights—enabled them to continue to work for others. This is why women
justify working late at night and taking their work home, they are satisfied by how their
work is helping the greater wellbeing of others. Despite the challenges they face
blurring their private and public spheres, they can find happiness in their work, for now
at least.

Basing their work in their personal experience also conveys their passion and
pushes back against the sentiment that NGOs are becoming increasingly corporate.
While this is still a reality for the wider non-profit/NGO sector, it was less of a concern
for the women in my research. They could think about themselves in their work from
something they once experienced; how they were brought up to think about ‘good
work’; what it means to be a woman in everyday life; their identity being questioned
and challenged by various stakeholders; or even a basic interest in altruistic work.
‘Good work’ involves more than helping others. It also involves individuals wanting to
sacrifice themselves for something they feel and believe is both work that is good and
they feel good doing. This self-sacrifice is thought to be a choice, but as Hochschild,
Pringle and others working on gender and work suggest, this can affect more than the
mental and physical aspects of work, but the emotional-states of embodying work,
especially in service-based professions. In the next chapter Breaking bodies, I examine
how women’s care roles from the home are brought into their work and what this means
for the self-neglect women experience resulting from the absence of a self-care regime.

101
Chapter Four – Breaking bodies: Looking after others and
overlooking the self

As discussed in the previous chapter, mundane tasks such as turning on the

computer and checking the office email, working on concept notes, completing reports
and filling in funding applications have meaning.242 In her examination of academics in
a newly corporatising university, Ruth Barcan conveys how administrative work can be
vocational,243 she argues, “Vocation implies the meaningfulness of work, a privileged
collectivity with whom to share it, values and goals that transcend the everyday…”244
This is true for the women working at IWRAW AP. The routine of coming to the office
day-after-day is traced to their commitment to women’s rights. As Barcan argues,
“Academic work is not a job that involves turning up, doing your work and going
home.”245 This has physical and emotional effect. I argue non-profit/NGO workers use
the meaningfulness of work and working for others to justify self-neglect and a lack of
self-care, and this is promoted by an NGO working culture of silence.

After several field site visits to Malaysia from 2014 to 2016, and more
specifically to Kuala Lumpur and the women of IWRAW AP, I saw how women were
conflicted in taking time for themselves. They were often tired, overworked and felt
undervalued. Many even saw our interviews as a place where they could finally talk
about themselves, which was unfamiliar territory for them. In a study of aid workers,
researchers found that 79% of the 754 respondents stated they had experienced mental
health issues.246 More than three quarters of the survey was taken by women who make
up the majority of those engaging in aid work. While NGO workers in my research do

242
Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 17. Ruth Barcan, Academic life and
labour in the new university: hope and other choices (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 78. See also Ryan D.
Duffy and Bryan J. Dik, “Research on calling: What have we learned and where are we going?” Journal
of Vocational Behaviour 83 (2013): 428-436, Http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2013.06.006, for more on
calling and vocation in research.
243
Barcan, Academic life and labour in the new university, 79.
244
Ibid., 78.
245
Ibid., 78-79.
246
Holly Young, “Guardian research suggests mental health crisis among aid workers,” The Guardian,
accessed November 23, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-
network/2015/nov/23/guardian-research-suggests-mental-health-crisis-among-aid-workers.

102
not see the trauma that aid workers do, such as human tragedy, health consequences are
common to all workers in this field, where staff welfare often takes a backseat.247

In a report conducted by the Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights
(UAFWHR), Jane Barry and Jelena Dordevic argue:

Most activists don’t like to talk about themselves…They can talk for hours
about fundamentalisms, funding crunches, ending war and violence against
women…But convincing activists to discuss their own hopes, fears, and
concerns was much harder…For them, their stress, exhaustion, and even safety
were private matters—unrelated to the real business of activism…There is no
place for them in the real discourse of human rights.248

I encountered this on my first fieldwork visit to Kuala Lumpur during a dinner

with friends connected to Malaysian activist circles. My host informed me that the NGO
working culture promoted the use of unpaid labour and overwork. I was familiar with
this perspective from my past experiences in the sector, but I was also curious as to
what extent this took place in Malaysian-based women’s NGOs. This chapter explores
what self-care means for the women in my study, and how health comes at a cost in
their commitment towards the work. Women find themselves continuing when their
minds and bodies are slowly wearing out.

I begin by outlining the construction of women as carers. I then return to and

build on Hochschild’s research to examine why women are responsible or feel like they
are for care work, incorporating Marcel Mauss’ influential text The Gift and feminist
readings of the gift exchange. I argue, as a result of bringing together these schools of
thought that the representations of women as carers in non-profit/NGO work has a
detrimental impact on women’s health which, ultimately, compels them to focus on
others above themselves.

247
Ibid.
Jane Barry and Jelena Dordevic, What’s the Point of Revolution if We Can’t Dance? (Boulder: Urgent
248

Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights, 2007), 6.

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 The normalisation of self-sacrifice in non-profit/NGO work is a growing area of
concern. Women’s self-sacrificing dispositions impact their emotional and physical
health, NGO workplaces do not always maintain and uphold adequate systems and
structures to alleviate work stresses, and as a result women find themselves using
informal social structures to work through issues and frustrations. Individuals become
responsible for finding their own health remedies and solutions in the name of
sacrificial productivity, which is a common reality of the NGO working culture and
practice.

Women as carers: Gendered expectations from the home and their

professionalised uses

In attempts to balance productive and reproductive work, women often neglect

their own care to achieve the care needs of others. Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton
argue, “The replacement of a male breadwinner—female carer model with a dual
earner-female carer model in Canada resulted in enormous pressures on women
particularly to manage paid and unpaid work.”249 While their research is centred in the
Canadian context, bearing both paid and unpaid responsibilities is difficult in any
circumstance and context. Taking seriously the changes in women’s roles both at home
and in the workforce illustrates the important work women do, but receive little
recognition for. Women’s perceived responsibilities as the primary carers contributes to
the challenges of balancing home and work responsibilities.

Despite the fact that women only came onto the development scene in the 1970s,
they make up a majority of those working in the non-profit sector.250 ‘Caring’
occupations, such as teaching, nursing and non-profits and NGOs, reinforce gendered
stereotypes that perpetuate the notion of women as carers. As such, these
understandings and stereotypes are heavily rooted in a construction of women’s
‘natural’ ability to care for others, and are taken from traditional gender roles typically
seen in the family unit. What becomes of women who work in the non-profit/NGO

249
Kate Bezanson and Meg Luxton, eds., Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges
Neo-Liberalism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 5.
250
Kothari and Minogue, eds., Development theory and practice, 43.

104
sector when the (unpaid) emotion work typical of the home becomes a part of one’s
professional work?

Women in non-profit work: Overrepresented and undervalued

Shahra Razavi’s exploration of the political and social economy of care traces
the lack of women’s presence in dominant economic discourses to the over privileging
of monetised aspects of the economy, which has consistently ignored the realm of
unpaid work. Polarising dichotomies of the economy – paid versus unpaid and formal
versus informal – neglects various types of mixed economies.251 J.K. Gibson-Graham
has long suggested a reworking of these binaries to open up more spaces for a
transformative trajectory developing alternative paths of thinking about the economy
aside from formal commodity markets and capitalist representations.252 In the case of
non-profit work, the lack of financial gain and deeply entrenched altruistic motivations
provides a different model of paid work that does not conform to being profit-driven,
but is based on values.

Women in Southeast Asia are represented in high numbers in both the informal
economy and in values-based work voluntary associations and community enterprises.
Typical representations of women in voluntary and charity-based initiatives portray
them as workers who want to do ‘good work’ on behalf of others. When women enter
the non-profit sphere they are stereotyped through the gendered division of labour from
the private sphere of the home as devoted carers. Uma Kothari argues that development
theory and practice have yet to engage with feminism, suggesting this is related to the
prioritisation of men in development processes. She also reminds us of the gap between
theory and development practitioners and this is in need of further exploration.253
Examining the construction of gender roles in non-profit work, particularly at a WHRO,

251
Shahra Razavi, “The political and social economy of care in a developing context conceptual issues
research questions and policy options,” Gender and Development Programme Paper Number 3 Geneva:
United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (2007): 3.
252
J.K. Gibson-Graham and Gerda Roelvink, “The nitty gritty of creating alternative economies,” Social
Alternatives 30, no.1 (2011): 2,
http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=201106329;res=IELA
PA.
253
Kothari and Minogue, eds., Development theory and practice, 51.

105
not only visibilises the societal and cultural gendered assumptions of this work, but
more importantly also enables women’s experiences to be at the forefront of research.

Care as a concept has been taken up in various fields of research. To better

situate its use in my study of women and work, and more specifically the merging of the
public and private spheres of women’s care work, I utilise Razavi’s approach:

An ambiguous notion because it stretches from a more pragmatic and practical

endeavour of providing physical care, which may to some extent be independent
of the relation between the carer and the person cared for, to deeply emotional
caring, in which the person doing the caring is inseparable from the care
giver.254

Here Razavi illustrates what care involves. It is a relationship between the

caregiver and the cared for and it is the responsibility of the caregiver to perform
emotional caring for another through this process. This is where, I argue, the blur
between private emotion work becomes (what Hochschild termed) emotional labour. As
Hochschild draws on surface and deep acting methods involved in the commodification
of emotion management to argue that care also becomes a product for exchange. More
broadly, we can examine how men and women have differing roles and expectations in
care work, and more explicitly how women do more emotion work than men.

A gendered care analysis of social reproduction is characterised by three

dimensions: biological reproduction of the species, reproduction of the labour force, and
reproduction of provisioning care needs.255 Bezanson and Luxton argue social
reproduction is cemented on individuals who are members of families, households and
the wider community “[that] carry out their responsibilities for social reproduction in
ways that are profoundly shaped by familial ideology and class, race and gender
difference, while simultaneously producing and reproducing such ideologies and
differences.”256 How one moves in the world, according to Bezanson and Luxton, is

254
Razavi, “The political and social economy of care,” 8.
255
Stephen Gill and Isabella Bakker, Power, Production and Social Reproduction: Human In/security in
the Global Political Economy (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 74.
256
Bezanson and Luxton, Social Reproduction, 10.

106
based on what has influenced them or shaped them. This is also reflected in Pierre
Bourdieu’s conceptions of the habitus, which I discuss in Chapter Six.

Gendered roles in the home and at work are still practiced today. In Malaysia
women are encouraged to enter the workforce, however this is challenged when they
marry and begin a family, as they are still perceived as the primary carers at home.
Influenced by the ‘Asian Family Values’ discourses from the 1990s, which I discussed
in Chapter One. Malaysian women’s mothering roles also act as a moral metaphor for
the nation that is based in the gendered divisions of labour between men and women in
the home.257 In this way, Hochschild’s gendering of the different emotion work men and
women relates to the double bind of women’s personal and professional lives.258 She
captures the ongoing assumptions that women are inherent managers of feelings in
private life and are built for emotion management. She argues that women's lack of
economic power impacts women far greater than men: “Women in general have far less
independent access to money, power, authority, or status in society.”259

Hochschild also discusses the consequences that gendered roles have for both
men and women; first, she notes women make a resource out of a feeling and “offer it to
men as a gift in return for the more material resources they lack.”260 The expectation of
women to give is a transaction that is based on the household division of labour and the
gendered nurturing role of women in the private sphere. Marcel Mauss’s analysis on the
gift exchange allows us an approach that acknowledges what is at stake when women
self-sacrifice in this type of work, and their justifications. While, as Morny Joy points
out he was not writing from a gendered perspective, women in Mauss’ work were only
ascribed certain roles that designated them as docile and amenable.261 Feminist

257
Theresa Devasahayam and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, eds., Working and Mothering in Asia: Images,
Ideologies and Identities (Singapore: NUS Press, 2007), 37.
258
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 165.
259
Ibid., 163.
260
Ibid.
261
Morny Joy, Women and the Gift: Beyond the Given and All-Giving (Indiana: Indiana University Press,
2013), 1-3. See also Aafke E. Komter, Social Solidairty and the Gift (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005) for further readings on Mauss’ gift exchange. See also Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Expanded
Edition, trans. Jane I. Guyer (Chicago: Hau Books, 2016). See also Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss: A
Biography (NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) for a detailed account of Mauss’ research and works.

107
readings, such as Joy’s of Mauss’ gift exchange open up his conceptions to a gendered
approach that explores women in service-based industries and what is expected of them
in their work.

Thinking about The Gift beyond Mauss’ initial project by including gender and
women’s unpaid labour into the workplace forces a reckoning with the commodification
of sexual difference. Tyler and Taylor examine the process of sexual differentiation
where certain occupations have come to be perceived as ‘women’s work’. According to
their analysis of Mauss’ gift exchange:

For Mauss (1954), transactions of buying and selling are formally free, while
‘gift’ exchanges are obligatory. The second element of the Maussian model is
that, in contrast to alienated commodities, gifts are inalienable; they assume a
spiritual status because ‘…transfer of a possession can only establish a social
relationship between persons if that possession carries the significance of being
part of the personhood of the giver.’262

Women’s work in contemporary capitalism becomes a case of an ‘exchange of

aesthetics’.263 From their analysis, women’s work is offered through three
characteristics involving her nature, femininity and sexuality, and it is through this
feminised gift exchange that women simultaneously gain a sense of self-fulfillment in
the process of the exchange.264 Similar to Hochschild’s research, but using Mauss’
model, Tyler and Taylor’s research is based on flight attendants. According to one male
training instructor from their study, “…women are best suited to this role because they
are much more patient and caring than men…of other people’s needs…they are much
more thoughtful by nature.”265 This perception was also expressed by one experienced
female flight attendant who stated, “This job is more natural for a woman than for a
man…because many females in general are more caring than men…women are much

Melissa Tyler and Steve Taylor, “The Exchange of Aesthetics: Women’s Work and ‘The Gift’,”
262

Gender, Work and Organization 5, no.3 (1998): 166.

263
Ibid.
264
Ibid., 166-169.
265
Ibid., 167.

108
more helpful, they are kinder and more instinctive.”266 This logic that women use their
caring dispositions in professional work blurs the boundaries of home and work and
also justifies why they do so.

In the original Maussian model of exchange, “A gift is an object or service

which is transacted as part of [the] social, as distinct from purely or solely commercial,
relations of exchange; a gift exchange is a ritual offering.”267 Hochschild’s research uses
a comparative analysis exploring how gender plays a role in emotional labour by
signifying women take on the flight attendant side of emotional labour and men utilise
the bill collector side, Tyler and Taylor are focused exclusively on female flight
attendants. Hochschild’s research suggests women’s weaker status (for example their
lack of economic capital) is also a consequence of their gendered role and contributes to
their taking on others’ emotion work. Women then become more susceptible to take on
further care work, managing the needs of others first. Boris and Parrenas argue “Those
suffering from emotional dissonance are more likely to be persons in low-status
occupations who are without status shields against the poor treatment they may
experience at work from those with greater access to money, power, authority or status
in society.”268 Women’s access to resources or more often their lack of such, directly
contributes to their positions in society and how they think about emotion work in the
workplace and emotional dissonance they may experience, especially those without or
with weak status shields. In non-profit/NGO work (similar to other service-based
professions) this is double edged, as women are simultaneously gaining a sense of self-
fulfilment in the process of the exchange and also having their labour taken advantage
of.

Taking up Hochschild’s research on the gendered differential side of emotional

labour, I return to Donna Baines’ research of the non-profit sector in Canada.269 Baines
considers the differences in men’s and women’s approaches to non-profit work. Her

266
Ibid.
267
Ibid.
268
Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of
Care (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010), 6.
269
Hochschild’s research on bill collectors has not been taken up in the same way as her research on
flight attendants, but remains a strong aspect of her argument on the gendering of emotional labour.

109
research found that “male employees may have internalised firmer boundaries between
the spheres of home and work, permitting them to ignore or be unresponsive to pressure
to perform unpaid work or bring clients home with them.”270 According to Baines’
study, they were able to work without it having an impact on their personal lives. Her
findings allow insight into the differences between men and women and their
approaches towards work. Her analysis of men’s abilities to separate themselves from
their work is significant, because this greatly juxtaposes women’s approaches towards
the work, where their home and work boundaries are often straddled and crossed.
Baines’ analysis of men’s roles in this sector, again, points toward clear lines of
separation and distinguished boundaries, maintaining the notions that men’s and
women’s roles as carers greatly differ. She further notes:

Caring labour has been synonymous with being female, providing women
workers with little or no incentive to separate the worlds of caring at work and
home. They may be more susceptible than men to management pressures to
work unpaid hours, and to the agencies’ cultures of subsidizing workplace
resources with personal resources. Reflecting the blurry lines between the caring
spheres, female employees may even generate these solutions themselves with
management’s explicit or tacit approval.271

This professional vulnerability is related to the lack of separation between home

and work, and relates to the personal becoming the professional. Here I turn to how
private emotion becomes a commodity in the public sphere and what performing
emotion management says about women in the non-profit/NGO sector.

270
Donna Baines, “Staying with People Who Slap Us Around: Gender, Juggling and Violence in Paid
(and Unpaid) Care Work,” Gender, Work and Organization 13, no.2 (2006): 139, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-
0432.2006.00300.x. For more on Baines’ research on non-profit work, see also: Donna Baines, “Gender
mainstreaming in a Development Project: Intersectionality in a Post-Colonial Un-doing?” Gender, Work
and Organizations 17, no.2 (2010): 119-149, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0432.2009.0054.x; Donna Baines,
“Neoliberalism and the convergence of nonprofit care work in Canada,” Competition and Change 19,
no.3 (2015): 194-209, doi: 10.1177/1024529415580258; Donna Baines, “Race, Resistance, and
Restructuring: Emerging Skills in the New Social Services,” Social Work 53, no.2 (2008): 123-131.
271
Ibid.

