"Controlling ourselves, by ourselves": risk assemblages on Malaysia's assembly lines

Since the early 1990s, the Malaysian government has identified factories as high risk for HIV and AIDS. Signaling epidemiological concerns over the rising rates of HIV among factory workers, a significant proportion of whom are women, the label also appeared to reconstitute stereotypes of factory women as dangerously sexual and of factories as immoral spaces. Drawing on ethnographic research in the export processing zones of Penang, Malaysia in the mid-1990s, I examine the meanings and experiences of HIV risk among factory women themselves. Data were analyzed using discourse and grounded theory methods, the former to identify women's multiple modes of rationalizing HIV risks, and the latter to theorize the sources and significance of women's HIV risk assemblages. The heuristic of assemblages as localized knowledge spaces helped to show that biomedical and socioreligious risk lexica operated not as fixed epistemological categories but as situational resources in women's risk scripts. Overall, women desired multiple risk knowledges to help them "control themselves by themselves," a project of reflexive self-shaping mediated by the diverse and discordant discourses of gender, ethnicity, and modernity in Malaysia that shaped how HIV risks were engendered and experienced.