Only Empowered Maternities Here! Singaporean Malay Women’s Active Intersecting of Dominant State, Medical and Islamic Framework of Maternity

Malay-Muslim maternal bodies in Singapore are depicted as problematic in colonial and post-colonial discourses. Intersecting state, medical and religious discourses that have painted Malay maternity as unfit then come to structure and dominate Malay women’s everyday maternity experiences. This paper discusses how these discourses become the ideological framework that women tap into for their maternal embodiment. Moving away from a facile dichotomy of subjugation and empowerment, this chapter illustrate how women transform and conduct their maternal bodies to conform to the depiction of the successful Malay-Muslim maternity by actively intersecting discourses of maternity framed by the structures that come to dominate them. Additionally, women also introduce other structures to mediate their embodied experiences when the dominant structures contest each other or do not provide an adequate framework for bodily conduct. By positioning Malay-Muslim maternity experiences as the focus of the study, this chapter hopes to contribute to the body of knowledge on intersectionality by centering it around the agents that have come to mediate and even weave together old and new structures of domination to create a maternity experience that is meaningful to them.