“Racialized masculinities”: A gendered response to marginalization among Malay boys in Singapore
| Date | 01 March 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865818768675 |
| Author | Narayanan Ganapathy,Lavanya Balachandran |
| Published date | 01 March 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
“Racialized masculinities”:
A gendered response to
marginalization among
Malay boys in Singapore
Narayanan Ganapathy and
Lavanya Balachandran
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Abstract
While social disorganization and anomie theories are generally employed to explain the
disproportionate representation of racial minorities in the offending population, such per-
spectives often fail to address the intersectionalities of class, race, religion, gender, and
historicity that structurally marginalize the Malay youth in Singapore. This article hence
adopts a neocolonial criminological approach in explaining racial disparity in crime, partic-
ularly how the Malay youth establish their dominance in gangs through hyper- and exagger-
ated forms of masculinity. Drawing on interviews with Singaporean Malay and Chinese
individuals who were current and former gang members, this study shows that Malay
youth tended to exhibit a blended masculinity comprising “Malayness” and “Chineseness”
to compensate for their marginal status, highlighting their agentic capacity in strategically
tapping upon an inventory of race resources to negotiate their gendered identities and attain
status and economic mobility in the illegitimate society.
Keywords
Gangs, masculinity, neocolonialism, race, Singapore society
Date received: 14 June 2017; accepted: 5 May 2018
Corresponding author:
Narayanan Ganapathy, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, AS1 11 Arts Link, 04-22,
Singapore 117570, Singapore.
Email: socng@nus.edu.sg
Australian & New Zealand Journal of
Criminology
2019, Vol. 52(1) 94–110
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0004865818768675
journals.sagepub.com/home/anj
Introduction
The disproportionate representation of ethnic and racial minorities in the criminal jus-
tice system in countries such as the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, France, and
Netherlands has fuelled debates over the contested linkages between race, class, and
the criminal justice system (King & Mauer, 2007). Racial disparity in the criminal justice
system is, evidently, a global problem and Singapore is no exception. The Malays, one
of the two minority groups in Singapore, are not only disproportionately represented in
the drug statistics but its youth are overrepresented in rioting cases at 40% (John, 2007).
This raises a concern as the Malays as an ethnic group (majority of whom are Muslims)
constitute only 13.4% of the national population (Statistics Singapore, 2010). On one
hand, the political and positivist discourses have had attributed the antisocial behavior
of the Malays to the perceived deficiency of the Malay culture (Rahim, 1998), pointing
to their apparent visibility in a litany of social ills—teen marriages (Rahman, 2009),
health deficiencies, teenage pregnancies, and dysfunctional families (Bin Mohamed
Nasir, 2007). According to a report published by the Association of Muslim
Professionals (2012), Malays have a high youth dependency ratio at 31.3% (AMP,
2012, p. 220) and a low labor force participation rate (AMP, 2012, p. 220). The most
recent Census of Population (Statistics Singapore, 2010) also reveals that the Malays
have the lowest average and median incomes and are underrepresented among univer-
sity graduates compared to the other ethnic groups, the Chinese and Indians. On the
other hand, functionalist sociologists have generally maintained that racial disparities in
antisocial and criminal behaviors are the result of inequities in the social structure
(Bridges, Crutchfield, & Simpson, 1987). Though functionalist perspectives have lost
their efficacy in contemporary criminology generally (Downes & Rock, 2007), they are
still very much revered in the Singapore context as an explanatory framework due to
their strong normative appeal (Ganapathy, 2002).
Both perspectives, however, can be critiqued on grounds that they insufficiently con-
textualize the lived experiences of the Malays—at both an individual and collective
level—by failing to address the role of race and racism in the structural relations of a
postcolonial multiracial society nor attempting to locate the biography of the Malays
as a visible minority within the intersectionality of class, race, religion, gender, and
historicity. Hence, this article hopes to reposition the racial disparity in crime within
the experiences of Malay’s structural exclusion, and how an exaggerated form of mas-
culinity is being appropriated by the Malay youth to compensate for their historically
marginal economic and social status engendered by colonization.
Using a neocolonial model (Tatum, 2000), which combines the traditional colonial
thesis with an underclass perspective, this article seeks to (1) address the fundamental
question of how historical factors such as colonization and multiracialism in postinde-
pendent Singapore have negatively impacted the life chances of the Malays, fuelling
their propensity to using violence as status resource and means for conflict resolution,
and (2) account for the racially differential response to shared structural conditions of
marginalization. Specifically, this article attempts to explicate why working-class male
Malay youths, who face similar structural exclusion with other class and racial groups,
embody what we call “racialized masculinity”—a performance that contextually blends
both “Chineseness” and “Malayness” as they seek to enact and subvert definitions of
Ganapathy and Balachandran 95
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