State versus Islam: Malay families, women's bodies, and the body politic in Malaysia

This article examines the social effects of the secular state and Islamic resurgence as they negotiate different models of Malay women, kinship, and identity. Widely viewed as a politically radical force, Islamic revivalism is here interpreted as a middle-class ideology mediating changes in gender and domestic relations linked to official policies. Neither simply "resisting" nor "passive," upwardly mobile women have come to identify with revivalist ideals of motherhood, male authority, and the imagined body politic. [state/body politic, Islamic revivalism, gender and the family, social agency, class and social change, Malaysia/Islamic societies]