110
Private emotion management takes off in the public sphere

So much of the effort and follow up that goes into it and the wow moments are
there. This is where, for me, you have the intellectual and substantial growth, not
just the nitty gritty of doing the logistics and through every single activity you
learn something new of the national context of something about the way a
person practices feminisms you learn something so substantive and I think
working with and INGO you have so many wow moments. You literally create
everything and in every single activity you learn something new. You think you
are at a training [that] you have done ten times and you learn something new that
something new adds and to that you engage fully holistically…emotions and
intellect are in play and whatever substantive information and it can be very
exhausting.

It is clear from Wathshlah’s depiction, this is more than just work, it is about
helping people, and it is about learning from others. Here she speaks of her work, and
how she thinks of her own commitment towards care. She informs me, “If you are
looking for a 9–5, this is not it.” She has the expectation of herself and of others that
you put in the extra work. She exemplifies what Baines suggests workers within non-
profits and NGOs see as giving back to their society through their efforts.272 In Mauss’
use of the gift exchange, the gift is webbed in social relationships, relies on a reciprocal
return or obligation in the form of social rules and practices. Wathshlah recognises how
her work positively impacts the women who participate in IWRAW AP’s programs and
projects, but she is also aware of what is at stake for her in her work.

Wathshlah’s passion towards the work and the women she has helped and met
makes her susceptible to make sacrifices for the organisation and to strive for and
achieve shared objectives.273 This follows Tomoko Hayakawa’s study “Selfish Giving”
that explores the voluntary community in London. She argues the “nature of the gift is

272
Donna Baines, “Caring for Nothing: work organization and unwaged labour in social services,” Work,
Employment and Society 18, no.2 (2004): 289,
http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/23748816.
273
Ibid.

111
double-edged that gives us pleasure and poison at the same time.”274 When Wathshlah
attends programs and consultations, she is representing both herself and the
organisation. Her motivations for engaging in this type of work are noble, but not
without professional motivations as her work involves being paid to care deeply for
others, involving emotion work that complicates her genuine and performed emotions.
The intent behind her work is morally justified and involves the emotional and material.
As Mauss reminds us in The Gift, values can be emotionally driven: “Our morality is
not solely commercial.”275 This merging of not only personal and professional spaces,
but of personal and professional emotions, eventually impacts the ways women think
about their commitment to the work.

The tensions between the personal and the professional for Wathshlah raise the
importance of recognising burnout in NGO work, specifically when there is a feeling
that the personal is always being sacrificed. In Wathshlah’s words:

Burnout…sometimes we let ourselves be burnt out and sometimes we have no

choice because things are just so bad. Sometimes things are just so bad like for
example and I don’t blame anyone at IWRAW now if they want to leave you
have four people doing the work of eight and NGOs you know that is really not
fair and they need to take that seriously. Really [it’s] not fair because it is going
to physically and mentally affect you [and] that’s that level of burnout and there
are people who come into NGOs with different levels of expectations and when
those expectations are not met then you burnout as well it could be a time factor
over work but also a mismatch of expectations.

By drawing attention to the increasing working demands that the women of

IWRAW AP experience, Wathshlah highlights how few are doing the work of many.
One of the concerns in NGOs is the declining donor funding allocations for human
resources. This signals a future of continuing to overwork in a profession that is

274
Tomoko Hayakawa, “Selfish Giving? Volunteering Motivations and the Morality of Giving,”
Traditiones 43, no.3 (2014): 15, doi: 10.3986/Traditio2014430302.
275
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies (London: Cohen and
West, 1969), 35.

112
becoming more dependent on external donor funding, which in turn promotes
occupation insecurity. I explore this in-depth in the next chapter.

Hochschild’s concept feeling rules (what one should do in a situation relies on

what is expected of them) illustrates how the expectations that women are self-
sacrificing and have endless capabilities to care for others are normalised. Using their
natural disposition as carers, women have a professional obligation and duty to be self-
sacrificing in their work, which in turn exploits their labour because it is ingrained in
workplace practices.276 Natasha, a program officer from Musawah is clear that her
labour is exploited by management. She acknowledges that this is embedded in NGO
workplace practice; however finds it difficult to address her concerns of overwork to
management, because she does not want to be seen as weak. This becomes an issue for
her career aspirations in the sector, because her silence also affects the possibility of
being promoted within the organisation. Natasha says, “There has been no open
discussion of increasing my salary and responsibilities and going for my Juris Doctor
(JD).” She continues, “[They] haven’t initiated [this conversation] and the ball is in my
court.”

The self-neglect women experience in their work is one of the contradictions of

the non-profit/NGO sector. In particular, women’s organisations centre their work on
women’s rights, yet some women working within these workplaces do not feel they
have rights. The working mentality is focused on putting the work first and making it a
priority, which puts a strain on the women’s health, their commitment towards the work
and time spent with family and friends. The expectations of women’s organisations as
outlined above illustrate the perpetual exploitation of women’s labour. Playing on the
gendered assumption of a woman being self-sacrificing and caring takes advantage of
her labour, and generalises women into specific professional categories and
representations, making it seem natural that all women share the same level of care for
the work. This also reflects on the experiences of activists from the WLM and how they
saw themselves during their struggles, which also led to both exhaustion and burnout.
According to Hochschild, burnout acts as a form of emotional numbness, providing an
exit from overwhelming distress that “allows a person to remain physically present on

276
Baines, “Caring for Nothing,” 289.

113
the job.”277 While going into ‘robot-mode’ is one coping mechanism, others can take on
substance abuse to cope with overwork. The Malaysian Feminist Activist (MFA)
describes some of her experiences where she saw her health deteriorate because of long
working hours and the compromises she made to ‘get the work done’:

It is actually encouraged to overwork…we leave the office…and still pounding

away and there is affirmation for this kind of total self-neglect. I had no life, I
drank coffee until ten o’clock at night, no wonder I got cancer [with] the life that
I was leading. I quit smoking in 2001, but I continued obsessive behaviour all
the way until the cancer. I was drinking 5–6 cups of coffee a day, just think
about what that would do that was my substitute for cigarettes, it was so
obsessive, yeah?

Many of the women were forthcoming about their coping methods. MFA went
from one obsessive behaviour to another. Other women also noted they had taken up
smoking and had poor eating habits. After being diagnosed with cancer, MFA changed
her approach to her professional life. This would directly impact her personal life, as
she remarked, she wanted to practice a ‘Zen’ lifestyle, taking time for herself and
committing to projects she knew she could handle comfortably.

Examining NGOs: A space for self-neglect

I don’t know whether [it is] a feminist expectation or a socialist expectation or

you know it’s this kind of degree of self-neglect that is acceptable in the
women’s movement is shocking, which is why people like the Urgent Action
Fund for Women and Human Rights (UAFWHR) have done this whole thing
about sustaining activism as being about self-care. This language of self-care has
come to the women’s movement in the last ten years, how do we take care of
ourselves? We are all dying of cancer, we are all dying of diseases, our
relationships are broken, we can’t keep long terms partners [and] our children
hate us.

277
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 188.

114
 Here MFA refers to the UAFWHR report, which I opened this chapter with.
MFA not only speaks of her own experience with cancer, but also colleagues and
friends of hers that have passed away. I draw on her reflection here to note the
importance of self-care for activists. The earlier discussion of care in this chapter
examined women’s caring roles and responsibilities and their use of this gendered trait
in their work. Here I turn to how women think about caring for themselves. Self-care is
a recent revelation for women in non-profit/NGO work and is a discussion that is still in
progress. When women in this type of work give all of their time and energy towards
helping others, what is left for them? The UAFWHR sought to acknowledge and raise
awareness for activist sustainability and health by gathering a global collection of
women’s voices in non-profit/NGO work. According to Barry and Dordevic:

Activists may be uncomfortable talking about themselves, but they are

beginning to talk. The idea that the personal really is political is starting to
come full circle: not only do we have the right to speak openly about our
‘private’ concerns, but also we have the right (and a responsibility) to ensure
that they are considered equally important to our public work.278

Barry and Dordevic’s research illustrate the challenges of getting women

activists to speak about their experiences. They place importance on women’s voices,
acknowledging the feminist slogan that has been central in this thesis ‘the personal is
political’ and its continuing relevance, especially for women activists who have
historically embodied its message. Considering women’s voices who engage in ‘good
work’ is to think beyond project outcomes and outputs, and puts the focus on those who
invest their time, emotions and care into their professional roles.

By initiating a platform of dialogue for women activists, Barry and Dordevic

recognise the lack of recognition given to women in this sector. They seek to
problematise the impact the work has on women and in doing so use a bottom up
approach to portray the importance of self-care. NGO work is different from other
service-based professions because it involves care and social justice and relies on
compassionate social relationships built and maintained by those engaging in the

278
Barry and Dordevic, What’s the Point of Revolution, 4.

115
work.279 Drawing on the narratives of women activists, Barry and Dordevic illustrate
the significance of women’s voices and experiences, maintaining the vitality for the
continued incorporation of feminist principles, especially in women-dominated
organisations and groups. The self-sacrificing and emotionless attributes of the 1970s
“movement women” that I discussed in the previous chapter are still encouraged and
maintained by women’s organisations today and are inherent in NGO workplaces.
Perpetuating this mentality MFA says:

[Comes] at great cost to our bodies, our intimacy with other people, our
relationships, our time with reflection, our relationship with God or whatever,
you know…all of those things have been neglected, so people are now saying
it’s time to come back within and look because of that.

The driving force behind the UAFWHR publication was to open up and put into
practice some form of self-care regime that women in this profession can use. When it
comes to doing the work women will take on the burden of overwork because it is what
is expected of them. As one activist from the UAFWHR publication shares:

We just go on doing the work—we go so far in exploiting ourselves, because we

feel that if you don’t do the work…then things don’t happen…You are in a
double bind…If you don’t do the work, it won’t be done, because others have so
much on their shoulders already, they can’t take more on.280

This activist’s experience illustrates how women sacrifice themselves in the

name of the work, and draws attention to the idea of women not wanting to burden other
women with more work. Key terms, such as passion and commitment, are used to
perpetuate and justify the personal/professional boundary blur. Natasha finds the word
passion problematic. She says, “I just said it and I feel it.” It can be used very violently,
so if you stay up all night and everyone knows you are underpaid, the word that is used
is automatically, “wow, you are so passionate.”

279
Donna Baines, “Resistance as emotional work: The Australian and Canadian non-profit social
services,” Industrial Relations Journal 42, no.2 (2011): 139, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2338.2011.00616.
280
Barry and Dordevic, What’s the Point of Revolution, 25.

116
 Rest is rarely a priority for these women. In Barry and Dordevic’s report they
cite a Jamaican activist named Yvonne Artis:

Since I started working, I never took a break. There is no break in Jamaica—

there is nowhere to take a break…I get a call from six in the morning, 24 hours a
day. There are times when they call me at three in the morning to find a
homosexual male or female full of blood, or to go to their home that has been
vandalised. Or they need a ride to go home because they are scared or they need
somebody to follow them to their doors. Sometimes my partner says to me it is
getting to her, but I have to do it.281

Quite simply feminist activists can run themselves to their deaths. Taking time
for themselves is unheard of, and even suggesting a holiday or a break can be
considered insolent. Even when Yvonne, the Jamaican activist is called at home at a
random hour, she sees it as her responsibility to help someone else in need and in doing
so she sacrifices her personal life. The care responsibility she takes on has implications
on her personal life as indicated by her partner’s response. Being a ‘professional’ carer
reinforces the ideal of being selfless. In some cases, women only stop when they get
seriously ill, and from this, they can experience a wake-up call. For others, they will
continue to work like this. In the process they emotionally distance themselves from the
work and have their mental, emotional and physical health impacted.

The burden of work increases when there is geographical distance involved.

Sanyu describes what happens working for an organisation that is not in the same
physical location of on-the-ground activists. Sanyu’s time with this organisation
involved her working from home because of the time difference between her and the
activists she was helping. Unlike the Jamaican activist’s experience who could
immediately help because of her physical proximity, Sanyu could not. She describes:

There is also a sense of hopelessness because I would be on Skype with an

activist in Malawi who says, “I have been arrested once and they are going to
come after me again, what can you do?” I am in Delhi and he is asking me
“What can I do?” because he assumes that as an international organization, I

281
Barry and Dordevic, What’s the Point of Revolution, 28.

117
 have got connections and networks I can tap into and if I sound the alarm it
would be way better than him sounding the alarm, because I will have more
people who will listen…right? But then I am sitting in Delhi and I am sounding
the alarm, but then I realize there is nothing actually I can do in Delhi. I could
not help him and if they came and arrested him again that’s it. I had [contacted
partners in] Brussels [and] Washington, [but depending] on how fast they can
activate their own networks [it is out of my hands], so there is yes, you can be
disconnected, but also you can be connected even if you are remote.

Sanyu feels powerless because she can not directly help her contact. Her only
resources were telecommuting to other contacts and organisations to activate some form
of support for her contact. Similarly, she and the Jamaican activist experience their
personal space of the home impacted by the work and while they do not see this
crossing of boundaries as an immediate issue, they are aware of the infringement of
their personal space.

Individual and workplace responsibilities—Who shoulders the burden

of thinking about care?

Overwork is the first of many sustainability paradoxes. While activists are

deeply concerned and stressed out about the amount of work they have to do,
they almost universally accept this level of work as an inevitable fact of
activism.282

This paradox will continue in the work of non-profits and NGOs as long as the
mentality of those engaging in this type of work remains self-sacrificing, thinking that
others are more important than themselves. The women I interviewed acknowledged the
non-existence of occupational health in NGO workplace policies by indicating the
individualisation of finding methods of self-care and work stress relief. Wathshlah’s
reflection:

282
Ibid., 24.

118
 For an organization to really function well, you need to put in processes to make
sure there is a space for people to have some kind of recourse when they are
affected for overwork [and] not getting along with colleagues and to see how
that can be dealt with. [The] ideal situation and a lot of NGOs don’t have space
[for this] and so you need to find your own way really creating the space, so
what we used to do here, we used to go for cakes and drinks and then [the] more
and more we were stressed we didn’t make time to go and [do] that. So, that’s
where the organization, like literally spiralled to a major crisis.

While Wathshlah’s experiences have highlighted the importance of enmeshing

her personal and professional activism, she calls for organisations to have clear policies
on workers’ rights. She asks, “How can you ask us to work on rights without giving us
our own rights?” She suggests informal structures and social groups have substituted as
a form of self-care, but these were only temporary measures. Taking self-care into
consideration, the Sisters In Islam office find the time to go for walks together during
breaks at work. The workplace also includes a space that is set up for relaxing and at
times is even used for group yoga sessions. Many of my interviewees revealed that even
sharing their experiences in our interview allowed them a space to think through their
commitment and understanding of themselves in their work, providing a space where
they could reflect on their current situations and if this type of work is really worth
continuing in.

Ruby was one of the women who found our interview cathartic. After our
interview she had a slight smile of relief on her face and felt that she had been able to
voice her concerns, and hoped it could have an impact. When we spoke about sacrifice,
the work and health, she says:

You put on different hats, so when you come in and you are a let’s say program
officer, you are going to be multitasking like crazy. It’s not just going to be your
program work, but it is going to be other stuff. So, people expect a lot and they
say if it’s detrimental to your health that is a sacrifice you should make.
Although they will not say it so bluntly that is the kind of culture that is around
and permeates the entire organization and then if you do get sick and you do ask
for a better environment in work then you are deemed too picky, you ask for too

119
 much and then they will say, “we are not covered and you chose this life and this
is what we have, so deal with it.”

Ruby frames the NGO working environment in terms of its many organisational
shortcomings. She relates how when it comes to the health concerns of workers, this is a
sacrifice they should be making, because the motivation for engaging in this non-
profit/NGO work is a choice. While individuals come to this type of work through a
variety of experiences, whether religious, family or educational, workers have not
chosen to work in environments that exploit their unpaid labour and considers workers’
health concerns minor in the grand scheme of the work. While Ruby is clear about the
shortcomings this does not stop her dedication towards human rights work and in her
‘free’ time she also helps subordinated populations in Malaysia.283 Like many, her
approach towards her work is both due to her personal commitment and the working
culture of NGOs. She describes:

I think most non-for-profits/NGOs don’t have any solid human resource

systems, because their focus is a lot of helping the people outside that they don’t
really focus on their people and any kind of learning, capacity building,
investing in your people and your health and well-being is seen as the last
priority, if we have time. It is not built in the processes of the organization, so
the people who are doing all of this hard work are usually the last priority of the
organization and that is really sad.

As Barry and Dordevic argue, “Activists [who] feel an enormous sense of

individual responsibility to right so many wrongs. They feel that they have to keep
going, and even take on more work—if they don’t do it, who will?”284 As I have argued,
this reproduces stereotypes about women’s care roles from the home. As MFA notes:

I just want to walk away and not look back, I have had enough you know, but I
was walking away half-dead you know sort of like that sort of I am not saying

283
Due to the nature of Ruby’s personal activism, I do not go into specific details, because of the
dominant religious and cultural practices in Malaysia that severely oppress groups she works with and
for.
284
Barry and Dordevic, What’s the Point of Revolution, 25.

120
 that it was the women’s movement, but it was my response to all of the
nonsense.

