‘It’s Just a Matter of Key Performance Indicators’: The Disposability of Foreign National Women Sentenced to Death for Drug Trafficking in Malaysia

Drawing on research on foreign national women sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia, this chapter speaks to the issue of bodily lived experience as an organising conceptual tool for theorising the global contours of gendered punishment. Here, it is argued that those female drug couriers are viewed as ‘disposable’ by drug syndicates and Malaysian law enforcement alike—a concept that has been critically explored by postcolonial feminist scholars. Crucially, their disposability is embodied: many of the women were caught with drugs on their body or had swallowed capsules of drugs and it is thought that they make better drug couriers as they are believed to be less suspicious to authorities by virtue of the way they perform their gender. Overall, it is argued that the disposability of these foreign national women can be explained by a continuum of patriarchal state violence.