Intimacy Under Surveillance: Illicit Sexuality, Moral Policing, and the State in Contemporary Malaysia

Malaysia’s Malay-Muslim majority adheres to heteronormative forms of sexuality that recognise marriage as the only means of securing access to lawful sexual intimacy. Islam, Malay customs (adat), and the Malaysian state impose strict sanctions on pre- and extramarital intimacy in its Syariah criminal laws. A Vice Prevention Unit responsible for moral policing is legally authorised to arrest couples who violate Islamic rules of behaviour, including sexual offences such as khalwat (illicit proximity)—a crime of passion punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment. This article compares two khalwat trials in Kota Bharu and Kuala Lumpur’s Syariah court to illustrate what Peletz (2002) calls the judges’ “cultural logic of judicial reasoning”. In these trials, Syariah judges extend beyond a narrowed focus on gender to also consider cultural understandings of age, profession, family circumstances, and marital status, thus reproducing Malay adat understandings of intimacy, marriage, and personhood. In an effort to steer young couples away from forbidden sexual temptations, the Malaysian state liberalises access to marriage by recognising cross-border marriages contracted in Southern Thailand, offering financial incentives to young couples intending to marry and defending existing legal provisions allowing the marriage of minors. The Malaysian state’s mix of punitive, preventative, and pro-marriage policies, I suggest, are various ways of surveilling sexuality by bringing uncontrolled desires under the purview of matrimony, where it may find its lawful expression.

“Wanted to Save Her Honor”

This chapter shows how, in 1895-96, women’s rights activists attempted to use sensationalism to critique the double standard in domestic violence prosecution. Lacking illustrated newspapers of their own, veteran activists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Henry Blackwell, used the pages of the New York Recorder, World, and Journal to apply the “crime of passion” defense to the case of Maria Barbella (or Barberi), a woman tried twice for killing a man who had seduced and dishonored her. Their efforts to introduce into the daily papers a complex debate about women’s rights and the double standard in legal protection helped win the campaign for Barbella’s acquittal. It had the unintended cost of undermining women’s standing to critique honor killings by men.

Fatal Attraction

Simply summarized the plot of Georges Bizet’s Carmen is that of a crime of passion. This banal plot does not by itself account for the extraordinary international success of the story in different media. The themes that explain the tragic end are imbedded in the libretto. Through a textual and structural analysis of the libretto, the themes of love, passion, gender, freedom, possessiveness, and responsibility, as well as the importance of language in human relations are given new emphasis. The chapter concludes with a discussion of personal trauma and political issues that may account for Georges Bizet’s interest in bringing this story to the operatic stage in 1870.

The Criminal of Passion

This chapter explores the categorization of the criminal of passion in the second half of the nineteenth century, in Italy. In this period, legal and medical scholars switched the focus of the criminological debate from the crime to the criminal, looking at the criminal of passion as a social and physiological being. The attempts of the Italian Positivist School and its critics to understand and define crime-of-passion perpetrators fostered and furthered the analysis of the physiology and psychology of human emotional phenomena, highlighting the complex link between the soma, the psyche, and emotions.

“Svesti la giubba,” or, Uncloaking the Genesis of Pagliacci

In 1943 Allied bombs destroyed the archives of Leoncavallo's publisher, Sonzogno, and of the Teatro Dal Verme, where Pagliacci was first performed. As a result, many sources pertaining to the opera's compositional history were lost, and scholarship has relied almost exclusively on Leoncavallo's unpublished autobiographical manuscript, “Appunti.” Contextual sources such as notifications in the press, eyewitness accounts, and a large body of mostly unpublished correspondence now suggest that Leoncavallo cloaked the opera's genesis to protect its legacy. Leoncavallo was twice charged with having imitated an existing play. In his protracted defense, he took every opportunity to distinguish his libretto from the literary tradition to which it belongs and tie it instead to the verismo movement (with which critics had associated it since the premiere). He began to claim, for instance, that the libretto was based on a crime of passion he had witnessed in Montalto and invented a version of that crime that matched the libretto. Furthermore, in preparation of the first performance in Paris, he actively contributed to a staging faithfully depicting Montalto in an attempt to highlight the originality of the story. And as he was tightening the opera's connection to verismo, he was concealing aspects that would have reflected poorly on the opera's reception, including Sonzogno's initial concerns regarding the music and the presence of substantial musical self-borrowings.