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the construction and implementation of women as

carers in non-profit/NGO work. When women’s unpaid care roles from the home are
commodified primarily in service work, they are called upon to use their nurturing roles
from the home in their work. I have drawn on the Maussian model of the gift exchange
and have shown how gender is implicated in this exchange. For women, this exchange
relies on women’s abilities to be caring, nurturing and feminine. In particular, women in
non-profit/NGO work and the emotion work that is asked of them not only considers
how women’s care role is extended into the public sphere, but also what impact it has
on their overall health. The care roles they take on in their professional work, often
leaves women to neglect their own self-care for the well-being of others in the name of
‘good work’. This can have a detrimental impact on women’s personal and professional
lives as many have merged these spaces, only to find their health suffer, their personal
lives and families affected and an overall feeling of self-neglect and alienation from
their workplaces and working environments. What becomes even more evident and
challenging is their continued justification of work in these spaces. The next chapter
investigates the impact of the NGO funding crunch for both women’s organisations and
those working in them.

121
Chapter Five – You have to fight for your rights, and for your
funding

Gender is now passé.285

This statement dates and periodises the concept of gender, suggesting we have
moved beyond it. As this thesis has shown, gender is fluid and is always being
constructed and reconstructed. In the situation of women’s organisations and their
access to gender-based funding, the idea that gender is old but is having an impact on
funding for women’s organisations. After the momentum from the women’s world
conferences dispelled, women’s groups and organisations were left with the task of
seeking external, non-government donor funding. A 2006 report conducted by the
Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) portrayed a bleak funding
landscape for women’s organisations. The report explored multiple questions, such as:
are women’s rights groups sufficiently bold in their funding strategies? Do donors
understand the urgency and importance of this work? 286 In this chapter I examine the
funding realities for women’s rights organisations and the driving forces behind those
trends.

The report draws attention to the situation of women’s organisations and

potential strategies for changing the existing funding landscape, calling for more
resources to be made available to women’s groups and women’s organisations.287 It was
collated in the context where women’s organisations continue to receive less funding
now than they have in the past, which has seen them shifting their focus away from
projects and programs towards fundraising for their survival.288 This resonates across

285
Cindy Clark, Ellen Sprenger and Lisa VeneKlasen et al., Where is the money for women’s rights?
Assessing resources and the role of donors in the promotion of women’s rights and the support of
women’s organizations (AWID, 2006), 85,
https://www.awid.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/assessing_resources_and_role_of_donors_fundher.pd
f. The use of this phrase is to illustrate the significance of examining the changing funding landscape of
the non-profit/NGO sector to dissect how women’s organisations are affected by funding cuts.
286
Ibid., 1.
287
Ibid.
288
Ibid., 3.

122
geographical boundaries and contexts, but women’s organisations vary in how they
adapt to the changing funding climate.

This chapter problematises donor-funding allocations to women’s organisations

by exploring women’s experiences of precarity and how they understand the role of
external donor funding. Just as David Mosse and David Lewis take an ethnographic
approach to the development sector, I follow their lead and continue my analysis of
Sisters In Islam and IWRAW AP in this chapter to consider some of the similarities and
differences between how the organisations are embedded in wider NGO funding
structures and politics.289 Mosse and Lewis suggest their ethnographic study, “reveals
an unstable donor world in which the nature of the target, the ‘field’, the role of
expertise or consultants, and even what it means to be a donor is constantly in
question.”290 Here we uncover systems of relationships that are both internal to
organisations and external in broader NGO structures.291 I argue that the decrease in
funding to women’s organisations (mostly in the Global South), have led to
organisations prioritising funding over the work. This is important as it illustrates the
layers between funding, the work, those who do the work and the justification of ‘good
work’. This then becomes a competition of which organisations can play the donor
funding game in order to survive in an increasingly aggressive NGO playing field.Re-
thinking the North/South binary

In the 1990s, development as an idea, a practice and an objective was the subject
of critique that saw an investigation of development theory and practice. Uma Kothari
points out post-colonial and feminist interventions have challenged the normative ideals
of a Western masculinist conception of development.292 Development discourses have
taken an interest in applying post-colonial feminist theory to the sector. Kothari argues:

289
Mosse and Lewis, eds., The Aid Effect, 1.
290
Ibid., 16-17.
291
Ibid., 17. See also J.G. Townsend and A.R. Townsend, “Accountability, motivation and practice:
NGOs North and South,” Social and Cultural Geography 5, no.2 (2004): 271-284, doi:
10.1080/14649360410001690259.
292
Kothari and Minogue, eds., Development theory and practice, 12, 35. Uma Kothari, “Authority and
Expertise: The Professionalisation of International Development and the Ordering of Dissent,” Antipode
37, no.3 (2005): 427, doi: 10.1111/j.0066-4812.2005.00505.x.

123
 [It] offers a critique that is relevant to development studies since it demands a
rethinking of how the other places and people are constructed and
problematized, while at the same time challenging common understandings of
the concepts and representations within gender and development.293

Kothari is influenced by post-colonial feminists such as bell hooks, Gayatri

Spivak and Mohanty who all draw on conceptualisations of the ‘Other’ in their research
and writings. Edward Said’s 1977 masterpiece Orientalism describes the Orient as the
‘Other’ a construct reinforced by Europe and the West in knowledge production.294
Following his assertions, post-colonial feminist thinkers have taken up his ideas to
illustrate the importance of de-centring hegemonic histories and subjectivities that have
marginalised the voices of women from the Global South.295

The Global North and Global South dichotomy is the most recent binary
relationship in development discourses. It is a way to describe the power imbalances
between countries, those that are thought to be developed and those still developing. For
my research purposes, it is used to describe the power dynamics between women who
work in the Malaysian context for international women’s human rights that are
mandated by the United Nations in Geneva and funders located in the Global North.
Kothari argues, “Contemporary development strategies and interventions produce
unequal global relations, not solely by invoking colonial forms of rule of the past, but
also through the construction of expertise.”296 She further examines that the priority
given to Western knowledge masquerades “as universal and neutral” posing as the
acceptable authority.297 This is exemplified in the United Nations women’s human
rights agendas that continue to reproduce inequalities between women in the Global
North and Global South. Sondra Hale argues scholars and institutions in the Global
South have led bold and insightful advances towards documenting and theorising
feminism. Many challenges still persist, such as the lack of formal recognition and

293
Kothari and Minogue, eds., Development theory and practice, 46.
294
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 41.
295
Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders, 78.
296
Kothari, “Authority and Expertise”, 433.
297
Ibid.

124
networks in the South that limit its development for deeper scholarly understandings of
these efforts.298 Tensions within feminist discourses are still unsettled, however, it is
through them that I discuss the changing funding landscape in Malaysian-based
women’s organisations.

Reiterating the complexities and the tensions within and around feminisms, I use
this chapter to discuss the changing funding landscape for women’s organisations.
Specifically, this chapter considers the effect that dominant forms of feminisms may
have in relation to women’s organisations and access to external donor funding. The
consequences of financial constraints have made it challenging for organisations to
think about sustaining their personnel and maintaining aims and mandates. I argue that
when women’s organisations shift their goals and objectives towards donor expectations
and agendas, women working in these organisations are conflicted about who the work
is serving and where they draw the lines between being fundraisers and program
officers.

Tensions in the Global North and Global South relationship are not only related
to donor funding, but is also a concern in wider feminist politics whenever the questions
of who gets to speak, who speaks for whom and which groups’ voices remain
marginalised come into view. I return to Linda Alcoff’s “The Problem of Speaking for
Others,” where she argues:

A speaker’s location (which I take here to refer to their social location, or social
identity) has an epistemically significant impact on that speaker’s claims and can
serve either to authorize or disauthorize one’s speech.299

Here I map Northern and Southern women’s organisations through their

constructed cultural, political and historical geographies that directly impact which
organisations have better access to donor funding. The inequalities between women’s
groups are geographical, political, epistemological and ontological. Epistemologically,
the discursive constructions of these categories are deeply embedded in colonial roots

298
Sondra Hale, “Transnational Gender Studies and the Migrating Concept of Gender in the Middle East
and North Africa,” Cultural Dynamics 21, no.22 (2009): 135, doi: 10.1177/0921374008105068.
299
Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” 7.

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and histories and continue to manifest through various global economic agencies and
policies like the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The Third World as a category is produced and reproduced by the binary between the
industrialised North and the developing South.300 Ontologically, the persistent
inequalities remain in women’s everyday realities, for example, which groups of women
get to set the agenda at major conferences and activities, and which groups of women
get to speak and have their voices heard. Chapter Three discussed the importance of the
concept experience has in my research; here I use this approach to discuss the
North/South binary relationship. In the Malaysian context of women’s organisations,
the remnants of colonialism have brought about new challenges in a post-colonial
Malaysia that is still embedded in racial and ethnic inequalities. These divisions are
cemented in wider political and economic structures of the non-profit/NGO sector,
which themselves are located in the colonial legacy of inequalities.

I interrogate the power imbalance between women’s organisations based in the

institutions of the Global North and those based in the Global South by drawing on
Alcoff’s analysis. She argues the ‘rituals of speaking’ involves both the location of the
speaker and listener, as such we are afforded a twofold mapping showing how an
argument becomes significant and for which groups.301 Arturo Escobar also argues that
the problem of speaking for others is an area of concern in the development sector,
noting that who can speak and from what authority then set the rules used in planning
and policies.302 Escobar, like Alcoff, is interested in the power behind whose voices are
heard and from which locations they are speaking. From their approaches, and in
addition to the approaches of Mohanty and de Lauretis discussed in Chapter Two, we
can think through how various classes of women are positioned through the economics
of donor funding to women’s organisations.

Lata Narayanaswamy explores the intricacies of Southern Women’s NGOs. She

argues that the growing transnational feminist movement gained visibility through

300
Chilla Bulbeck, Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women’s Diversity in a Postcolonial World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 35.
301
Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” 12.
302
Kothari, “Authority and Expertise,” 428.

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multilateral commitments to women’s rights through women’s NGOs. She
problematises the North/South dichotomy and suggests this perception is outdated,
because it does not account for the slippery in-between debates within these
categories.303 This sentiment is also seen in organisations that enmesh “universal” rights
discourses and Islamic approaches to women’s rights such as Sisters In Islam and other
Malaysian-based women’s organisations. As we have seen women’s organisations were
influenced by Islamic resurgence movements in the 1980s in addition to international
women’s movements, conferences and conventions. World conferences on women
brought women from various countries together, united by their assumed gender
identity. These conferences have since been critiqued; for example, in what way issues
arising in how Southern women’s NGOs have been constructed by Northern
stakeholders, which maintain the power imbalance between the North and the South
where Northern stakeholders presume the capacity to represent the needs, interests and
voices of marginalised people in the South to achieve empowerment goals in
development programs and projects.304 They privileged so-called authentic voices from
the Global South further inculcating the privilege of whose voices are heard and
perceptions of women working out of the developing world.

Here I return to de Lauretis’ Technologies of Gender and her definition of the

subject as one that is not unified but multiple, not so much divided as contradicted, to
illustrate the contention within the construct of Mohanty’s Third World Woman.305
Highlighted again are the variations and reconfigurations of the Global North/South
relationship. These relationships are further complicated by the changing NGO
landscape with more organisations seeking external donor funding due to gaps in
government aid and economic intervention. Donor funding has manipulated
geographical boundaries to situate NGOs through economic funding rather than
geographical borders. This is relevant to organisations such as IWRAW AP whose work
is considered international, but is geographically located in the Global South. In the next
section, I highlight the role of external donor funding and trace it to international

Lata Narayanaswamy, “NGOs and Feminisms in Development: Interrogating the ‘Southern Women’s’
303

NGO’,” Geography Compass 8, no.8 (2014): 580, doi: 10.1111/gec3.12150.

304
Narayanaswamy, “NGOs and Feminisms in Development,” 576.
305
de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender, 2.

127
politics, specifically to the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in
1995.

Funding realities: The politics behind women’s world conferences

The Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW) was a global event that
brought together women’s organisations and state governments to discuss women’s
shared issues and concerns. At the time this was the biggest United Nations conference
ever held. Dianne Otto points out:

Over 50,000 people, mostly women, participated in the official

intergovernmental Conference and the parallel NGO Forum…Participants came
from a total of 189 states and, in addition to the 400 NGOs which hold
permanent consultative status with the Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC), approximately 2,500 other NGOs were accredited to attend.306

One of its main objectives was to strategise initiatives to promote gender

equality. The event was set to mark an important time for women and gender equality
worldwide; however, in reality, there were several issues that plagued the conference,
and continued after its closing days. It promoted the idea that women’s shared common
concerns could be addressed by working together and in partnership with women and
men from various classes, races, ethnicities, countries and activist backgrounds. This
endeavour to work together with diverse groups of women and men failed to take into
account ongoing and unequal power relations, which can be traced to both political and
colonial histories and women’s differing contexts in the women’s movements that I
discussed in Chapter One. Beijing 1995’s universal approach to women’s rights failed
to acknowledge the different ways women from different backgrounds came to the
conference, where the common category of women was both politically and culturally
problematic.

306
Dianne Otto, “Holding up half the sky, but for whose benefit?: a critical analysis of the fourth world
conference on women,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 6, no. 1 (1996): 7, doi:
10.1080/13200968.1996.11077188.

128
 Recalling Aihwa Ong’s use of ‘strategic sisterhood’, where she discusses how
the FWCW led to superficial alliances between Northern and Southern women and
women’s groups describes, “Feminists from metropolitan countries seek a new North-
South alliance whereby they make strategic interventions on behalf of third world
women by putting pressure on their governments.”307 Ong’s use of strategic sisterhood
highlights the tensions within feminism concerning whose voices are heard, who can
speak for whom and from what positions are they speaking from. For her, strategic
sisterhood is transnational and concerned with the complexities of globalisation and
women’s rights. Ong draws our attention to the role of colonialism through nationalism
and political moralities in postcolonial contexts where women’s rights are connected to
wider communitarian structures and politics. Thus, women’s rights are not only about
individuals, but also their positions in the family, the community and the nation.308 She
questions what these ‘sisterly links and collaborations’ are based on:

“Whose ‘imagined communities’ are we dealing with?” When we think about

globalisation, and the pressing problems affecting women and children globally,
we are tempted to brush aside other social imaginaries that do not view women’s
rights in quite the same way. It will be important to attend to how discourses of
community, development and gender are negotiated in a particular society.309

Ong follows a similar path as Mohanty, de Lauretis and Alcoff who all consider
the tensions within feminist discourses and ideologies, and whose ideas have been
central to my thesis.

The year 2015 marked the 20th anniversary of the events in Beijing, and
women’s rights organisations are still seriously underfunded. When governments
attended Beijing, they signed global agreements to drive positive outcomes on women’s
issues and for women’s human rights. This policy-driven approach in Beijing was not
met with the same economic rigour by governments to negotiate and secure further

307
Aihwa Ong, “Strategic Sisterhood or Sisters in Solidarity?”107.
308
Ibid., 110-112.
309
Ibid., 114.

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funding commitments for women’s organisations and women’s rights.310 This triggered
a response from external sources of funding, ranging from United Nations institutions,
private donors and large funding organisations based out of the Global North to fill this
funding gap. This enabled an environment of piecemeal and scattered pots of funding
for NGOs, which does not adequately sustain organisations. Funding is based on
specific projects, populations and programs. In addition, the 2008 financial recession in
the Global North saw budgets allocated for international assistance slashed. Women’s
organisations were not given flexible funding, but project specific funding, which does
not account for the administrative or infrastructure costs of an organisation.311
Respondents in AWID’s research stated, “It is most difficult to find funding for staff
salaries, administration and capacity building. It is significantly easier to raise funds for
media, technology and communications work, leadership development and linking and
networking.”312 The perception that staff and organisational costs are not as important
as technology reflects the disinterest of funders to consider the workers who are
themselves in vulnerable positions of overwork and continued emotional investment.

Returning to the notion that ‘gender is now passé’, I examine shifting trends in
external donor funding, as “many [women’s] groups say they are struggling to maintain
donor interest and support…Many feel that gender equality and even women’s rights
was [the] ‘flavour of the month’ for many donors.”313 External donor funding for
women’s organisations are represented through institutions and organisations, such as
the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), Mama Cash and
Hivos.314 While there are many other donor agencies and funding institutions, these

310
Lydia Alpizar Duran, “20 Years of Shamefully Scarce Funding for Feminists and Women’s Rights
Movements,” UNRISD, accessed May 13, 2015,
http://www.unrisd.org/UNRISD/website/newsview.nsf/(httpNews).
311
Ibid.
312
Clark, Sprenger, and VeneKlasen et al. Where is the money for women’s rights? 12.
313
Ibid., 14.
314
From my observations and fieldwork, UNIFEM is a United Nations based institution that engages with
women’s organizations in a multiple of ways, such as the UNIFEM Trust Fund that supports a number of
issues relating to women, for example, specific funds that are allocated in support of actions to eliminate
violence against women. Mama Cash is a global women’s fund with over 20 years of experience. It is one
of the largest funders of small women’s organisations, providing core funding (covering overhead and
staff pay). It receives funds from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Irish Aid. Hivos is an INGO
based in the Netherlands that supports civil society organisations in the Global South and East. Research
examining these particular funders can be found in the 2008 OECD document “Gender Equality,
130
donors primarily support organisations with mandates to advance women’s positions
through a shared feminist lens.315 Due to the shifting tendencies of donor funding, donor
expectations and criteria make it difficult for women’s organisations to maintain and
secure core funding. According to AWID’s research, women’s rights and funding for
women’s organisations have become out of fashion with donors. Funding for women’s
rights have arguably been on ‘safe’ issues that focus on women’s health or women’s
public participation.316 The move is towards fashion funding, or following funding
trends as Benoit Challand argues:

Many donors ride the fashion waves, like empowerment, awareness-raising,

children’s rights, mobile clinics, or mental health, etc. This translates into the
emergence of a large number of new civil society organisations, often with
overlapping or similar activities, with the ensuing risk of a good deal of
duplication in project funding…Therefore what donors promote is more a
plurality in terms of numbers rather than in terms of quality of work and a
healthy competition among civil society actors.317

As Challand points out, the growing numbers of NGOs have caused a great deal
of overlap in NGO activities and this is directly tied to donors following issue trends as
a means to allocate resources and funds. NGOs also respond to these trends, which
complicates the external donor funding and NGO recipient funding relationship. The
reality for many NGOs is one that comes down to economics, is there enough money to
operate? For how many years? Will staff get paid? How many program officers and
office support staff is realistic in terms of the organisation’s budget? As a result of this
instability and insecurity, organisations now expend resources and time to fundraising.
In turn, this impacts their work, as the following section explores.

