The Hope of the Nation: Moral Panics and the Construction of Teenagerhood in Contemporary Malaysia

Abstract

This chapter looks at a series of moral panics about the place of young people in the new Malaysia’. With unprecedented growth rates and energetic debates about a corporate Islam as the way forward for Malays if not the whole of Malaysia, cultural productions about contemporary Malaysian modernity have become critically centered on anxieties about the ‘family’, sexuality and ‘the youth. It is not straightforward to write about the ‘youth’ in Malaysia, given both the absence of a youth voice within many cultural productions as well as within the often prescriptive social welfare work about youth as ‘problems’. Independent Malaysia has seen growing debates about the ways in which the country m..