On women’s laughter in Malay horror (Part 2)

This is Part 2 of a two-part post on the pontianak and women’s laughter in Malaysian horror cinema. Read Part 1.

Consider laughter’s capacity to upset and as a vehicle of resistance. More specifically when women laugh at men, laughing at patriarchy, laughing at power, laughing from below. Situated below speech in the register of communication, laughter can confound thanks to its multifarious meanings. It is pregnant with meaning that is not immediately accessible by reason and rational thinking. Its semantic elusiveness can be a form of resistance against the male-dominated symbolic order. It not only has the ability to inflict cracks in the micro-structures of patriarchy within the confines of a film narrative but to tear down the fourth wall.

Women’s voice in film is projected differently from men. In classical Hollywood cinema, the male disembodied voice-over has an omnipotent presence that emanates from the centre of the narrative, through and beyond the cinematic frame. By contrast, women’s voices in film are confined purely within diagetic space reinforcing the role of the female body in film as objects of the gaze. In response, female filmmakers have experimented with feminist cinematic approaches by dislodging women’s voices from the female image or the voice-image de-synchronisation, and deploying the female voice-over and voice-off instead. As Kaja Silverman argues below:

To disembody the female voice [via de-synchronisation] would be to challenge every conception by means of which we have previously known woman in Hollywood film, since it is precisely as body she is constructed there (1988, p. 164)

When heard but not seen, women’s hysterical laughter at patriarchy offers a diversion away from the corporeality of feminist politics. Resistance without the need for women’s bodily display offers a panacea to what Sandra Bartky calls the ‘feminine narcissism’ in both normative and transgressive subjectivity.

The sonic subjectivity of the laughing woman occurs within what Teresa De Lauretis calls a ‘space-off’, ‘the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the frame makes visible’. Without the oppressive structures of the gaze, the ‘space-off’ represents a respite from the prevailing control of gender:

It is here [in the space-off] that the terms of a different construction of gender can be posed – terms that do have effect and take hold at the level of subjectivity and self-representation: in the micro-political practices of daily life and daily resistances that afford both agency and sources of power or empowering investments (De Lauretis, 1988, p. 25)

The pontianak’s disembodied laughter draws attention away from the materiality of a woman’s laughter and to the affective range of women’s voice and knowledge. It denies the cinematic unity of women as bodies and the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ they provide. By departing, if momentarily, from women’s bodies as a site of resistance, disembodied laughter seeks to reclaim space through sonic means.

Discomfort with women’s laughter arises from what Deborah Cameron refers to as the gendered ‘distribution of linguistic resources’ that results in women’s exclusion from verbal expression in the public sphere. This is not to say that women are prohibited from speaking in public in toto but rather such prohibitions are sanctioned in subtle ways through a gendered division of linguistic labour within institutions in the public sphere. Certain forms of speech are registered as gendered (such as gossiping, nagging, shrill and strident speech) and assigned lower value and diminished authority. Speech designated as ‘feminine’ is negatively valued and as a consequence frequently evacuated from domains of power. Inadvertently but no less a consequence of gendered demarcation of speech, women are historically shut out from speaking from positions of institutions of authority, principally in the law as judges, as religious leaders, professors, and politicians.

Across cultures, women were either ritually or socially denied to speak with authority, seriousness, and symbolic gravity in the presence of men. With rare exception, under-representation of women in politics and prohibition against Muslim women delivering the Friday sermon to male worshippers are testament to the denial of the female public voice. When permitted to speak, a woman’s voice is channeled down a lower register where it is trivialised, mocked, and dismissed.

In conclusion, a woman’s laughter unleashes the power of the female voice to pierce the patriarchal edifice. To upend the threat of male dominance, all a woman needs to do is laugh with abandon. It is an apposite counter to the rapture of mass hysteria suffered by young Malay women, interpreted as a collective cry for help. And so a laugh is more than just a laugh, more than the voluntary spasms of the diagphram.

Although she emerges from a place of victimhood, the pontianak is a woman who is given a second chance to reclaim justice and what is hers to begin with. The extreme range of emotions that the Asian monstrous/feminine impresses upon others (from loving and seductive to terrifying) throws into sharp relief how the dark affect of anger, jealousy, vengeance, and schadenfreude can easily place ‘real’ femininity in the domain of the grotesque. But the anti-patriarchal terror of the pontianak’s laughter thinly conceals the precarity of women’s desire to undermine patriarchy. After all, the pontianak’s laugh signifies a momentary pyrrhic victory before she is vanquished by a man.

Occasionally, as in Anak Pontianak (1958), she survives the prevailing moral order that wipes out spirits and demons. But when her survival means forever stalking the earth alongside the other undead of legend, beautiful and untouched by age, she is made lonesome by the frail shortness of human life. There is indeed something about women’s laughter in Malay popular culture, its persistence in folk horror, and its derisiveness in discourses of Malay decorum. It is a vehicle for affective knowledge in a public sphere filled with gendered transgressions. Women’s loud shrieks and excessive laughter constitute temporary bursts of respite and resistance in a culture replete with impositions on women’s voices.