Women’s Empowerment and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness: Issues Brief 3 Innovative
Funding for Women’s Organizations”.
315
It should be noted that the shared feminist lens follows Western feminist ideals, particularly the
universalisation of women’s rights and empowerment goals.
316
Clark, Sprenger, and VeneKlasen et al., Where is the money for women’s rights? 14.
317
Benoit Challand, “Looking Beyond the Pale: International Donors and Civil Society Promotion in
Palestine,” Palestine - Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture 12.1 (2005): 60.

131
Experiences on the ground: Women’s organisations and funding
realities

As we saw in the previous chapter, the common and shared characteristic of

NGO workplaces relies on the habit of program officers to overwork themselves, driven
by the ideal ingrained in NGO working culture that ‘the work is good’. In women’s
organisations, as Wathshlah notes:

[Program Officers] are taking on more [of] the emotional battering and the
psychological battering…you know usually where there is this total emotional
and psychological abuse you see, there is only so much you can take until it
starts affecting the work to a certain extent it has not affected the work, but it has
affected your own psychological being and what is what’s happening [now].

Wathshlah’s use of the terms emotional battering and psychological battering to

express how she experiences women’s human rights work suggests this type of work
asks women to act as a shield of impact. In other words, they bear both the impact of
working on the ground with communities and participants, and to negotiating the NGO
workplace culture. By working as gatekeepers or brokers between participants and
NGO structures, the constant reality for women in this type of work is to now take on
the brunt of the work without sufficient organisational support. Mosse and Lewis
highlight social actors operate as active agents that deal in the institutional
bureaucracies and social realities of helping others.318 Their analysis of international aid
institutions employs an actor-oriented approach that studies intermediary actors or
brokers. Women NGO workers act as mediators in their positions where they utilise
international humanitarian and human rights discourses, as well as negotiating
relationships between women activists.319 Their role hinges on their ability to follow
organisational and institutional policies, while at the same time presenting themselves
as caring and invested workers.

318
Lewis and Mosse, eds., Development Brokers and Translators, 11, 16.
319
Ibid., 10.

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 The less funding that is made available for women’s organisations, the more
work women face. Natasha called this funding reality “the spawn of Satan”. She says
most pots of funding available now are program-based, which neglect costs such as
paying and hiring NGO workers. This is a growing concern in the sector because donor
funding is here to stay and current organisational structures have not allocated for this.
Ruby told me “Most non-for-profits or NGOs don’t have any kind of solid human
resource systems, because their focus is a lot on helping the people outside that they
don’t really focus on their people.” Her interpretation of non-profit and NGO
workplaces appears bleak, however she proposed ways in which organisations can think
about its workers and worker sustainability:

One of the strategies that would be good is to invest in your people and build
them up, and if you say there is not enough people or not enough capacity,
because there is a lack of people, then you need to go back to the core reason
why there is a lack of people, because it is a lot of hard work and you don’t get
paid much, so one of the strategies is to make it a career and pay people
better…people feel valued and stay.

Ruby’s reflection of NGO workplaces emphasis the continued practice of

manipulating workers through the ‘good work’ mentality. Women continue working in
these conditions because they are motivated by the nature of the work, and their low pay
and feelings of under appreciation in NGO workplaces are often overlooked. Ruby calls
on organisations to rectify these practices, by incorporating better workplace standards
of pay and to acknowledge hard work and commitment. As Ruby thinks through
possible solutions, she highlights the idea of retention strategies in non-profits and the
unwillingness of management to consider them. She is able to continue in this type of
work because she does not have extra responsibilities beyond herself, but what about
others who have families to support or have responsibilities that extends beyond their
own? Ruby said that if something were to happen and she needed money to be able to
help her parents in the future or if she wanted to study, travel or even have a family she
would not have adequate financial resources. She sees this as a major problem in the
profession.

Sanyu, equipped with long-term experiences with NGOs is not naïve about some
of the professional realities and the frustrations she has felt in the work:

133
 Yeah…and I think once you know there is a disparity between working in the
corporate sector and working in the non-for-profit sector and I don’t think you
sort of realize how that will impact you on a personal level, until you are
growing older.

In NGOs, the standard two-year contract compounds the volatility of secured

funds. Employees are able to renew their contracts for an additional one-year term, but
this employment process is based on how much funding is allocated for operational
costs. Women engaging in the non-profit/NGO sector are aware of the pay realities and
how their wages are often tied to how much funding organisations receive and what the
organisation can dedicate to institutional and overhead costs. In their hopes that
organisations will renew or can renew their contracts, workers are put in difficult
situations where short-term contracts are a constant reminder of the financial uneasiness
of their work. In some cases, where NGOs have adequate funding for a five-year term,
they can implement activities and employ longer contracted personnel, however, even in
this five-year term they are still constantly seeking funds and are always reassessing
their financial security.

This onus is on fundraising and how NGO workers spend more time and energy
dedicated to sourcing funds. This economic reality is directly related to piecemeal
funding strategies that perpetuate the shifting culture of NGOs. Wathshlah, Ruby and
Sanyu share some of the challenges they encounter in the work, but they do not question
the level of personal over-burden that they absorb in the long, under-renumerated hours.
To work less, would also potentially make them the first in line for non-renewal come
contract time.

At the organisational level, IWRAW AP’s funding is tied exclusively to those

Western donor funders who financially support feminist-based projects and programs in
the South. The organisation has to survive on this external funding as it receives no
support from the Malaysian Government. Using external donor funding is in part a
strategy by the organisation’s founding members who see this as an opportunity to have
less government intervention in its work on women’s human rights. IWRAW AP’s lack
of economic attachment to the Malaysian Government affords it greater leeway as a
women’s organisation, because the government is not able to use funding as a way to
control what the organisation does. But it relies on and is accountable to external

134
donors. The slash in funding to NGOs has seen women’s advocacy organisations hit
hardest. In 2005, over 100 developed and developing countries came together to agree
on changing the asymmetrical practices between donors and recipients. This event,
called the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, recognised the growing concerns on
the impact that changing approaches to delivering aid have had on women’s rights
organisations.320 The struggle to secure and sustain funding in women’s organisations
points to the scarce resources in an uncertain non-profit/NGO sector that breed
competition.321

Audrey reflected on IWRAW AP’s funding situation, “That is why we are

facing a funding crunch because we don’t fulfill the criteria right now for a lot of funds
because they are based in their pockets.” Here she referred to project-specific funding as
‘based in their pockets’. She further clarified this with “South Asia will have its funds,
Southeast Asia will have its funds, the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA)
has its funds and unless we work with partners we won’t get the funds.” She said
funding connected to specific geographical regions places IWRAW AP in a vulnerable
position. Even though IWRAW AP is located in Malaysia and is a part of Southeast
Asia, because of its international framing, it cannot apply for funds that are region-
specific and therefore is limited in what donors are looking for in specific times and
locations.

National-level organisations, such as Sisters In Islam also located in Kuala

Lumpur, have approached their funding realities through an emphasis on fundraising
initiatives. Ratna, the Executive Director of Sisters In Islam considers that the cuts in
funding for women’s organisations has increased the amount of time and energy spent
on fundraising over advocacy and research projects. As the Executive Director, part of
her responsibilities is to address daily organisational operations, such as paying salaries
of the staff. One of the differences between IWRAW AP and Sisters In Islam is that
Sisters In Islam is a members-based NGO with 37 regular members who also fundraise
for the organisation. Where most of the program officers at IWRAW AP also seek

320
DAC Network on Gender Equality, “Gender Equality, Women’s Empowerment and the Paris
Declaration on Aid Effectiveness: Issue Brief 3,” OECD (2008): 1, https://www.oecd.org/dac/gender-
development/42310124.pdf.
321
Eyben and Turquet, eds., Feminists in Development Organizations, 181.

135
funding opportunities and prioritise funding, Sisters In Islam’s members, rather than
workers, take on the organisation’s fundraising initiatives. It was unclear from my
interview with Ratna if this membership is based on financial contributions or was
simply a roster of individuals invested in the organisation’s work. Program officers
fundraise for IWRAW AP and staff research donors initiate contact, and in the final
stages write grant proposals. In the past few years IWRAW AP has not had a long-term
serving Executive Director whose primary responsibility is to network and seek funding
opportunities and this has also contributed to staff taking on more workload.

Sisters In Islam voted in former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s daughter

Marina Mahathir to their board in 2009. She continues to work with the organisation
from her position as a media figure and a spokesperson for humanitarian causes. Her
celebrity status in Malaysia benefits Sisters In Islam for further networking with
potential donors. However, it is unclear if Sisters In Islam currently receives state
funding and the relationship the organisation has with the current government. In its
beginning, the organisation received financial support from the government, but this
relationship has become strained over time. Although the organisation’s work is based
in Islamic principles to promote gender equality, more recently it has been vocal on the
rights of LGBT persons and the Malaysian Government is not supportive of their work
to help these groups. This tension between the State and Sisters In Islam and LGBT
communities rests on the dominant heterosexual norms of men and women in
Malaysian society. Trying to maintain government funding and work for vulnerable and
marginalised groups, Sisters In Islam is also put in a difficult position of choosing who
to allocate resources to.

I use these organisations’ relationships to funding to illustrate donor funding’s

impact on the day-to-day realities of organisations and those working in them. I argue
that women’s organisations across the NGO spectrum are experiencing structural
changes, however some organisations are better equipped to respond to these changes
given their geographical positions, who they receive funding from and the priority given
to fundraising strategies.

136
Financial instability of NGOs and shifting workplace practices

As gatekeepers between donors and participants, NGO workers not only labour
at the front lines helping people, but also are involved in responding to donor concerns
and expectations. At the organisational level, women are concerned with the
organisation’s economic survival and in turn their own personal economic survival is
intertwined in their professional investment in NGO work. From the blurring of their
personal lives into their professional lives, the women I interviewed began to question
their futures in values-based work, as the precarious survival of organisations becomes
more apparent. The Malaysian Feminist Activist (MFA) pointed out funding’s effect on
women’s organisations working out of the Global South:

Our funders care about whether we have transparency, accountability…[Are]

our finances in order and whatever and they come in and speak to our Executive
Director and so the Executive Director can say anything and the board you
know…So, you have this situation where it’s only if the board and whatever are
sort of mature and committed enough that you have organizations that are
healthy enough…healthy organizations where people are joyful in the feminist
movement I would argue is a dying thing.

MFA described the realities she encountered where funding is talked about
through donor expectations, primarily from transparency and accountability
perspectives where NGOs conform to economic checks and balances. She recognised
the hierarchies of power within organisations, highlighting the roles of the Executive
Director and Board Members who are in direct contact with donors, further emphasising
which voices are acknowledged. She highlighted the reality for many women’s
organisations, particularly in the Global South, is the competition for funding that has
prioritised efficient economics of organisations over organisational integrity. As a
Malaysian feminist activist who has spent many years attending big international
forums and conferences she knows the inner workings of this space and some of the
issues that can arise.

Organisations grappling with financial sustainability or organisational integrity

face a dilemma between the integrity of ‘good work’ and the reality of how the work
gets funded. In the Southeast Asian context, the Mekong region (countries such as

137
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) has turned towards service-delivery projects. Audrey
recognises this is typical in this region where NGOs operate under strict authoritative
governments. Women’s human rights work is diffused through education initiatives,
such as schooling for girls, rather than at a structural level, such as gender equality
policies:

NGOs are [moving towards] service delivery and very few are about policy and
advocacy. [T]hey don’t want to rock the boat [for example] in the Mekong
region where the governments are very authoritarian, they are all about the
services. [We can] make a recommendation about how to educate girls, so they
will [go] back to school, but they are not openly and proactively about gender
equality or human rights, but they are about development needs for girls in
education. [What] we get a sense of is the state is a little bit more removed from
the actual result because [organisations like] Oxfam are coming in, so [then] it’s
not my problem, they are already providing the service so it’s okay. They do
good work but they are taking over the space [overriding the] state rather than
doing advocacy [work], most NGOs are [now] in the service sector.

Coming from an advocacy-based organisation like IWRAW AP, Audrey is

aware the organisation is being left out of funding prospects because they have not
shifted towards service-delivery. Audrey sees that the intentions of organisations from
the Global North are for the most part good, but that local organisations can be pushed
out of their own space and context. This is directly related to the funds they receive
from larger external organisations. International organisations like Oxfam that are able
to fund projects in areas such as the Mekong region do not take into consideration local
organisations and their roles in community development and the lasting effects they
have in the region.

Audrey highlighted the importance of the aftermath of the 2008 global financial
crisis and how donors responded to the crisis:

We found that in the last four years, because of that whole capital crunch and the
credit loss… [Funders] prioritize projects that deal directly with projects dealing
with a specific population, right? With a very clear idea of what is the problem,
how are you going to address it, what will you produce and in terms of program

138
 management -- that is how they want it to be shown, because they don’t want to
be so confused by your project and if it is very complicated and about higher
order type outputs and you can’t promise anything because you say you will do
all of these things so that the government will produce a law or policy that is
positive for women, but you can’t [say] that because we can only say that we
will build enabling environments.

Audrey argued that organisations that focus on advocacy can easily get left
behind. In the work of advocacy-based organisations, such as IWRAW AP, there is
little in the way it can materially show in terms of how its work benefits the people.
More specifically, the promotion of women’s human rights and advocacy activities do
not translate into mathematical percentages in the same way service delivery activities
highlight groups helped, aid received and numbers of services utilised.

As Michael Edwards and David Hulme contend, “NGOs find themselves in a

web of complex interactions in a particular context. The concept of multiple
‘stakeholders’ helps to further our understanding of NGO accountability…Donors and
other resource-providers have a stake in the outcomes of NGO performance too.”322
Edwards and Hulme’s analysis focuses on how the donor-favoured relationship that
NGOs are constantly navigating through compromises organisations in order to keep
their doors open. This is apparent when organisations concede to shifting donor-funding
practices, as Audrey previously illustrated with some of the changing dynamics in the
Mekong region. This is also represented in organisational activities that ‘fit’ with donor
agendas, but deviates from the political agendas for justice, accountability and
transformation in NGOs.323 In other words, organisations find themselves at odds with
fulfilling their mandates and goals against funder expectations and requirements.

For the women at IWRAW AP, the changing NGO landscape and idealising
‘fashion funding’ fosters a sense that:

Michael Edwards and David Hulme, eds., Non-Governmental Organisations – Performance and
322

Accountability Beyond the Magic Bullet (London: Earthscan, 1995), 40-42.

323
Ibid., 3.

139
 Donors have already made up their minds about where we can be most effective
with the money, and because to them it’s about how useful is my one dollar and
what I can show for the one dollar, so that’s there … and because they have
already made these decisions, unless you impact them from early on, you can’t
work that way, your funding criteria and the way it is structured.

Audrey considered the complications of external donor funding and some of the
rationale behind which projects are funded. It is clear there is little room for
organisations receiving funds to negotiate changes in donor funding strategy or
decisions. This can result in organisations making concessions in their work to fit in
with donor demands, which puts workers in compromising positions as often the
morality of the work takes a backseat to the economics of operations. For example, if
donors are looking to support projects that are issues-based such as HIV/AIDS,
organisations such as IWRAW AP would have to find a way to incorporate the mandate
of CEDAW into the project, with the permission of the donor. If the donor rejects this,
then it becomes a case of following the funding or the organisation’s mandate. Once
donor funding has been accepted and taken by organisations, donors expect NGOs to
fulfill their obligations and complete all programs and tasks, holding organisations
accountable for funds spent. Accounting for transparency is beneficial to both funders
and organisations, but can at times be trying due to unforeseen circumstances. If, for
instance, a program cannot be completed for reasons such as political instability,
organisations are held accountable to their donors and have to find the best solution for
their donors.

Kathleen O’Reilly, Srila Roy and many others have examined the
professionalisation of the non-profit/NGO sector, which is critiqued for adopting a
‘corporatised’ approach. In their 1996 work, Edwards and Hulme use the African
proverb “If you have your hands in another man’s pocket, you must move when he
moves,” describing some of the relationships organisations have with funders.324 The
reality is that if NGOs do not shift or make compromises in their work, then they are

324
Khaldoun AbouAssi, “Hands in the Pockets of Mercurial Donors: NGO Response to Shifting Funding
Priorities,” Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 42, no.3 (2012): 585, doi:
101177/0899764012439629.

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subject to a further funding crunch and a possibility of closing their doors. Dorathy
considers:

NGOs are going to face this, because money is running out. Now there is
fleeting resources because donors are also moving into so-called ‘work on the
ground’ — they actually want a direct presence, they don’t want to use
intermediaries, they want a direct presence and a lot of it is going back to
national groups…so [then it becomes about] very strong national groups are like
“give me the money and I will give you my report”.

