76
Heike Jensen, Jac sm Kee, Gayathry Venkiteswaran, and Sonia Randhawa
Censorship by the state and by other entities constitutes an important form of
intervention in this ideological battle, and the Malaysian case has provided evidence
for the overall trend in several countries, as traced by ONI testing, that direct and
sustained, state-ordered fi ltering of the Internet may not play a crucial role in this
context and may in fact be much less important than other mechanisms of censoring
and silencing people employed by state actors as well as nonstate actors. In addition,
the deployment of a moralistic discourse of the state ’ s duty to regulate sexuality has
become the central framework employed by the state to distract from and thus negotiate tensions between the economic objectives of Internet development in the country
and the Internet ’ s disturbing capacity to shape and disrupt ideas of the Malaysian
nation and its citizens.
The Malaysian case illustrates the clash between the potential power of the Internet
to instigate far-reaching economic and social changes on the one hand and the established power of political and social elites on the other hand, which tries to perpetuate
itself under new conditions. Under these conditions, the initial promise of a Malaysian
Internet free from censorship was not upheld by the state, which has increasingly
encroached upon this medium through a variety of direct and indirect means. These
include the application of peripheral laws to rein in transgressive discourse, as well as
administrative procedures and identity-based surveillance designed to foster a culture
of self-censorship and conformity with gender and sexual rules. Further gendersensitive research into censorship and surveillance, in Malaysia and elsewhere, would
be welcome to unearth more of the inner workings of such negotiations, as well as
the circumstances and factors that may complicate these processes and could theoretically also spur many unintended consequences in the gender and sexual order of a
nation.
Notes
1. Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey, “ Internet Filtering: The Politics and Mechanisms of
Control, ” in Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering , ed. Ronald Deibert,
John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 35.
2. Heteronormativity refers to the privileging of heterosexuality through institutions, structures
of understanding, and practical orientations. See Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “ Sex in
Public, ” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 548.
3. This chapter was written by the OpenNet-Asia Gender Research Framework development
team, coordinated by the Association of Progressive Communications, Women ’ s Networking
Support Programme, in partnership with the Centre for Independent Journalism, Malaysia. The
full framework is available at http://www.genderit.org .
4. Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, “ Control and Subversion in Russian Cyberspace, ”
in Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace , ed. Ronald Deibert,
Heike Jensen, Jac sm Kee, Gayathry Venkiteswaran, and Sonia Randhawa
Censorship by the state and by other entities constitutes an important form of
intervention in this ideological battle, and the Malaysian case has provided evidence
for the overall trend in several countries, as traced by ONI testing, that direct and
sustained, state-ordered fi ltering of the Internet may not play a crucial role in this
context and may in fact be much less important than other mechanisms of censoring
and silencing people employed by state actors as well as nonstate actors. In addition,
the deployment of a moralistic discourse of the state ’ s duty to regulate sexuality has
become the central framework employed by the state to distract from and thus negotiate tensions between the economic objectives of Internet development in the country
and the Internet ’ s disturbing capacity to shape and disrupt ideas of the Malaysian
nation and its citizens.
The Malaysian case illustrates the clash between the potential power of the Internet
to instigate far-reaching economic and social changes on the one hand and the established power of political and social elites on the other hand, which tries to perpetuate
itself under new conditions. Under these conditions, the initial promise of a Malaysian
Internet free from censorship was not upheld by the state, which has increasingly
encroached upon this medium through a variety of direct and indirect means. These
include the application of peripheral laws to rein in transgressive discourse, as well as
administrative procedures and identity-based surveillance designed to foster a culture
of self-censorship and conformity with gender and sexual rules. Further gendersensitive research into censorship and surveillance, in Malaysia and elsewhere, would
be welcome to unearth more of the inner workings of such negotiations, as well as
the circumstances and factors that may complicate these processes and could theoretically also spur many unintended consequences in the gender and sexual order of a
nation.
Notes
1. Jonathan Zittrain and John Palfrey, “ Internet Filtering: The Politics and Mechanisms of
Control, ” in Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering , ed. Ronald Deibert,
John Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 35.
2. Heteronormativity refers to the privileging of heterosexuality through institutions, structures
of understanding, and practical orientations. See Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “ Sex in
Public, ” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 548.
3. This chapter was written by the OpenNet-Asia Gender Research Framework development
team, coordinated by the Association of Progressive Communications, Women ’ s Networking
Support Programme, in partnership with the Centre for Independent Journalism, Malaysia. The
full framework is available at http://www.genderit.org .
4. Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, “ Control and Subversion in Russian Cyberspace, ”
in Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace , ed. Ronald Deibert,