Beyonce, PAS, and biopower

The American entertainer Beyonce Knowles is going to perform at a concert at the Bukit Jalil Stadium in KL on Oct 25. Expectedly, the PAS youth people want the government to ban her performance, arguing that performers like her promote hedonism.

PAS Youth vice president Ahmad Sabki told the press: "We are against western entertainers who promote hedonism. We do not want our youths to be misled."

I suppose Beyonce ( right ) is indeed well known for her good looks, her revealing costumes, and her provocative dance steps. In 2007, her proposed concert was cancelled after she rejected the dress code that was imposed on her as a condition for permitting her to perform in KL.

As the day draws nearer to her concert this year, I am wondering what conditions have been imposed on her dress code again. Would she be required to cover herself from her head to her toes, so as not to "mislead" impressionable gullible innocent Malaysian youths?

If indeed she covers herself completely in conservative clothes like our Malaysian lady entertainers, will she be able to perform all her very challenging dance steps without falling onto the stage?

I am no great fan of pop culture or pop music entertainment. But I do notice that all the female entertainers in the US are equally provocative in their dress code and equally provocative in their dancing anyway.

They are being beamed into our sitting room through MTV channel, and youths can switch on and be exposed to the "hedonistic" temptation of entertainers.

So what can a ban on Beyonce's live concert in KL keep out that temptation to "hedonism"? What "hedonism" are the PAS people talking about anyway, easy, cheap and quick sensual pleasures connected with watching a woman's half-naked body?

Then I am reminded of what Michel Foucault described as "biopower". The human body is one of the primary templates in our social milieu for power to be exercised on individuals in groups for the purpose of discipline and control.

Battleground for two major narratives

In many social institutions, in schools, prisons, army camps, and hospitals, the layers of rules and regulations subject their inmates to long-term conditioning to discipline. Using Foucault's tool box, we can also begin an analysis to understand the Beyonce controversy in Malaysia.

Here, Beyonce's body is the battleground for two major narratives to clash and fight for dominance in the public sphere. In a sense, it is the miniature reflection of a global fight between two discourses.

If Beyonce had lived and performed in 17th century America, the period set for Nathaniel Hawthorne's masterpiece The Scarlet letter , she too would have been severely punished in severely puritanical Boston at that time.

The grip of Christian puritanical orthodoxy on American way of life then would have been welcome by PAS in Malaysia today.

But the United States of America has gone through several revolutions in more ways than one since then. Gender relationship and gender identity have undergone radical and irreversible transformation beyond belief, after the feminist revolution of the 1960s.

Add to that, is the emergence of the American entertainment industry as a multinational business empire that impinges upon all cultures of the world.

As they say, sex and violence sell best in entertainment. This is more than reflected in the entertainment fare served up in movies and music, especially the new medium of the music video.

Therefore, their female performers are expected to wear the most revealing costumes on stage and perform dance moves that sometimes border on the pornographic.

The idea is to block off the intellectual criticism of the materials being presented, so that the senses of the audience can be completely drowned out in the sound and fury of the performance on stage and on video.

The bright flashing lights and the surreal backdrop of the performance are supposed to create a mystique surrounding the lead performer, to manufacture an aura befitting a diva, a sort of Goddess.

That way, you attract faithful adoring screaming fans, thereby guaranteeing massive sales and astronomical profits for the company and the performers.

Dominant pop cultural

That is the narrative of the entertainment empire of the Western world. Thanks to the likes of Michael Jackson and Beyonce Knowles, it is now the dominant pop cultural narrative on the air waves in countries that have any aspiration to modernity and consumerism.

But we all know that the world of Beyonce on stage is a world of appearance, and not one of reality. In "real" life, we do not see women dressed like that on the streets, and for dancers, they do not gyrate as she does on the dance floor.

I doubt if any person is ever lured into "immorality" by just watching Beyonce perform! We know her image on stage is a mirage, and so we keep our feet on the floor.

In fact, I admire her youth and health when I watch her performance. She may look sexy, but she is also very athletic; I doubt if I can do point-one percent of what she does, in my old age.

Still, I see this western pop culture as neither moral nor immoral in itself, though we can debate on the morality and immorality of cultural capitalism to no end.

But I do not take Beyonce that seriously; it is just entertainment, another commodity on the mass consumer market. Consumers should have their choice, even of objectifying the woman's body. That is the risk of freedom.

But inevitably, there are traditional forces all over the world, including our own PAS Youth people, who see this sort of pop culture as an assault on their traditional cultural or religious values. They will resist it as much as they can.

There must be traditional cultures that view the female body as so sacrosanct, that it must be wrapped from head to toe, away from the lecherous gaze of the ever-horny males. There would be those conservative elements all over the world that blame the attractiveness of the female body to man as the cause of sex crimes.

I do not subscribe to this view, because its characterisation of human nature in gender relation and gender identity is simply too simplistic. I would even propose that we as a collective human race have yet to come to understand in a comprehensive and penetrating fashion our own sexuality, despite Freud and Foucault.

But once again, on this issue of Beyonce's concert in KL, we witness the struggle for biopower by two anachronistic and diametrically opposed narratives. In our multiracial and modernising nation, things are in flux, and diverse forces are at work. It is hard for us to say categorically who is right and who is wrong.

But by understanding this as a battle for biopower, we can begin to see how the truth in each narrative has come to be THE truth.

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SIM KWANG YANG can be reached at kenyalang578@hotmail.com.