ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the off-stage voices of factory women, the self-perceptions which have emerged, partly in reaction to the external caricatures of their status, but mainly out of their own felt experiences as wage workers in changing Malay society. I have argued elsewhere that in a society undergoing capitalist transformation, it is necessary not only to decipher the dominant gender motifs which have become the symbols of relations of domination and subordination, but also to discover, in everyday choices and practices, how ordinary women and men live and refashion their own images and culture. Disparate statements, new gestures, and untypical episodes will be used to demonstrate how concepts of gender and sexuality became transmuted through the new experiences of the emergent Malay working class.