The competition for funds that Dorathy raises is a shared reality for many
organisations, which not only impacts women’s organisations, but governing states and
groups who rely on NGO services. The extent of competition, as Emily Barman
explores, has organisations struggling to obtain resources or risk failure.325 In some
cases, organisations will make concessions in their own goals and strategies to ensure
they are able to survive. For NGOs, where do organisations draw the lines of how many
compromises are too many in regards to safeguarding funds in relation to their values
and reliability as an NGO? For example, it could be to secure funding for programs and
projects or a change in terminology from human rights to empowerment is needed to
better serve donor agendas, however, is empowerment a part of the organisation’s
vision? Questioning what appears to be a simple change in terminology can have
disastrous ramifications for the integrity of NGO mandates and vision, what happens to
the credibility of an organisation? In this way, the donor/NGO relationship becomes
about economic restraints and financial susceptibility, where it becomes a one-sided
game of donor/NGO tug-of-war, as AbouAssi acknowledges:

As key players, donors reposition themselves to accommodate demands from

other members. However, the change donors undergo is subtle compared to that
NGOs undertake. As implementing partners and receivers of funding, NGOs
have to dramatically transform their organizational interests and cultures to align

Emily Barman, “With Strings Attached: Nonprofits and the Adoption of Donor Choice,” Nonprofit
325

and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 37, no.1 (2008): 45, doi: 10.1177/0899764007303530.

141
 with those of other members in the circle. In doing so, they lose much of their
identity and interaction with constituents.326

This is the power donors have over NGOs. While donors may make few
concessions, NGOs make greater compromises, not only in their organisational
integrity, but also in the workload. On the one hand, worker investment in values-based
work exemplifies the meaningfulness and the nobility this type of work encompasses.
On the other hand, NGO workers must also consider the economic realities of what it
takes for organisations to continue its operations, especially when there is a plethora of
NGOs who will make the necessary changes in order to survive one more day.
Organisations and those working in them, straddle the lines of not only doing ‘good
work’, but also the lingering hardships that come with this type of work. The shifting
NGO/donor funding relationship poses new sets of challenges for NGOs as a shift in
NGO mandates and goals may mean funding for today and the next few years, but what
about its long-term effects and future implications?

Conclusion

This chapter highlighted the lack of funding for women’s organisations. More
specifically, I focused on the Malaysian context and women’s organisations working
out of the Global South. From this analysis, I considered the importance donor funding
has had on women’s organisations and which organisations have access to funding in
light of shifting funding trends. I traced the implications of funding to women’s
organisations to the 1990s when women’s rights and gender equality were major issues
in international politics and given large platforms. The gap in government economic
support to women’s organisations saw an increase in external donors, which enabled a
competitive NGO playing field. Women’s narratives illustrate a clear recognition that
the economics of organisations took priority over the work, this was seen through
increased fundraising efforts and shifting priorities of organisations, which became
more concerned with donor needs over organisational integrity.

326
AbouAssi, “Hands in the Pockets of Mercurial Donors,” 586.

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 Organisations following donor-funding trends have been portrayed as becoming
‘corporate’. This portrayal of NGOs does not consider the everyday realities and
complexities of NGO operations and what it means to sustain and survive in the NGO
climate where shifts in donor funding allocations and piecemeal practices of funding are
all too common. The women I interviewed recognised funding had become increasingly
limited, and that organisations were constantly struggling to secure both long- and
short-term funding. In this way, their professional longevity was also uncertain, which
in turn led them to think about their tentative positions at work and how that impacted
their personal lives. In the next and final chapter, I use feminist reconfigurations of
Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptions on the habitus to explore what the gendered habitus
means to women in non-profit/NGO work. I also examine the concept of emotional
capital and how it is acquired and maintains the generational divide amongst younger
and older feminist activists in these spaces.

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Chapter Six – Bridging the gap: Generational tensions in
women’s organisations

We see intergenerational tensions between faculty and students in academic

settings, between second and third waves in the feminist movement, and
between older women in higher positions in NGOs and young women in lower
positions starting a career in this field – just to name a few.327

In 2010 the online platform Young Feminist Activism (YFA) was created by the
Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) to develop an online
community for and by young feminists. This online space aimed to provide and share
news, tools and opportunities connecting young feminists from different countries and
regions. AWID’s vision — through YFA — was to increase young feminist activism
across women’s movements. The online community targeted women 30 years old and
younger who were active on women’s issues, rights, social, environmental and gender
justice activism.328 One of the program’s overarching goals is to contribute to stronger
multigenerational women’s/feminist movements across the globe.

Minjon Tholen, a contributor to the forum, highlights where generational

tensions can take place. In Tholen’s blogpost titled “Intergenerate” she examines some
of the ongoing issues in feminist debates and women’s organisations. After speaking
with many young women in local and international contexts, and from her own
experience, Tholen states:

Intergenerational tensions are by no means a new phenomenon, nor are articles

on this issue. But as a young woman convinced of the urgency to address this
matter, I would like to share my perspectives on the importance of

327
Minjon Tholen, “Intergenerate,” Young Feminist Wire, last modified 28 Apr. 2011
http://yfa.awid.org/2011/04/intergenerate/.
328
Association for Women’s Rights in Development, “About Us,” AWID, last modified May 2, 2016,
http://yfa.awid.org/about-us/. AWID was mentioned earlier in this thesis. In Chapter Five, I explored
AWID’s analysis of the lack of funding for women’s organisations. AWID is an international, feminist,
membership organisation committed to achieving gender equality, sustainable development and women’s
human rights.

144
 intergenerational communication and collaboration to sustain progress in the
fight for women’s rights and gender equality.329

She notes that the tensions between younger and older feminist activists are not
a new revelation in feminist activism, yet are still pertinent. In her words:

Young women are not looking to take over your movement and push you out;
we are merely aspiring to further advance the powerful movement you have
developed and we are all proud to be a part of – if you let us.330

Tholen calls for an inclusive approach to bridging the generational gap. She
foregrounds the importance of the movement and what inclusivity could lead to, if there
was a shared willingness from older generations of feminist activists:

As young women, we sometimes had to – literally – stand up and raise our hand
to show our presence, passion for the cause, and eagerness to become more
actively involved in this field. At other times, older women told us that they
were not ready to give up their movement yet. If older women continue to
consider this their movement, instead of a movement that belongs to all of us,
the intergenerational divide will prove detrimental.331

This mentality of ‘their movement’ is a consistent issue in the generational

divide. In my interview with Ruby she acknowledged the power dynamics between
older women and younger women and finds it perplexing how older women are aware
of the hierarchies and power dynamics outside of the workplace, but have little
recognition for what is happening within women’s organisations. This is reminiscent of
Wathshlah’s comments I discussed in Chapter Four where she asks, “How can you ask
us to work on rights without giving us our own rights?”

One of the main concerns in women’s feminist activism continues to be how to

bridge disparities among differing groups of women. This chapter focuses on some of
the tensions in feminist activism involving the generational divide between older and

329
Tholen, “Intergenerate,” http://yfa.awid.org/2011/04/intergenerate.
330
Ibid.
331
Ibid.

145
younger feminist activists and how women come to work in the non-profit/NGO sector.
The concept “intergenerational” is important for my research as it implicates more than
age, but also other tensions in women’s organisations, such as the role ethnicity and
religion play in the Malaysian context. Specifically, women’s organisations in Malaysia
are headed by women who have fought for women’s human rights in the country, but
have also come from privileged ethnic and religious classes. The women who founded
Sisters In Islam were also educated professionals. Many of them received university-
level education abroad. As I discussed in Chapter One, Malay and Muslim women have
been afforded privileges based on their race and ethnicity and this has enabled
educational opportunities, which in turn furthered their status in gaining momentum to
lead and create women’s movements and organisations.

The concept intergenerational in this chapter highlights the diversity in women’s

embodied feminism through an analysis in the types of existing relationships in
women’s organisations. Generational analysis in feminism more broadly has a complex
and tenuous history. As Astrid Henry examines in her 2004 book Not My Mother’s
Sister, feminism is embodied, performed and enacted through the imaginary of
generations. She writes that generational identity conflicts are naturalised and seeks to
problematise this. Her analysis will be explored further in this chapter to think through
the experiences of the women I interviewed.

I also use this final chapter to explore women’s experiences in their work and
the ongoing issues concerning the generational gap, ethnic tensions and the role of
religion. I am particularly interested in how women’s individual and collective
feminisms influence their approach to their work. What could this mean for the
emotional capital they accrue, not only in their work, but also from their personal lives:
how is this managed in the workspace? I seek to answer questions of why older women
continue to dominate these spaces and how this impacts the dynamics within women’s
organisations. Following on from the ideas and concerns discussed in Chapter Two, I
argue women’s embodied feminisms are multiple. Drawing on the gendered habitus
takes into account intersecting categorisations, such as race, ethnicity, age, nationality,
and so on. Here I explore what the affective gendered habitus and religious gendered
habitus could look like for women. Building on my earlier application of Hochschild’s
emotional labour thesis, here I seek to explore how it is embodied, by focusing on the

146
experiences of Ruby, Wathshlah, Natasha and Ratna. These women work for different
organisations across Malaysia with an interest in gender, gender equality, and women’s
rights, and have all come to embody feminisms shaped through their gendered habitus.

Feminist reworkings of Bourdieu

In his significant volume Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu describes the habitus as,
“both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgements and the system of
classification (principium divisionis) of these practices.”332 Habitus is created through
both social and individual practices that can change depending on context and under
unexpected conditions, where the interplay between dispositions generated overtime is
shaped by past events and structures and that also shape current practices and structures.
How we move in the world is embedded in class, culture, taste, education, family, social
space and status experiences, and accumulated over time. Feminist readings of
Bourdieu, as Beverley Skegg’s points out, has enabled “feminists to put the issue of
class back onto the feminist agenda.”333 In the 2004 edited collection by Lisa Adkins
and Beverley Skeggs titled Feminism After Bourdieu, contributors offer gendered
readings of Bourdieu’s social theory to re-evaluate and expand on his theorisations.334
Feminist reworkings of Bourdieu’s concepts focus on gendered practices. In this chapter
I also employ the concept of emotional capital to tease out how emotion is utilised in
the work in terms of commitment and passion, particularly through the formation of
generational relationships in women’s organisations.

Before mapping emotional capital and its use in my research, I return to

Bourdieu’s ideas on the habitus to illustrate some of its gendered aspects relating to the
private sphere and the family. When Bourdieu speaks of social identity, he means a
process that begins through early socialisation in the family. Skegg’s recognises:

332
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Boston: Harvard University
Press, 1984), 170-174.
333
Beverley Skeggs, “Context and Background: Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of class, gender and
sexuality,” in Feminism After Bourdieu, eds. Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (MA: Blackwell
Publishing, 2004), 20.
Lisa Adkins, “Introduction: Feminism, Bourdieu and after,” in Feminism After Bourdieu, eds. Lisa
334

Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 3.

147
 For Bourdieu social identity is first made from sexual identity, from the
experience of the mother’s and father’s bodies. But to this he adds the sexual
division of labour in the home; the experience; the experience of the parental
body is always shaped by this sexual division formed by the wider sexual
division of labour.335

Here Skeggs highlights how children learn intimately to experience wider

structural features, which are never just an experience of the structural but always
intertwined with the child’s physical and sexual presence, with its bodily relation to
others.336 The intimate experiences that children learn in the family socialises them
towards Hochschild’s “training of the heart.”

Women’s work in the home has been long seen as a form of payment for men’s
paid work and the legal protections of being within a household. Women’s mothering
and care duties not only offer a form of payment to the household, but also renders them
in charge of children’s socialisation. In her research on schooling and education in the
United Kingdom, Diane Reay points out:

Feminist research on the domestic division of labour would also point to the
mother as the parent who expends the most time on childcare and thus the parent
most directly involved in the generation of cultural capital. Childcare is made up
of a complex amalgam of practical, educational and emotional work.337

As the mother is the parent involved in childcare, she is responsible for

transmitting cultural capital and finding the appropriate ways for her children to
accumulate it. Reay argues:

Cultural capital is primarily transmitted through the family. It is from the family
that children derive modes of thinking, types of dispositions, sets of meaning
and qualities of style. These are then assigned a specific social value and status

335
Skeggs, “Context and Background,” 21.
336
Ibid.
337
Diane Reay, “Gendering Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals? Emotional capital, women and social class,”
in Feminism After Bourdieu, eds. Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004),
59.

148
 in accordance with what the dominant classes label as the most valued cultural
capital.338

The concept of emotional capital highlights the role of the mother in familial
relationships. Reay states “While Bourdieu never refers explicitly to emotional capital
in his own work…this work falls more particularly on women, who are responsible for
maintaining relationships.”339 Emotional capital provided by mothers is a gesture of
devotion, generosity and solidarity; and is a type of work that is linked more to the
private than the public sphere.340 As such, women take on the job to create the
emotional tone of social encounters both at home and in their work.341 The gendered
habitus relies on the naturalisation of gender roles, calling on men and women to do
different kinds of work. Skeggs acknowledges that in Bourdieu’s habitus:

The normalcy of gendered reproduction works very differently for boys and
girls. For girls it can only offer a limited form of capital if they conform to
gender normalcy. For boys it offers masculine power, institutionalized in the
school as a form of symbolic capital that (as with the family) represents
accumulated privilege in other fields.342

The different ways boys and girls are socialised and trained to be effects the
ways in which they not only acquire their habitus and forms of capital, but also impacts
their gendered approach to emotion work. Women are more likely presented with tasks
of mastering anger and aggression in the service of ‘being nice’ whereas men are not
held to the same standards in their emotion management.343

Here I begin charting emotional capital using Elspeth Probyn’s argument about
what emotion is and what it can do. In her 2005 book Blush, she examines the
experiences, expressions and ideas about shame. She argues “shame gives us a way to

338
Ibid., 58.
339
Ibid., 60.
340
Ibid., 60, 62.
341
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 20.
342
Skeggs, “Context and Background,” 22.
343
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 163.

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rethink the types of oppositions that have become entrenched in popular debate.”344
Shame is a fact of human life that “is productive in how it makes us think again about
bodies, societies and human interaction.”345 While I do not engage with Probyn’s in-
depth analysis of shame in this chapter, I use her reconfiguration of Bourdieu’s concepts
to examine the affective gendered habitus and draw on her analysis of emotion in
Bourdieu’s work. Probyn states:

While the body and the social come together in much of his work, Bourdieu was
also rather vague about the place of emotion within the habitus: is emotion
important, or is it a side issue compared with the big questions about class and
social capital? Bourdieu’s interest lay in how to account for practical
knowledge—the stuff that people gather and deploy in their everyday lives and
that constitutes for Bourdieu the real reason that one does sociology.346

Probyn not only opens up Bourdieu’s habitus to emotion, but also the feeling
body, illustrating what emotion can physically do. Akin to Probyn’s injection of affect
into Bourdieu’s concepts, Reay also considers emotion in his work. At the personal
level, Reay reveals her relationship to Bourdieu’s work is as much affective as it is
intellectual — she not only feels drawn by his words, but also moved by them. I am also
drawn to Bourdieu’s conceptions, especially feminist rearticulations of his conceptions
by Probyn, Skeggs and Reay. While Bourdieu never refers explicitly to emotional
capital in his works, Reay uses this as an entry point for her genesis of the concept of
emotional capital. Reay expands on Helga Nowotny’s definition of emotional capital
that sees emotional capital as an extension of Bourdieu’s social capital. This is the
network of relationships, which according to Bourdieu are “aimed at establishing or
reproducing social relationships that are directly usable in the short or long term.”347

Nowotny coined the term emotional capital in 1981 and defined it as an

amalgamation of “Knowledge, contacts and relations as well as access to emotionally

344
Elspeth Probyn Blush: Faces of Shame (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005), xv.
345
Ibid., xviii.
346
Probyn, Blush, 51.
347
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 1986 Cultural Theory: An Anthology (2011): 89.

150
valued skills and assets, which hold within any social network characterised at least
partly by affective ties.”348

For Bourdieu, the accumulation of capital is subject to certain conditions with

the possibility of converting from one form to another. Recognising the value of
different forms of capital (whether economic, social or cultural) is then implicated in an
“exchange within complex networks or circuits within and across different fields.”349
Reay’s research suggests that the concept of emotional capital is useful to unravel some
of the puzzling class and gender processes embedded in contemporary education
markets, as it takes into account the emotional investment that is focused on others
rather than the self.350 Her work also highlights the significance of the gendered role of
the mother in particular and her ability to transmit emotional capital within the private
and public spheres.

Nowotny argues that traditionally emotional capital was a trap for women as it
limited them to the private sphere:

As long as women were confined to the private sphere, this was the only capital
they could acquire. Like other forms of capital, they could accumulate it and
build up positions of dominance, but their reach extended only as far as the
validity of this currency; it was limited to the private sphere.351

Taking the concept into the workplace, Jenna Ward and Robert McMurray point
out in The Dark Side of Emotional Labour that:

Studies have focused on the ways in which families (i.e. mothers) generate this
type of capital in the form of ‘emotionally valued assets and skill, love and
affection, expenditure of time, attention, care and concern’. Yet, what these

348
Reay, “Gendering Bourdieu’s concepts of capital,” 60.
Rob Moore, “Capital,” In Key Concepts: Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Michael Grenfell (Durham: Acumen,
349

2012), 99.
350
Reay, “Gendering Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals?” 71.
Helga Nowotny, “Women in Public Life in Austria,” in Access to power: Cross-national studies of
351

women and elites, eds. Cynthia F. Epstein and Rose L. Coser (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981),
148.

