The Tragedy of Sex Trafficking: A Study of Vietnamese Women Trafficked into Malaysia for Sex Purposes

Sex trafficking is an abhorrent crime in our contemporary times. Malaysia is currently both a transit and destination country, where women from different countries are trafficked in and out of Malaysia for sex purposes. This article focuses specifically on the trafficking of Vietnamese women into Malaysia. We, the researchers of this paper, interviewed a group of 10 Vietnamese women who were caught in a single police raid at an illegal ‘gambling center’ and placed in a women’s shelter in Kuala Lumpur. While this article explores the tragedy of sex trafficking and the plight of trafficked victims, it also focuses on the politics of the body of the trafficked woman, discussing how the female body has been abused and condemned through manipulation and oppression. This article also reveals how systems of oppression, namely patriarchal cultural practices and gendered discrimination, have helped form a prejudice and suppression of Vietnamese women. Ketu Katrak and Elleke Boehmer’s discussions on the politics of the female body construct the basis of this article’s theoretical framework. At the same time, the literary approach of ‘lived narratives’ offers a unique blend of multiple disciplines of study, including literature, sociology, gender, and politics, to discuss sex trafficking in Malaysia. Overall, this article provides a glimpse into the complex dynamics of sex trafficking in Malaysia.

Moving Cage: Vibration, Sonification and the Quanta of Time

Dear John is an experimental choreomusical work that reinterprets Cage's works while advancing his ideas of sound as sonic events and embodied choreography. In this episodic work, improvised movement unfolds to a soundscape of defamiliarized instruments, sound devices and sonicities of macro- and micro-movements. The correspondence and (in)congruence between dance movements and music's kinetic energy become the means to examine a politics of the body and sound, of music on movement. Additionally, in this ‘auditory architecture’ the quanta of time, its relations and (lack of) unity are exposed. This article then examines the intersubjective interplay of movement and music, body and sonicity; it considers the resonance of the performing body as intermaterial vibration and how this invites a sonic politics of relational possibility. The article will then also investigate the ways in which the interaction of motion and music, movement and stillness engenders experiences of time's indeterminacy and elasticity.

POLITIK TUBUH DALAM SERAT KAWRUH SANGGAMA KARYA RADEN BRATAKESAWA AWAL ABAD XX

Hal-hal yang berkaitan dengan seksualitas selalu menarik untuk dikaji meskipun diikat oleh tabu. Pada awal abad XX, naskah-naskah soal seksualitas cukup populer, apalagi sudah dicetak dalam bentuk buku yang diperjualbelikan di lapak-lapak buku. Salah satu naskah yang memuat seksualitas adalah Serat Kawruh Sanggama. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah untuk mengungkap bentuk, fungsi, dan makna politik tubuh dalam Serat Kawruh Sanggama. Metode yang digunakan adalah analisis data kualitatif-interpretatif dengan pendekatan teori politik tubuh. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan, Serat Kawruh Sanggama ditulis di Kediri dan disebarluaskan oleh penerbit Boekhandel Tan Khoen Swie Kediri. Bentuk politik tubuh berupa narasi tentang tata cara atau aturan bersenggama. Naskah ini mengandung politik tubuh yang berfungsi untuk menundukkan, mengontrol, dan mendominasi tubuh perempuan. Namun demikian, naskah ini dapat dimaknai sebagai upaya laki-laki untuk memahami misteri tubuh perempuan. Selain itu, naskah ini dimaknai pula sebagai daya perempuan, sehingga laki-laki harus berusaha untuk memahami seluk beluk tubuh perempuan.Despite a taboo subject amongst society, the matters related to sexuality are always interesting to study. In the early twentieth century, texts on sexuality were quite popular and had even been printed in the form of books that were sold in the book stalls. One of those was Serat Kawruh Sanggama. The purpose of this study was to analyze the form, the function, and the meaning of the politics of the body in the Serat Kawruh Sanggama. The method used in the research was the qualitative-interpretative data analysis combined with the approach of the Politics of the Body. The results of the study have shown that Serat Kawruh Sanggama was written in Kediri and then disseminated by the publisher of the Boekhandel Tan Khoen Swie Kediri. The elements of the Politics of the Body revealed in the text are in the form of narratives related to the procedures or rules of sexual intercourse. It is evident that the elements of the Politics of the Body found on the text served as an instrument of subjugating, controlling, and dominating the female body. This text can be interpreted as an attempt by men to understand the mystery of the female body. However, on the other hand, the text can also be interpreted as an attempt by men to understand the mystery of the female body. In addition, it also represented as a woman's power that encourages men to understand the ins and outs of the female body.

The Social Body of Béla Balázs

Focusing on the interwar writings of the film journalist and theorist Béla Balázs, this article argues for an understanding of Balázs’s film aesthetics as grounded in a popular politics of the body. Balázs understood film as a medium in which experiences of image, sound, and expressive movement and gesture shape human subjectivities within a newly mediatized social realm. The article explores Balázs’s consequent plea for a film politics of popular embodiment and asks what a survey of Balázs’s writings as both critic and theorist tell us about the political valences of his film theory now.

The multispatial governance of social and economic policy

This chapter distinguishes Foucault’s approach from the work of Anglo-Foucauldian scholars. The latter adopted a microsocial perspective, focused on the programmes and rationalities of government that work across multiple alliances between different actors, and argued for bottom-up civil society responsibilization. Foucault was not only state-phobic but also suspicious of political action based on civil society. His theoretical interests shifted from the micro-physics of disciplinary society and its anatomo-politics of the body to the more general strategic codification of a plurality of discourses, practices, technologies of power, and institutional ensembles around a specific governmental rationality concerned with the social body (bio-power) in a consolidated capitalist society. This is reflected in the statification of government and the governmentalization of the state. This led to his analyses of sovereignty, territorial statehood, and state power and the role of civil society in this regard and to less well-substantiated claims about their articulation to the logic of capital accumulation.

The transient museum: Or a vision of the not-yet-here

This essay forwards the idea of the transient museum, a theoretical and utopian project aimed at dismantling the visual logics that support the contemporary art museum. Beginning from the premise that such museums are predicated upon colonial and capitalist visual logics, the transient museum imagines ways of being in but not of the contemporary art museum and the economies of circulation it engenders. Its tactics engage visuality but, equally, a politics of the body and of movement. As such, Gwyneth Shanks frames two ways of performing the transient museum, against acquisition and an aesthetics of concealment, analyzing highly performative artworks by artists Rafa Esparza and Nari Ward to explain these categories. She argues that the transient museum names ever-accumulating forces of global and historical crisis—forces to which neither the museum nor contemporary art are immune—as a practice of enacting hope and remaking the contours of contemporary art.