SOUTHEAST ASIA: A Multidisciplinary Journal 6 (1) 2005/2006 FASS, UBD EXPRESSIONS OF SELF-CENSORSHIP: AMBIVALENCE AND DIFFERENCE IN MALAYSIAN AND SINGAPOREAN CHINESE

This paper examines the idea of “individual freedom and expression ” in the English-language writings produced by Chinese women in the censorial and patriarchal nation-spaces of Malaysia and Singapore. Writers in general are subjected to the political injunctions of censorship, but for Chinese women writers, there is the added complication of culture, which produces its own set of gendered prohibitions and barriers. However, I perceive that women writers do not necessarily respond to the discourse of censorship through resistance; instead, I argue that they are ambivalent and conflicted subjects whose notion of “individual expression ” has been shaped by the specific historical, socio-political and cultural conditions that have evolved in postcolonial Malaysia and Singapore. Hence the varying “expressions of self-censorship,” which capture the ambivalence and tension experienced by Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese women writers, who are themselves caught between the contesting forces of nation and culture, Asia and the West. Be it man or woman, the writer located in the plural contexts of Malaysia and Singapore has always been highly aware of the censorship apparatuses operating within the nation-space. S/he has learnt to treat with caution the subjects forbidden in these countries — namely race and religion — due to the historicized national memory of the 1964 ethni