151
 studies seemed to have overlooked is Bourdieu’s most basic definition of capital
‘as accumulated history’.352

Ward and McMurray return to Bourdieu’s analysis of the field and habitus to
explore the idea of emotional capital as a socially, culturally, economically informed
capacity to explain why individuals have the capabilities to perform emotional
labour.353 Bringing emotional capital to work is then connected to the gendering of
emotion work and its role in organisations. Emotion is part of the body’s accumulated
knowledge where “emotion seems to work to amplify or reduce instilled tendencies.”354
Ward and McMurray bring together practices, experiences and related resources that are
drawn from workers engaging in emotional performances observing the impact of life
experiences that contribute to their ability to undertake work.355 Their interviews
include veterinarians, counsellors, home care workers and an organisation called the
Samaritans.356 I follow their lead by taking emotional capital into the public sphere
through my interviews with women working in women’s organisations.

Whose capital counts? Emotional, cultural and economic capitals in

women’s organisations

Exploring emotional capital in women’s organisations cannot be understood

without recognising its relationship with other forms of capital such as economic,
cultural and social capitals. In Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital”, he argues capital can
appear in three ways. He describes:

[A]s economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into

money and may be institutionalized in the forms of property rights; as cultural
capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and

352
Ward and McMurray, The Dark Side of Emotional Labour, 91.
353
Ibid., 92.
Elspeth Probyn, “Shame in the habitus,” in Feminism After Bourdieu, eds. Lisa Adkins and Beverley
354

Skeggs (MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 231.

355
Ward and McMurray, The Dark Side, 89.
356
Samaritans is a voluntary organisation dedicated to reducing suicide and improving emotional well-
being.

152
 may be institutionalized in the forms of education qualifications; and as social
capital, made up of social obligations (‘connections’), which is convertible, in
certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the
forms of title and nobility.357

Capital is represented and subject to certain conditions. Economic capital is

based in monetary value whereas cultural and social capitals are symbolic. Cultural
capital in its embodied state is a part of one’s habitus, as Bourdieu notes, “Cultural
capital can be acquired, to a varying extent, depending on the period, the society, and
the social class, in the absence of any deliberate inculcation, and therefore quite
unconsciously.”358 The acquisition of this form of capital is shaped through one’s
personal and collective histories. According to Ward and McMurray:

Emotional capital cannot be understood without an appreciation for Bourdieu’s

most central concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’…‘habitus’ is best thought of as a
system of dispositions…These dispositions are a spectrum of cognitive and
affective factors that constitute a ‘product of history [that] produces individual
and collective practices’.359

The embodiment of dispositions is the product of accrued capitals that is carried

by and through the body and the fit between the habitus and the field. It provides us
with a way of recognising authority in its physical dispositions and then can become a
reflection of social entitlement.360 Through the forms of capital, the visibility of younger
women’s subordinate status in women’s organisations is encapsulated by older
generations of women’s experiences in women’s movements and professional
experiences in women’s organisations. Older women have, over time, gained
experiences in this type of work and therefore have the ‘right’ habitus that enable them
to move with ease in the world of women’s organisations and feminist activism. Their
past experiences have shaped their feminist activism through their own struggles and

Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” In Handbook of Theory and Research for Sociology of
357

Education, John Richardson, ed. (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 243.

358
Ibid., 245-246.
359
Ward and McMurray, The Dark Side of Emotional Labour, 93.
360
Skeggs, “Context and Background,” 23.

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hardships with challenging governments and forming alliances between women across
class, ethnic and religious boundaries. For many young women working in women’s
organisations, this is not the case, their habitus is still being shaped in relation to altered
socio-economic conditions, as they are constantly negotiating their feminist activism
and how they situate themselves in these spaces. This is illustrated through the
relationships they form with older colleagues in the office and also through their lack of
wages in the non-profit/NGO sector, a poor status that is also justified through the work
being good, because it has purpose and meaning. Their positions in women’s
organisations is subject to change throughout their professional careers, as the longer
women stay working they may be able to find their footing — but will they attain the
right habitus and under what conditions and constraints is this made possible?

Currently, many young women lack the opportunity to form the same types of
relationships and connections in women’s movements and women’s organisations in the
ways of their older colleagues. They are perceived as junior, not only young but also as
daughters. More widely across the non-profit/NGO sector, the cultural habitus plays a
role in distinguishing who has the right fit. In the case of the foreign worker and the
local worker another divide is made visible. In an article titled “Secret aid worker” an
anonymous aid worker writes, “The discrepancies in compensation and benefits reflect
the difference in value assigned not only to needs, but to the capabilities of local versus
expat staff.”361 The secret aid worker continues, “In most companies, if two people who
did the same role and had the same amount of experience got paid vastly different
salaries, there would be uproar. Not so in the NGO world.”362 Here foreign experience
and knowledge is a form of privileged cultural capital in its embodied state. There is an
increased value placed on the travelled body over that of a local body, whose sacrificial
status is often taken for granted. While the literature examining expatriate staff in NGOs
is limited, Sarah Mukasa points out the tensions between expat and local staff is more
than just a monetary divide, but the relationship is impacted by frequent changes of
expat staff, undervaluing of local staff knowledge, a structural divide of “them versus

361
Secret aid worker, “Secret aid worker: Why do expats earn more than the rest of us?” The Guardian,
last modified March 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-
network/2016/mar/29/secret-aid-worker-why-do-expats-earn-more-than-the-rest-of-us.
362
Ibid.

154
us” and unclear policies on expats.363 Kothari also points out, “The expatriate
development professional further enjoys the cultural capital acquired by being from or
of the West and reproduces this on the ground through technical knowledge associated
with ‘modern’ scientific ideas.”364 In the case of older Malaysian women their contact
with the West enhanced their cultural and social capital. The disparities are not only
grounded in intergenerational tensions, but also in the different ways in which they
came to women’s movements.

Many of the founding members of women’s organisations in Malaysia took part

in global and national campaigns for women’s human rights. Global conferences, such
as the Second World Conference on Women in Copenhagen in 1980, used momentum
from the adoption of CEDAW in 1979 to further women’s participation in political
feminist movements. This carried through to Nairobi in 1985, which some consider to
be where the controversial “birth of global feminism” began.365 It was in Nairobi that
women became an international force unified under the banner of equality, development
and peace. Women who attended international conferences used moments in women’s
movements to strengthen their feminist activism, which was considered separate, but
still implicated in their professional lives. In the Malaysian context, women who
participated in these events were also professionals, occupying careers such as
journalists, teachers, professors, academics and lawyers.

In today’s context of feminist activism young women left their careers in the
corporate sector, dissatisfied with this career trajectory, to work in the non-profit/NGO
sector in search of more rewarding work. In doing so, they value ‘good work’ over
money. This is not always acknowledged in their newfound NGO positions. In addition
to older women’s privileged positions in women’s organisations, many older feminist
activists hold racial and ethnic privileges. Most are middle class Malay women, who
have benefitted from affirmative action policies by the state and have used this to

363
Sarah Mukasa, “Are expatriate staff necessary in international development NGOs? A case study of an
international NGO in Uganda,” CVO International Working Paper 4 (1999): 18-21.
364
Kothari, “Authority and Expertise,” 428.
365
UN Women, “The Four Global Women’s Conferences 1975 - 1995: Historical Perspective,” UN
Women, last modified May 2000,
http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/followup/session/presskit/hist.html.

155
strengthen their positions as feminist activists both at the national and international
levels.

The class, ethnic, age and racial processes embedded in contemporary women’s
movements and organisations in Malaysia further perpetuates the disparities between
younger and older feminist activists. This transpires through various institutional
structures within women’s organisations. In my interviews I did not ask questions about
how much women earn but the women I interviewed referred to the wage disparities as
an issue of concern. By examining capitals, and in particular emotional capital in these
workplaces, which are already fraught with gendered, classed, racial, ethnic and aged
divisions, I seek to convey some of the challenges in negotiating one’s feminist
activism.

Generational divides: Experiences of women in Malaysian women’s

organisations

Ruby: Profession – Passion – Pragmatics

Ruby’s professional feminist activism came after being in the corporate sector
for two years. She is in her mid-twenties to early-thirties and had been involved in the
NGO sector for just a few years when I met and interviewed her. Having studied
business at university, she felt the corporate world was the next logical step in her
professional career. Like other women I interviewed, she realised she wanted
satisfaction and meaning from work. She takes her experiences from the corporate
sector into the non-profit sector. When I asked Ruby about her experiences working in
an NGO, especially in relation to the generational divide, she responded:

What is ironic about NGOs/non-for-profits, especially feminist organisations is

the critique of power structures, but I see that being replicated in a lot of
women’s organisations…So you are supposed to be passionate and want to do
stuff, but when you critique this kind of [NGO] environment that is unhealthy
then you get put down and suddenly you are deemed disrespectful, you don’t
follow orders, you are angry crazy kids who can’t do the job they are supposed
to do. Sometimes, it is really hard not only to fight externally, but sometimes
there is a lot of tension internally and colliding between the intergenerational

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 differences can be very apparent and that is something I am trying to manage in
my own experience.

When Ruby points out the structural inequalities within the workplace, she is
perceived as ‘angry’ by her older colleagues; dismissed as a child and acting out. In the
Indian context, Srila Roy highlights that feminists fear NGO-isation and the process of
professionalisation. Roy argues that NGO-isation is representative of institutionalised
feminism, where feminism’s political autonomy is sacrificed to government and donor
funding programs and projects involving professionalisation, bureaucratisation and
managerialism in organisational structures and functioning.366 She sees that has watered
down the women’s movement by relating feminist activism to a career, especially for
younger feminist activists whose activism is perceived as a profession and not part of a
political movement; young women are “refusing to inherit the legacies of their feminist
foremothers.”367 Younger women are then constantly reminded of their lack of
credibility and often it is used against them as leverage to dismiss opposing opinions
and decisions. This tension is not only about younger feminist activists and older
feminist activists but also of who is thought to be a ‘real’ and altruistic feminist activist.
This distinction between the younger ‘career’ feminist activist and older ‘altruistic’
feminist activist is implicated in how many of these organisations are structured. Ruby
said:

You have to sacrifice yourself to do good for people and that is the kind of
thinking that is still there in a lot of our organizations. Here, instead of seeing it,
as okay, young people coming in and it needs to be a career, [it] needs to be
something they can do; [and not] burn out and then leave and go back to the
corporate sector, because then capitalism wins in that sense. I just think we need
a mindset shift, but [it] needs to be honest.

Calling for a shift in NGO culture, especially in the continued portrayal that
NGO work is purely based on altruism, Ruby is realistic about the changing landscape
in the NGO sector. She wants an ethical career grounded in good work. Making her

366
Srila Roy, “The Indian Women’s Movement,” 100-103.
367
Srila Roy, ed., New South Asian Feminism: Paradoxes and Possibilities (London: Zed Books, 2012),
14.

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feminist activism a part of her career is not a shared sentiment by older feminist
activists who are skeptical of the career feminist, a view that is silently reinforced by the
economic capital that underwrites their position. As Tholen noted earlier in this chapter,
younger women are proud to be involved, if they are given the space. However,
women’s political movements and activism in Malaysia is always linked to the 1980s
when the creation and proliferation of women’s organisations flourished. This has
instilled the idea that it was because of older generations of (middle class) feminist
activists that these organisations not only exist, but continue to function today.

As discussed in the previous chapter, women’s organisations are increasingly

implicated in funding realities in the NGO sector. The economic factors have become a
driving force behind how women’s organisations continue to function in a difficult
funding climate. The ‘purely’ altruistic mentality is complicated by donor funding
practices in the NGO sector. NGOs are caught between doing good work and economic
viability. Women’s organisations are directly impacted by the changing funding
landscape in the NGO sector, which also relies on embedded structural hierarchies of
these organisations to disguise internal hierarchies and gender-age expectations. This
further positions older women as those who have the right organisational habitus, as
many of them have relationships with donors and funders and have experiences that
help in accessing and obtaining further funding.

In her article “Politics, Passion and Professionalization in Contemporary Indian

Feminism” Srila Roy discusses the rise in career feminism in NGOs and the role of
younger women in India:

Autonomy is also linked to the idea of voluntarism in a wider social movement

framework that is shared by the NGO sector. Unlike today’s paid NGO ‘staff’,
middle-class feminists retained their professional roles (in the media, law,
academy), and contributed to political activism on the basis of their conviction
and commitment, which was entirely voluntary (if not altruistic).368

368
Srila Roy, “Politics, Passion and Professionalization in Contemporary Indian Feminism,” Sociology
45, no.4 (2011): 589, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/42857556.

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 Labels, such as the career feminist, can have serious consequences. According to
Uma Chakravarti cited in Roy’s article, career feminists are “women activists who are
specialists on one issue: health, sexuality, micro credit, reproductive rights, sexual
harassment, etc. without a larger understanding of the interrelatedness of these issues
and the complexity of patriarchal powers.”369 Roy notes that the possibility of fusing
one’s passion with one’s livelihood contributes to the generational tensions. On the one
hand, younger women are questioned if it is passion that drives them or just a profession
where they are implicated in the ‘9 to 5isation’ of the women’s movement. On the other
hand, older activists’ versions of ‘pure’ feminism are continually used as a benchmark
for younger feminist activists, which began in a different time and context, had different
socio-economic conditions, and somewhat romanticise feminist histories and
experiences, further dividing younger and older feminist activists.

Ruby’s experiences as a younger feminist activist illustrate some aspects of

younger feminist activist/older feminist activist dichotomy:

The intergenerational differences can be very apparent and that is something I

am trying to manage in my own experience. I tried to follow the older
generations, and this didn’t work. Negotiating that kind of power dynamics
within the organization can be very difficult as well, because NGOs are a tight
knit community and word gets out and then you are labelled a difficult person.

Wathshlah: In-between generations – Vocation – Career

Wathshlah is a key figure in my thesis. She helped me to understand women’s

human rights when I interned with IWRAW AP three years prior to starting my
research. Wathshlah was one among many women who mentored me in my internship.
She has always been passionate about her work; she lives and breathes women’s human
rights. When I was an intern researching women and armed conflict she recited all of
the United Nations Security Council resolution relating to women in armed conflict off
by heart. When I caught up with her for an interview, Wathshlah was about to walk out
of IWRAW AP’s office for the day. I had stopped her at the door to say hello and
reminisce, and after a few minutes of chatting, she agreed to be interviewed. We

369
Roy, “The Indian Women’s Movement,” 107.

159
proceeded to IWRAW AP’s only meeting room located at the back of the office near the
kitchen and away from the communal workspace.

Wathshlah is in her forties and straddles the line of the young/old dichotomy,
finding this a constant struggle:

You are faced with challenges working with the older generation…and you are
faced with challenges working with the younger generations. And your
perceptions and histories are different and that’s always been the challenge and I
don’t need to think like the younger generation to work with the younger
generations. At the same time, you can’t expect me to think like the older
generation, and [then] where do you fit in?

Working with both the younger and older generations of feminist activists,
Wathshlah has a difficult time situating herself as one or the other and remains in-
between either side. Wathshlah experiences the tensions of being in-between younger
and ‘career’ feminists and older ‘altruistic’ feminists.370 She elaborated on how the
generational gap is reproduced from generation to generation:

It is an existing gap and is [an] ongoing thing and I know people who are one
generation before me with the same problem, when they were my age and the
biggest problem sometimes is you are not just starting off at the same time, you
haven’t reached that level of experience yet.

As Astrid Henry argues, “a generation is an imaginary collective that both

reveals truths about people of a particular age and tries to mould those people into a
unified group.”371 This is central to Wathshlah’s work in IWRAW AP’s projects called
the Fund for Gender Equality (FGE): Young Women Making Change. The project’s
aim was to foster young women’s engagement into feminist activism in the Asia Pacific
region focusing on countries such as Vietnam, Laos, Timor Leste and Malaysia.
Through the program, young women from these countries learned how to be activists

370
Diane Reay, “Habitus and the psychosocial: Bourdieu with feelings,” Cambridge Journal of Education
45, no.1 (2015): 10-15, doi: 10.1080/0305764X.2014.990420.
371
Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 6.

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and how to use CEDAW as a tool to enhance women’s rights. Activism was noted by
some of the participants as something that was ‘only for older generations and not for
young women’. However, this perception changed with the young women’s increased
participation in the FGE project, where women learned how to not only use CEDAW,
but also developed their advocacy skills.

Following on from IWRAW AP’s FGE program, activists from Vietnam used
their training in CEDAW to promote changes for women in their country especially,
about dating violence, which they then raised in the 61st CEDAW session in Geneva,
Switzerland. Wathshlah remarks of the Vietnamese activists:

Dating violence is not something that many people are familiar with in the
region and in Vietnam. These young women took this issue to Geneva in July
and we have seen the outcome of it where dating violence for the first time in
Vietnam has been articulated as a recommendation. And I was sitting in Kuala
Lumpur reading the concluding observations of the CEDAW committee and all I
could say was “Wow.” It was two years in the making but what an amazing
achievement, because we’ve been working with so many issues and so it’s so
difficult sometimes to bring our issues at the global arena and at a redress
mechanism and to get it articulated, but these young women were able to do
it.372

Wathshlah’s praise of the Vietnamese women encapsulates her desire to

overcome generational tensions. What she sees is their commitments to working on
women’s human rights and the passion and dedication that they direct to policy reforms.

