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‘She doesn’t even need to be smart. It’s enough that she’s pretty and has a hole’ (Tak kena pandai pun, cukup la rupa cantik pastu ada lubang)

A case study of violence against women in politics in Malaysia

ORCiD logo with link | Lancaster University, United Kingdom | International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM), Malaysia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with Lancaster University.

Published online: 24 March 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00150.sit
Abstract
This paper examines how violence against women in politics (VAWP) is enacted and normalised in Malaysia through online reactions to a media appearance by Young Syefura Othman, a Malay-Muslim politician in the Chinese-majority Democratic Action Party (DAP). Drawing on Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM-CDS) (KhosraviNik, Majid, and Eleonora Esposito. 2018. “Online Hate, Digital Discourse and Critique: Exploring Digitally Mediated Discursive Practices of Gender-Based Hostility.” Łódź Papers in Pragmatics 14(1): 45–68. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar; Esposito, Eleonora, and Majid KhosraviNik. 2023. “Digital Distribution Processes and New Research Tools in SM-CDS.” In Social Media and Society: Integrating the Digital with the Social in Digital Discourse, edited by Majid KhosraviNik, 15–37. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), it analyses reaction-emoji metrics and 2,800 netizen comments following the recirculation of the clip by Utusan Malaysia Online. The findings identify three interlocking mechanisms of political violence: (1) affective disciplining organised through emoji-driven ridicule; (2) embodied degradation via animalisation and sexualisation that recode political agency as bodily subordination; and (3) moral-religious sanction, in which appeals to haram (religiously forbidden), kafir (infidel), calls for fatwa (religious rulings), and eschatological imagery authorise exclusion from political and religious community. Sexualisation functions as a key intensifier that binds gendered hostility to racialised and religious boundary-work. The paper argues that framing such attacks as mere “online misconduct” obscures their political function in deterring participation, eroding democratic voice, and policing the boundaries of political belonging.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Violence against women in politics
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results and discussion
    • 4.1Affective disciplining
    • 4.2Embodied degradation
      • 4.2.1Ontological downgrading
      • 4.2.2Instrumentalised subordination
      • 4.2.3Pornographic contamination
    • 4.3Moral-religious sanction
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
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