4.1 Narratives of the Ideal Pregnant Body
4.1.4 The Ideal Conduct & Attire
The preceding examples illustrate how the discourse that places the pregnant body as a weak cocoon has permeated into the popular psyche. This has also resulted in the monitoring of a pregnant woman‟s bodily conduct as it enters the public space. So, Dijah was reproached by the other teachers for possibly compromising her babies by “walking too fast and shouting in class”. Siti was also seen as deviant for being too active:
“People will always tell me to be careful, there is someone inside because I walk very fast. They will also see that I am ok because I can eat any food I want and they will say that I am pregnant but don‟t act like I am pregnant. I will carry my son alone and travel here and there without my husband. So people keep asking me aren‟t I tired, aren‟t I tired because I was quite active.”
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These accounts illustrate how my informants and their relations saw embodied performance as influencing the outcome of the fetus. It can also be inferred from these accounts that my informants‟ social group subscribed to the dominant discourse that expected women to alter their embodied actions to accommodate to the well-being of their child. This then explains why my informants‟ orang tua (elders) own experiences of maternity have also influenced my younger informants‟ ideas of the ideal pregnant body. This sometimes caused my informants to have a discouraging view of their maternal bodies:
“So when compared to her, my mother says „why are you so lembek (weak)‟? She says that if you are weak, later your son will be weak but I say because my first trimester was really bad. I had morning sickness which only my grandma could understand because my grandma experienced morning sickness like me, my mother didn‟t.
So my mother didn‟t understand why I was so weak, why I had to be in bed all day long. So the comparison is still there in the form of how active or not active we were. And then I said, it‟s so sad when your mother says your fat and so weak. (Diana)
Accordingly, the older age group also partook in creating notions about the ideal image of the pregnant body. This was especially prevalent in their conversations about the appropriate attire and conduct during pregnancy.
Therefore, for Ms. Idayu and Mdm Kamisah, pregnant women should wear baggy clothes to hide their pregnancies. As such, Mdm Ramlah does not feel that pregnant women today are conforming to the ideal as they “wear tight clothes as if wanting to menunjuk (show-off) their pregnancies”. This is unlike their generation:
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“when we were pregnant, we were malu (shy). It is only when other people see our big stomach, then they know that we are pregnant. We never tell anyone. I remembered sticking a sour plum at the back of my mouth to stop me from throwing up when I am visiting people. So people won‟t know that I am pregnant. Only when they see our big stomach, they will then comment on my pregnancy”.
(Mdm Mak Nyah)
The orang tua continually expressed their views about the ideal pregnant conduct and attire to their younger counterparts. They utilized their experiences of their embodied maternal performance to critique my informants‟ management of their maternal bodies. This has then resulted in dissonance between the two age groups as can be seen in Mdm Kamisah‟s comments on her granddaughter, Diana‟s and her sister‟s pregnancies:
“They all wear very tight. Shyness is a trait of our Iman (faith), I tell them. You all have knowledge, not that you don‟t. You know the laws from young already. I already taught them from young religion so they know what is halal (lawful), haram (unlawful), dosa (sin), pahala (spiritual reward). They already understand. So if they still want to behave like that then it is up to them.”
In her study of Malay kinship, Janet Carsten (1997) suggests how the hearth is a site of memory and the creation of kinship bonds. Similar to Rudie (1994), she also discussed how mothers and grandmothers are involved in managing women‟s experiences of motherhood and maternity. Not unlike the hearth, the older women‟s bodies act as a memory site on which they can extract their experiential knowledge to transmit to their younger pregnant kin. Interestingly, these accounts also illustrate how the older informants saw their pregnancy
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experiences as embodying the ideal. Therefore, they expected the younger informants to look to them for guidance. This became even more evident as I explored the strategies that my younger informants employed to achieve the ideal pregnant body.