Content area
Full text
Abstract: This article highlights several performance personas-including novelty and Islamic piety-at work in the career of Fauziah Gambus, a female gambus player in a highly androcentric musical scene. I argue that gendered assumptions and stereotypes have not restricted her but have instead enabled her to gain more popular success and notoriety than many of her Malaysian male counterparts. In unpacking her career, I examine how Fauziah synthesizes a variety of self-promotion strategies to achieve success beyond traditional gambus music channels.
Artikel ini membincangkan beberapapersona ekspresif-,termasuk kebaruan dan ketakwaan Islam-yang relevan dalam kerjaya Fauziah Gambus, pemaingambusperempuan dalam masyarakat muzik yang kebanyakannya termasuk lelaki. Saya berpendapat bahawa andaian dan stereotaip jantına tidak menghadkan Fauziah tetapi sebaliknya membolehkan kejayaan yang lebih popular daripada ramai pemuzik gambus lelaki. Semasa saya meneliti kerjayanya, saya belajar macamana Fauziah menggabungkan pelbagai strategi pramosi diri untuk mencapai kejayaan di luar laluan-laluan muzik gambus tradisional.
Introduction
The Malaysian gambus (lute) is an instructive lens for studying issues of race, gender, and Islam in contemporary Malaysian social life. In Malaysia, gambus is a blanket term for a variety of short-necked plucked lutes of Turko-Arab and Central Asian origin, including the well-known oud. These lutes reflect deep historical roots across Maritime Southeast Asia despite their global iconic status as instruments of Arab and Ottoman-Turkic cultural legacies. In contemporary Malaysia, a subculture of professional musicians, film composers, luthiers, students, and pedagogues carry on traditions of adapting the gambus to a wide variety of Malaysian performing arts genres. These genres include sung poetry, social dance forms, theater traditions, and musical repertoires modeled by societies throughout a historical Indian Ocean trade network.1 Despite the internal diversity reflected in this subculture, the Malaysian gam bus scene is dominated by men.21 have met a total of three female gam bus players, only one of whom continues to support herself by exclusively playing the instrument professionally.
The participation of women in the gendered subculture of Malaysian gambus musicians reveals three major themes: Malay racial-national and regional identity formation, Islamic and Arab-influenced Muslim social formation, and gender dynamics within these formations. I examine how gendered assumptions lead to increased opportunities for self-promotion while also restricting access to gender-exclusive creative channels for female gambus musicians engaging in a masculinized performance sphere. Following Saba...