In our interview in 2014 before the FGE project took off, Wathshlah had spoken
about the project and its aims:

There is this huge intergenerational gap, it is very much existent, so what is our
role here? One is yes, build the capacity and understanding of this group of
people so that they don’t work separately. They are then able to engage through

372
Michaela Guthridge (IWRAW), “FGE: Young Women Making Change – Stories of Change,”
IWRAW, last modified December 3, 2015, accessed May 6, 2016,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0TNLbr-lEI.

161
 intergenerational dialogues, so that was the bigger agenda working with younger
women making sure it ties up with the work we are doing with the current
partners, because one huge aspect of that is to bridge the intergenerational gap.

The purpose of programs such as the FGE and YFA attempt to bridge the
generational gap in feminism and feminist activism and to target younger women as the
means for change. This can cause problems for younger feminist activists situated in
women’s organisations as feminist activists grounded in hierarchical positioning and
relationships. Furthermore, these younger women have not garnered the same kind of
cultural, social and emotional capitals that tend to privilege older women and their
feminist activist histories.

Many of the relationships between older and younger women in women’s

organisations position younger women as the dutiful daughter, where they are expected
to fulfillwhat is asked of them, even if they feel it exploits their labour. Henry calls this
the dutiful daughter syndrome in feminism: “The persistent nature of the maternal
metaphors in feminism is often referred to as the matrophor.”373 The mother-daughter
relationship is difficult to escape. As Rosi Braidotti cited in Henry argues:

[The] mother-daughter nexus has reached the status of political paradigm. As

such, it fulfils two crucial functions: firstly, it points to a specific type of
woman-to-woman bonding. Secondly, it spells the conditions of negativity and
violence that are specific to that type of bonding. It is precisely on these two
accounts that I wish to defend it as a very adequate political metaphor.374

Drawing on Braidotti’s analysis, I argue that the mother/daughter relationship further

perpetuates the intergenerational activist divide in women’s organisations. In the
following section I consider Natasha’s experiences to explore the mentor/mentee
relationship, which is also representative of familial relationships from the home, such
as the mother/daughter relationship.

373
Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister, 2.
374
Ibid., 11.

162
 Natasha: Mentor/mentee – Mother/daughter – Matrophor

I was told before I met Natasha that we would get along. And we did. We
immediately talked about our love for the North American West Coast, home of the
hipster these days. She tells me about how hipster parts of Kuala Lumpur have become.
At one point in our interview Natasha asks about my ethnic, cultural and religious
origins. She asks if I am Desi, which is a loose term to describe cultures and diasporic
communities from India. I find this question difficult to answer. In my attempt to be
concise, because this interview is about her, I responded with: “Well, my grandparents
and their families have origins in Gujarat in India, and they moved to East Africa and
well, then we ended up in Canada.” “Oh, she said you’re Ismaili.”375 In one word she
was able to pinpoint my ethno-cultural and religious backgrounds. I did not have to
explain my background to her, she already knew. She told me she has spent some time
in Vancouver and this is where she met a lot of Ismailis, and proceeded to ask me if we
have common friends. Jokingly, I responded that given I am a non-active member of the
community she would know more people than me. After chatting about our South Asian
heritage I turned the conversation back to Natasha and her experiences. I asked about
her engagement in the non-profit/NGO sector working with Musawah, the global
network that focuses on Muslim women’s rights. She told me about Musawah’s history
and how it grew out of Sisters In Islam and brings together activists, academics, and
policymakers at the international level to work on gender equality. Further into our
interview, she spoke of her relationship with one of her mentors. She said:

She really picked me as her mentee…the kind of expectations and pressures of

that compounded with the real mentoring that takes place, the guidance and
leadership it makes it very messy…She is the one, I always say she picked me I
feel picked and I didn’t know how big a name she was until I got here. I said
“Fuck man, what did you see in me?” And to live up to what she saw in me and
the need to live up to her expectations and to surpass [them] or at least meet
them…And the positive feedback that I got from that…I was working for
Musawah, but I was also equally looking for her approval and love, because it

375
Ismailis are a sect within Shia Muslims. They follow the teaching and guidance of the living Imam
that is traced to the hereditary succession from Ali to Prince Karim Aga Khan, the 49 th Imam in direct
lineal descent of the Prophet Muhammad.

163
 felt so good…They are aware they are doing this and they know, and that is how
they get the work done.

It was difficult for Natasha to speak about this. While she is a cheerful and positive
person, when it came to talking about her relationship with some of the women she
works with she obviously felt a mix of complicated emotions. This was further
exacerbated by a recent loss of a close family member two weeks prior to our interview,
which made her reflective about her personal life and her work life. She positions her
relationship with her mentor as both beautiful and problematic, saying at times “It hurts
so bad.” She was drawn to Musawah, because she wanted to make her Muslim and
gender identity a part of her work but that comes with conflicts especially around her
mentor. Natasha believes that her mentor ‘chose’ her, treating her as if she were her
daughter:

I think she sees me like a daughter figure…she would have these high
expectations of her daughter as well and she would be hard with her and stern
and strict and tell her that to her that to her face, but she also gives her
opportunities and want her to grow and excited to see her do well and lets her
know she is proud of her when she is.

Natasha realises her bond with her mentor is more than just a professional relationship.
She is connected to her mentor through work, through feminist politics and through a
personal connection. She sees the benefits and challenges of the blurriness of their
relationship. On the one hand, she values her mentor’s opinion of her and looks up to
her. On the other hand, she questions the strategy behind her mentor treating her like a
daughter figure, suggesting that this is a way to get the work done at any cost. Blurring
the private and public spaces then leaves Natasha feeling she has to put her work over
herself, because she is invested not only through the ‘good work’ she does, but wants to
please her mother figure. She spoke of some of her struggles at Musawah:

My labour, our labour is so clearly exploited and…that coupled with the

hierarchy of it and major cognitive dissonance this entire year and I haven’t been
able to dwell or talk about Musawah, it is just too hard to think through the love
and the hate in the simultaneousness. It is intense and especially when it deals
with things like faith, like this past year, I have literally come closer to my faith;

164
 because of my work…it is intensely personal…it is intensely personal. I do this
because I love it, because it is my passion, because it is my history, it’s making
me feel like a better human being and a better Muslim and then to know the way
the structure that holds it is so problematic.

Natasha’s personal activism comes up against institutional forces, such as the

hierarchical relationships in women’s organisations and deeply embedded generational
feminist politics. She is unsettled with how her labour is utilised at Musawah, which she
refers to the gendered practice of self-sacrifice and its role in women’s organisations:

Exploitation is gendered…it is our gender, our young femininity is taken

advantage of…the gratitude, the expected gratitude, the niceties and the not
speaking out and being very civil and maintaining harmony socially and
emotionally and all of that.

Here Natasha speaks of having her labour taken advantage of, and how this is
based on the additional expectation that her emotional labour, as a woman, and
especially as a younger woman, is inherently more patient, obedient and caring for other
people’s needs. As a young woman, Natasha is perceived as flexible and therefore more
capable of working in tumultuous conditions. For example, Musawah has been
temporarily working out of the Sisters In Islam office space for the past few years. This
was supposed to be a short-term stint before moving to its permanent location in Egypt.
However, with the onset of the Arab Spring and massive protests in Egypt, Musawah
could not move and was forced to relocate to a more secure location. For Natasha, six
months in Kuala Lumpur turned into a year, then over three years. This had her living a
life of instability: never knowing when she would be leaving Malaysia; always feeling
that she had to live like a nomad; and never thinking of Kuala Lumpur as a permanent
fixture she could call home. From management’s perspective, Natasha’s personal life
was not a priority, but for someone who needs a sense of rhythm and routine, this was
challenging.

Natasha feels that her senior colleagues underappreciate her commitment to

Musawah’s work, and while her passion is recognised it does not result in better
working conditions, financial remuneration or even work flexibility:

165
 The way [they] use passion, dedication and commitment, it is so violent and
functions to completely pre-empt any conversation of work-life-balance or equal
pay for equal labour you know. It shuts you up, because I am passionate right,
and that is a good thing, and I am not in it for anything else, and if I were to talk
about my rights as a labourer, it would seem like it was disingenuous and other
staff members are talked about like that… it is awful to see that actually happen.

Passion got Natasha into her work but it backfires when it is used against her.
Referencing the pay disparity between the senior women and the younger women in the
office, Natasha points out the difficulties for younger women entering this profession.
Younger women do not voice concerns over the pay gap, because they do not want to be
perceived as the ‘career’ feminist. But being called passionate implies immaturity, and
this then legitimises exploitative practices involving overwork and pay disparities.
These terms, such as passion, commitment and dedication, convey emotionally valued
skills and knowledge, and demonstrate the blurriness of intergenerational feminist
activist relationships.

Natasha’s experiences as the dutiful daughter leave her susceptible to have her
labour taken advantage of. This is a more general concern for women who engage in
non-profit/NGO work as they are applauded for bridging their ethics and values in their
work, but this in turn can work against them as they can overwork themselves. The
gendered habitus has a role in who is able to move in these spaces with ease and who
has trouble finding their footing. In the next section, I turn to the role of religion in the
Malaysian context and in particular how women’s feminist activism plays out in
women’s organisations that have Islam as a focal point in their work. I am interested in
how the gendered habitus is impacted by religion and in particular, what an Islamic
gendered habitus might look like for women who come to women’s human rights work
from very different contexts, situations and positionalities.

The Islamic gendered habitus: Natasha and Ratna’s experiences

In what follows, I want to move away from Natasha’s experiences with her
mentor and reflect on the role of her Muslim identity in her work, which is also
implicated in her family history and her mother’s activism. Here I also raise Ratna’s
experiences at Sisters In Islam in relation to the role religion plays both at home and at
166
work, impacting her overall identity. In Chapter Two I discussed how Ratna places her
feminist belonging and her feminist home in the work of Sisters In Islam. Her feelings
of belonging are also generated by her Islamic gendered habitus. As a Malaysian
woman, she came to feminist activism later in life and this has challenged her personal
and professional investments in gender relations in Malaysia. Natasha and Ratna’s
experiences capture the different ways that their Islamic gendered habitus is employed
in their respective organisations. Their embodied Muslim identities are shaped through
their individual and collective experiences.

Natasha: Family history – Education – Feminist activism

As I flagged earlier, Natasha is genuinely interested in research, and in

particular, research with a focus on gender. She is also passionate about using her
religious politics. This is evident in her effort to identify my religious background. Her
family is connected to the way she embodies her faith. When Natasha spoke of her
activist beginnings, she recalls a moment from her childhood and tells me the story of
when her biological father kidnapped her brother. She says:

When I was five my biological father kidnapped my brother and we had already
moved to the U.S. at this point and he had taken him back to Pakistan from
Berkeley. All of this was from [the] accumulation of abuse—physical, material,
emotional and financial abuse. My mom was quite young, she was 27 and my
brother was three and she went back to Pakistan and fought this dramatic, like
almost cinematic/melodramatic custody battle in the courts for 11 months.

Natasha’s mother eventually won the custody battle, but Pakistan’s political
climate and political Islamisation initiatives affected her mother’s legal struggle. She
discussed how the courts discriminated against women – women’s legal testimony was
given half the weight of men’s. Natasha highlights that it was at this point her mother
began thinking like an activist. She not only used the legal system in Pakistan but also
involved the media in her case. Natasha’s grandfather and mother used verses from the
Hadith – believed to be the sayings of the Prophet – to emphasise the important role of
the mother. The Hadith is a revered source of religious law and moral guidance and is
thought of as second in importance only to the Quran. In winning this case, her mother
also set legal precedent for kidnapping cases in Pakistan. Without formal education
Natasha’s mother won her custody battle and came back to Berkeley, California to put
167
herself through university. While she had no child support coming in and no green card,
Natasha recalls that “We were healthy and we grew up in a space that was safe.” Her
mother’s legal battle had a lasting impression on Natasha and has shaped her in thinking
about what is at stake for women and especially Muslim women.

Natasha’s activism is also related to her political awakening. The aftermath of

September 11th 2001, Islam became associated with terrorism, and this fueled Natasha’s
passion to use Islam in her overall identity. More specifically in her context, living in
the United States, she felt the need to intuitively and viscerally identify as Muslim. She
said:

To politically identify as Muslim, politically that was critical…it affected my

choice to major in Islamic and gender studies and the actual work that I did with
legal reform in Morocco and the women’s movement. Musawah kind of fell in
my lap after I graduated. There aren’t many opportunities to work with gender
and Islam; [they] are far and few between.

As Natasha points out, the aftermath of September 11th 2001 was a critical time
for Muslims to think about their religious identities. For her, Islam was something more
than faith – a part of her politics and what she wanted to study at university. Even
though she doesn’t wear the hijab (Arabic term for the veil) she embodies Islam and
puts it to use in her work at Musawah through her individual and collective family and
personal histories, meshing her personal and professional lives. The Islamic gendered
habitus is a driving force in her work at Musawah, which is also connected to her
position as a younger feminist activist, and through her experiences we can see how her
habitus shapes her feminist activism through her age, family history, gender and
religious backgrounds.

Ratna: Mother – Accidental feminist – Activist

Ratna’s journey to Sisters in Islam differs from Natasha’s as she comes from
outside of feminism and activism and later in life, as she is in her late-forties to early-
fifties. Ratna worked at an international brokering house before coming to Sisters In
Islam. She left her job in the corporate sector because she felt dissatisfied and
overworked. She said she wanted to do something more meaningful and came to Sisters
In Islam ‘accidentally’ by coming across its work online. She applied for a position at

168
Sisters In Islam and has since worked with the organisation. Ratna grew up in Malaysia
and as a child recalls watching her mother fulfill typical gender roles such as serving her
father:

My mother would have to serve my father his glass of water while he sat reading
the newspaper or watching TV, even if she herself was feeling tired after having
cooked three meals a day and tending to six small children.376

Ratna also wanted to satisfy the role of a good Muslim girl. Growing up, her
piety was a significant part of her life. She says this was instilled in her both at home
and at school. Reminding us of the different roles mothers and fathers play in the
family, Skeggs points out how this acts as a form of social reproduction that roots social
identity in the sexual division of labour from the home.377 This is where it is reproduced
and perpetuated, and then continues in other institutions. Ratna remembers her teachers
at school telling her to be obedient otherwise her parents would be punished for her
sins:

It was imparted to me that as a good Muslim girl, I should not assert myself—
that speaking softly was a requirement so as not to draw too much attention to
oneself. According to my educators, my voice, body, hair possessed the power
to lead men astray…and should this lead to their ‘downfall’, it would be my
fault entirely.378

From a young age, Ratna learned to do her gender and Islam correctly. Coming
to Sisters In Islam changed the way she thought about being a Muslim woman in
Malaysia. She began to question some of her classical interpretations of the Quran
including those about Islamic family laws. She spoke to her experience working with
Sisters In Islam:

This is definite[ly] a feminist group…With me feminism has not been, like

something that I have known within me, I was a very traditional conservative

376
Ratna Osman, “My Personal Journey to Sisters In Islam,” BARAZA! No.7 (2014): 3-4.
377
Skeggs, “Context and Background,” 21.
378
Osman, “My Personal Journey to Sisters In Islam,” 3-4.
169
 Muslim. I came from an understanding that men were supposed to be the leaders
and that you don’t challenge that.

For her, feminism wasn’t something she embodied or considered in her personal
politics before Sisters In Islam. She thought of herself as a devout Muslim woman,
which meant filling in a complementary role to a man. She grew up watching her father
and her brother receive special treatment at home in comparison to the women in her
family. However, she says she had little investment in women’s rights until she began
working at Sisters In Islam and this is when her personal politics shifted. She credits
feminist ideologies and principles in helping her think about her own personal politics
and views on gender relations. She says she began to see the unequal gender dynamics
playing out in Malaysian society and started to question how she situates herself as a
Muslim woman. Drawing on her experiences working at Sisters In Islam and the
changes she saw within herself, she also considers the changes in her personal life, and
how her shifting ideologies about gender, gender roles and gender stereotypes impact
her family, especially her sons.

Ratna’s face lights up when she talks about the changes she has seen at home
with her boys since she started working at Sisters In Islam.379 For example, prior to
working at Sisters In Islam she would hear and even use phrases at home, like “stop
crying like a girl” and “why are you shouting like a girl?” She reflects on the negative
use of the phrase “like a girl”:

It is wrong to have such language at home, because then boys, they go out and
they go to school and they interact with girls and they see girls, as you know
somebody that is weaker than them, because crying or anything linked with
girls…So, joining Sisters four years ago…changed with the way I communicate.

By linking her professional practices, aims and beliefs at home Ratna

emphasises the importance of having a feminist lens. Her newfound awareness of
thinking about gender beyond the dominant patriarchal lens has not only impacted her,
but also her sons. Sociologists, such as Hochschild and Reay, have argued for the

379
Ratna readily speaks of her sons and some of their experiences at home, but she doesn’t mention or
discuss her husband when she talks about her professional journey at Sisters In Islam.

