Just don’t say feminism: Covering the domestic violence act in the women’s pages of the Malaysian Malay-language press

Abstract

ABSTRACT The women’s pages of a newspaper have often been dismissed as fluff, playing at most a subsidiary role, while the real news of a paper is in the malestream pages: the domestic news or leader pages. Yet historically, these pages are often key in constructing women, and men, politically, socially and economically; in terms of generating revenue within the paper; and in terms of how the paper constructs itself in relation to its readers. Further, they have been important in bringing women into newsrooms, and allowing them to construct themselves as journalists with specialist expertise and independence from the male editorial hierarchy. In Malaysia, however, the women’s pages of the Malay-language press played a key role in the 1996 campaign for a Domestic Violence Act. Informed both by feminist critical discourse analysis and oral histories with female journalists working at the time, this article sheds light on the gendered nature of Malaysian newsrooms, with implications for how feminist media activists can negotiate feminist coverage, even in an environment hostile to feminism. There are further implications for the importance of understanding processes of both negotiation within newsrooms and identity formation as journalists, both of which impact upon the news produced.