170
importance of the private sphere and the family, where women engage in far more
emotion work than men. Hochschild tells us that women in general have far less
independent access to money, power, authority and status in society and because of this
they do extra emotion work as a way to repay their debt to the family household.380
Supporting Hochschild’s analysis, Reay, following Diane Bell’s work also argues that
the economy of emotion is the responsibility of women. Where “[mothering is equated]
with book-keeping, arguing that one of the major roles of mothering is to balance the
family’s emotional budget.”381

By taking on this responsibility women are instrumental in their children’s

emotional development.382 By and large the feeling rules instilled in children is through
their mothers. This familial and gendered responsibility placed on women is grounded
in the traditional view of women’s reciprocity to their partner’s paid and formal income,
where they are valued by their contributions to the household. While women have had
more economic access since Hochschild’s 1983 analysis, the ideal still remains that
women are primarily responsible for the emotion work and the emotional capital they
relay to their children. Moreover, Ratna’s transmission of her professional feminist
politics to her sons has in turn increased their emotional currency and feminist
awareness. Emotional capital is contextual and may not always be an asset in certain
circumstances and societies. In Ratna’s work it is a valuable form of capital, however,
in wider Malaysian society it has little currency, as Ratna’s feminist interventions are
not always revered. She recalls a particular example where her and her sons attended
Friday prayers at the Mosque and she was vilified for the work she does at Sisters In
Islam. An Imam said to her sons that their mother’s work is “the devil’s work”. She
continues her story saying how worried she was about how her role as a women’s rights
activist would impact her sons:

People are angry because this is our position [at Sisters in Islam]…[and]
whenever I am in the newspaper and other groups will slam us, I worry about

380
Hochschild, The Managed Heart, 162-165.
381
Diane Reay, “Gendering Bourdieu’s concepts of capital,” 59.
382
Ibid.

171
 my children and I ask them, they are like, it is okay mummy, and I don’t know
why people are so against you.

Since beginning her feminist activism and career at Sisters In Islam, Ratna’s
relationship with feminism, women’s NGOs, herself and her sons grew and developed.
She reiterates just how important it is to work for Sisters In Islam and women’s rights
more broadly. This was not a professional journey she thought she would embark on,
but has surprisingly and significantly benefitted from, because for her, she couldn’t see
herself working anywhere else and “the amount of satisfaction you have inside where
you have made a difference, you know that your work has impacted someone’s life.”
Her position as the executive director of Sisters In Islam does not come without its own
set of challenges, as she noted about how she is perceived in particular patriarchal
institutions and circumstances, but she continues on the path of feminist activism,
because she now embodies feminist ideologies and principles and makes them work for
her as a Muslim woman.

She no longer hears the negative connotations of “like a girl” at home, but hears
her sons making comments like, “Mummy, if I want to find a wife…I won’t ask them to
cover themselves, it is their choice and in the Quran it never mentions hair.” Ratna
equips her sons with emotional tools, and exposes them to alternative interpretations to
dominant forms of Islam, breaking dominant gendered norms. As a Muslim woman
working at Sisters In Islam, she believes she has the confidence to use her knowledge in
a place that best fits her spirits and identity.383

Ratna anecdotally says (while laughing) that before joining Sisters In Islam, her
sons made sure before she left the house that she had every strand of hair tucked away
in her hijab, and how (pointing at the way she was wearing it the day we met) this
would not have been acceptable to their standards, but now something like the headscarf
is not a concern for them. The supposedly mundane practice of how to wear a headscarf,
particularly for women working in an office focusing of women’s rights through Islam,
is symbolic of much more than an everyday practice. It signifies class, cultural, societal
and political ideologies about Islam. It also suggests some of the ongoing politics of

383
Osman, “My Personal Journey to Sisters In Islam,” 4.

172
working in a women’s organisation that employs only Muslim women, where veiling is
seen more than a choice, but how a woman embodies her Islam.

Drawing on Ratna and Natasha’s experiences we can see the importance of

religion in the ways women come to women’s human rights work, in particular,
organisations that focus on Islam. We can see how coming from inside and outside of
women’s movements and activism impacts the ways in which women view themselves
in their work. For Ratna, coming from outside of women’s activism has led to a
newfound appreciation for feminism not only professionally, but also personally in her
family. This, for her, has changed the ways in which she thinks about her gender.
Growing up in the Malaysian context, Ratna had to embody a specific gender role as a
good Muslim woman, since working at Sisters In Islam she realises the flaws in the
ideal Malay Muslim woman and works to fight against dominant conservative
patriarchal structures in Malaysia. Natasha has had a long family history of feminist
activism, which brings together her faith and her activism in both her educational
trajectory and her professional work. Natasha recognises the importance of the work,
but, also considers its painful moments. For example, how she is expected to sacrifice
her own care for the care of others, which is typical of women engaging in non-
profit/NGO work. From the experiences highlighted in this chapter, women’s feminist
activism is not only about how women see themselves in their work, but also how they
are portrayed and recognised as women, as younger or older women and focusing in the
Malaysian context as Muslim women. Bourdieu’s conceptions on the habitus and
feminist reworkings allow for an analysis that considers gender and how the habitus is
shaped and who is able to use their habitus to acquire the right kinds of capital in
women’s organisations.

Conclusion

Highlighted in this final chapter are women’s embodied feminist activisms and
the ways in which their religious/affective gendered habitus positions them in their
work. Diane Reay’s and Elspeth Probyn’s respective analysis of Bourdieu’s conceptions
of the habitus and capital enable a feminist reworking to include emotion. I draw on the
ideas of the affective habitus and emotional capital to convey the experiences of women
engaging in work that is imbued with, but not limited to emotional labour. Non-

173
profit/NGO work is complex as it relies on morals, values and one’s altruistic
investment. I have argued that women’s organisations in the Malaysian context are
dynamic in the ways in which women come to embody their feminisms both at the
individual and the organisation levels. In particular, I highlight intergenerational
divisions between groups of women working in these organisations. Vulnerable
positions of younger feminist activists in these spaces illustrate the tensions that surface,
such as what it means to be perceived as a career feminist versus an altruistic feminist
and replicating the mother/daughter relationship in the workplace.

Ruby, Wathshalah, Natasha and Ratna’s embodied feminisms in their work are
shaped by their gendered habitus, which is also coloured by how they feel in their work
through emotion and through ethnic and religious factors. Through their experiences in
non-profit/NGO work, I have mapped their feminist activism and how they have come
to embody their feminist identities. This chapter brings together ideas, concerns and
concepts that have been explored throughout this thesis to tie together how women
embody their feminist activism according to their gendered habitus that is implicated in
wider debates surrounding intergenerational tensions between women not only in
feminist movements, but also in women’s organisations. It is evident through women’s
experiences in this type of work that they share the mentality of the work being good
and can easily justify this. However, many of their experiences are implicated in the
challenges of working in NGOs, such as organisational issues of donor funding
practices, the culture to neglect one’s own care for the care of others, and the personal
and professional blur, which all contribute to affects felt in their emotional, mental and
physical health. How women see themselves in their work, in particular non-profit/NGO
work is multifaceted, as their work is not only a profession, but tied to morals, values,
and emotions, and brings together their individual and collective histories

Final conclusions

The mentality that women workers in women’s organisations are working for a
common good has enabled self-neglect and a lack of self-care for too long. This was
conveyed to me in women’s narratives. It continues to be a driving force behind why
they continue working in a sector that pays little attention to the work they do and the
sacrifices they make. Some women find solace working for others, where they are

174
emotionally-driven through their passion and commitment to advocate and promote
women’s rights. But, for how long is this sustainable in a profession that perpetuates
overwork and a culture of silence to take on more work, especially in an increasingly
precarious sector where external donor funding continues to be the main life support of
NGOs?
The women in my study commit to their work wholeheartedly, giving their
labour as a way to help others which in turn satisfies their own professional aspirations.
However this professional multitasking takes a toll on their overall identities. First,
women blur their personal and professional boundaries by using their morals and
values. Recalling Anne-Meike Fechter’s analysis of the intertwining of altruistic and
professional motives are important as, “it tells us about aid workers, but reveals a lacuna
in development ethics. This is the failure—or refusal—to consider the ‘care of the self’
as well as the ‘care for the other’.”384 Second, women constantly negotiate their
intersecting identities involving gender, race, religion, ethnicity and class in these
working environments. It was also through these identity markers they could relate to
other women. This was made apparent in how they thought about finding comfort in
their feminist identities and where they found their feminist belongings and homes. In
Chapter Two Ratna described that her newfound feminist home was based in her
Muslim identity working at Sisters in Islam. Third, NGO workplaces promoted
overwork and self-neglect that then resulted in health concerns and a re-evaluation of
their place and stake in women’s organisations and the wider women’s movement. For
some, it was only after they fell ill or experienced health issues that they reconsidered
their roles in this sector and how they wanted to continue.

Like the flight attendants in Hochschild’s research, the women in my study

experienced difficulties in setting clear boundaries between work and home. Hochschild
gives us an approach to capture why this may be and how emotion work is gendered.
Using her emotional labour thesis I argued women working in NGOs are caught
between the passion of using emotion in their work and managing this emotion
according to specific contexts and situations. The Managed Heart offered many starting
points for my research on women’s experiences in non-profit/NGO work. This allowed

384
Fechter, “‘Living Well’ while ‘Doing Good’?” 1489.

175
me to open up the fields of workplace studies and gender studies that made it possible to
trace the interconnections between them in the everyday working realities of the non-
profit/NGO sector. Using women’s narratives provided insights into the transformation
of what work has come to mean and the complexities of intertwining the personal and
professional spheres, especially in values-based workplaces. I have extended on
Hochschild’s research to include the feeling body that examined women’s affective
experiences. For example Sanyu, Ruby and Wathshlah recounted experiences
negotiating their emotional investment in their work that highlighted that the more
experience they had in NGOs the more it enabled them to find their footing in these
spaces. Possessing the appropriate affect is based in one’s gendered habitus in these
workplaces, and was reinforced in older women’s positions to move with ease in many
of the spaces they created. Their social, cultural and emotional capitals have been
accumulated over time, and younger women in this sector have not yet been afforded
the same possibilities. Ruby highlighted that as a younger woman in this sector if she
speaks out she is reprimanded by older colleagues, which was also reflected in Sanyu’s
experience. The body experienced for them hinges on their ability to find their footing
in these spaces and follow idealised forms of feminist activism that are based in past
feminist and women’s movements. Learning to be strong and selfless continues the
feminist legacy of being ‘movement women’ discussed in Chapter Three as the way to
proceed in these working environments. However this may be slowly changing as non-
profits and NGOs are taking on a more corporatised approach that is focused on output
and service delivery over advocacy and capacity building as Audrey drew our attention
to in Chapter Three.

Here I return to the chapters that have led to this point. In Chapter One “The
history of contemporary women’s organizations in Malaysia” I mapped the genealogy
of contemporary women’s movements and organisations in Malaysia. I argue that
women’s participation in anti-colonial resistance movements were important in
Malaysia’s fight for independence, but were fraught with racial, ethnic and class
tensions that re-emerged in the formation of women’s movements and organisations in
the 1980s and 1990s. The divisions between women and women’s groups were also
intensified by political agendas, such as the ‘Asian Values’ discourse; women uniting
under specific causes, such as Violence Against Women; and the influence of global
sisterhood movements promoted by United Nations World Conferences on Women.

176
‘Women’ as a catch all term was utilised in major international conferences to unite
women but failed to recognise the diversities within women, women’s groups and
women’s organisations. This is an ongoing issue in feminism and feminist theory, and
was explored in Chapter Two “Inside and outside of feminism.” In this chapter I
discussed what it means to be identified as a feminist in women’s organisations and
how women negotiate their feminist identity based on their comfort levels of the
feminist home or homes within feminism. The contradictions in feminism continue,
even today, and through feminist perspectives from Teresa de Lauretis, Linda Alcoff,
Chandra Talpade Mohanty and others we are able to uncover the multiplicity in
women’s embodied feminist identities and activism.

Building on Chapters One and Two, Chapter Three “The personal is the
professional” takes from the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’ and gives it new
meaning for the women in my study where the personal becomes the professional. It is
through women’s experiences we can get a sense of how they come to their work. To
examine experience as a method in research, I focused on the works of Adrienne Rich
and Elspeth Probyn. Bringing together the epistemological and ontological, Probyn
gives us a way to use experience as a tool in research. From the blurring of their
personal and professional spaces, women experience the challenges of overworking and
neglecting their own care for the care of others. In Chapter Four “Breaking bodies” I
illustrated the complications of this to think through the self-neglect women experience
in their work and the lack of priority given to their care needs. It is in this chapter we
see how ‘good work’ is not always good for those who are at the front lines. However,
women use this mentality to justify their approach to work, in what I argue, follows
Mauss’ analysis on the gift exchange. Following this chapter, Chapter Five “You have
to fight for your rights, and for your funding,” I examined the funding realities for
women in these organisations that have led program officers to become fundraisers.
Funding was always a depressing issue discussed in my interviews, recalling Natasha’s
sentiments, she called it “the spawn of Satan.” She, like many others, pointed out the
difficulty for women’s organisations to fundraise and the politics behind donors usually
located in the Global North and receiving organisations based out of the Global South.
In this chapter I made a feminist intervention through the lens of donor funding to
explore the unequal power relations between women’s organisations based in the Global
North and Global South. I employed Linda Alcoff’s essay “The Problem of Speaking

177
for Others” which continues to be used in gender studies courses today to think about
who has the privilege to speak for others and in what contexts and situations.

The final chapter, Chapter Six “Bridging the gap” concluded with the tensions
that surface between women working at organisations such as IWRAW AP, Sisters In
Islam and Musawah. I focused on the generational divisions among women and how
this is a wider concern in women’s movements and feminist activism that crosses
borders and contexts. Bringing together major themes discussed in my thesis, such as
feminist identities, the challenges of ‘good work’ and the hardships of NGO
workplaces, this chapter was concerned with how women come to their work and their
expectations from work. I have used the gendered habitus as a starting point to consider
how the affective gendered habitus and Islamic gendered habitus are manifested in
women’s organisations. Thinking about feminist interventions of Pierre Bourdieu’s
conceptions on the habitus and capital provides a framework that considers more than
class divisions but the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, religion and emotion.

This thesis opened with the excitement of what inspired it. It was driven by a
personal stake in voicing women’s passion and commitment to work on women’s
rights. My starting point was to ask what motivated women to engage in working for
others, what it meant to them and their emotional and personal stake in their work. I
have also problematised this passion and commitment to show some of the darker sides
of the non-profit/NGO sector and women’s often vulnerable positions. In particular, the
generational tensions between younger and older women tend to define women along
the lines that either it is simply a job or that the work is passion-based. Highlighted by
the women in my study was that it was more than a job. However women’s approaches
to their work is driven by the different ways they come into the sector, but for most of
them they remain working in this sector. This thesis has argued that despite its trying
moments and challenges in an unstable non-profit/NGO sector, where funding is drying
up and workers take on the burden of overwork, there is meaning behind the mundane
working for women’s rights.

Concluding a thesis that is inspired by my experiences working for a women’s

human rights organisation is a conflicting undertaking. On the one hand, I have used
this thesis to foreground women’s voices that are often unheard and undervalued. I have

178
drawn on iconic feminist ideologies and texts to excavate the gendered nature of non-
profit/NGO work. I argued how women’s overall identities become key factors in
continuing to work for others. On the other hand, some of the experiences shared were
painful and difficult moments in women’s lives and have led to further questions and
challenges in how they proceed in their work. While the empirical research drawn on is
specific to the Malaysian context, many of the debates and issues concerned in this
thesis could be a useful starting point for further research that crosses borders and
boundaries of women’s experiences in their work. In particular for younger women who
are just beginning their careers, building relationships and strengthening themselves as
feminist activists, they are caught in the ongoing generational debate that surrounds
wider feminist politics. Finding their footing in these spaces is challenging and often
perpetuates the mentality to overwork and to be silent otherwise they are positioned as
disobeying their feminist, activist elders. Further research that examines women’s
engagement in a changing non-profit/NGO sector, especially for younger women, could
explore if they will continue in the tradition of promoting the generational gap. Will
they continue in the legacy of their predecessors of perpetuating overwork and a lack of
self-care or break from it?

179
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Appendix 1: Details of the empirical study

Human Research Ethics Committee Approval

Approval for this empirical study was granted by the University of Sydney
Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) on November 1, 2013 when Protocol No:
2013/892 was issued. In compliance with process and procedures with the university,
Professor Elspeth Probyn was listed as the chief investigator and Alifa Bandali was
listed as the co-researcher. The following forms were applied in this study: Participant
Information Statement and Participant Consent Form.

Research Participants

The table below detail the research sample and reflects the qualitative aims of
this project. Taking seriously the HREC approval, all interviews were conducted with
the consent of each research participant who agreed to the material being recorded,
transcribed and published in this PhD thesis in addition to any associated academic
publications. It was explained both verbally and in writing that the recording could be
stopped any point throughout the interview.

Data Treatment

The interviews were transcribed and analysed thematically alongside other

material gathered from the field. Key quotes and excerpts from the interviews provided
direction in the research and have been utilized throughout the body of the thesis.

Located of Research: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Research Period(s):

First Site Visit: February 2014

Second Site Visit: July 2015

Third Site Visit: March 2016

195
 Table of Research Participants

Research participant Position Organisation Nationality

Sanyu Program Officer IWRAW AP Kenyan

Amarjargal ‘Amara’ Program Officer IWRAW AP Mongolian

Susanna Independent Consultant Freelance Malaysian

Ai Schuen ‘Audrey’ Program Manager IWRAW AP Malaysian

Shanti ‘Saan’ Program Officer IWRAW AP Nepali

Suraya Program Officer IWRAW AP Malaysian

Sally Intern IWRAW AP Australian

Lai Yoong Administrative Support IWRAW AP Malaysian

Freelance/
Wathshlah Independent Consultant Malaysian
IWRAW AP

Dorathy Program Officer IWRAW AP Malaysian

Sharon Program Officer Did not disclose Malaysian

Rubini ‘Ruby’ Program Officer Did not disclose Malaysian

Natasha Program Officer Musawah American

Ratna Executive Director Sisters In Islam Malaysian

Rebecca Program Officer IWRAW AP American

196