As a student of sociology, I have always been drawn to understanding how minorities are represented within a nation’s social and political framework. This goes beyond surface-level portrayals such as legal recognition as I am more interested in how vulnerable groups become unwillingly entangled in a state’s moral and economic agenda, often serving a broader political purpose precisely through their marginalisation.

My reflection stems from a fleeting TikTok video I came across, in which a Malaysian Muslim woman claimed that zina (adultery) is a socioeconomic crisis. Despite the video’s informal nature and uncertain credibility, it prompted me to think about those who may resort to zina due to poverty, such as sex workers. As these groups of workers are largely obscured in public discourse because of the moral stigma surrounding sex in a predominantly Muslim society, it felt worthwhile to explore how their position within this dynamic is sustained in Malaysia.

As I conducted further research, I was surprised to notice a recurring and revealing pattern where most news articles about prostitution or Malaysia’s red-light districts predominantly feature exclusively foreign women, rather than the majority local Malay-Muslim citizens. This observation prompted me to raise deeper questions about the racial and religious dynamics underpinning Malaysia’s hidden economy. Why are the foreigners sustaining such a precarious economy? And what does the Malaysian government’s stance reveal, given that sex work remains illegal under national law?

Race, religion, and gender intersect to shape the identities and visibility of sex workers in Malaysia. Drawing on concepts of racialised frameworks and multiculturalism, I argue that the hidden economy of sex work is both a product and a symptom of Malaysia’s broader political economy, one that sustains its vision of moral and social order by criminalising and exploiting those positioned as “others.” Within this framework, I also examine how Malay-Muslim women are situated as moral symbols of the nation. Their apparent protection under the ethno-moral regime often conceals a deeper paradox. While they are shielded from association with “immoral” labour, they are simultaneously subjected to heightened surveillance and moral policing, revealing a different kind of vulnerability embedded within Malaysia’s gendered moral order.

Background

To set the context, I will first outline several relevant articles alongside Malaysia’s key legal frameworks to better situate my argument. For the purposes of this essay, ethnicity and religion will be examined as intertwined categories, given that in Malaysia, the notion of the “Malay-Muslim” operates as a singular social identity.

In reviewing various online articles on sex work, prostitution, and Malaysia’s red-light districts, a clear narrative emerged which is the consistent portrayal of sex work as a foreign phenomenon. Headlines frequently emphasise words such as “foreign”  or “immigration”  in reporting police raids, suggesting a fixation on locating an external culprit. This framing not only displaces accountability but also a conspicuous absence of any majority Malay-Muslim subjects. One article  even categorised sex workers by ethnicity, noting that clients liked local women (Malay, Chinese, Indian alike) but tended to avoid Malay women completely due to their legal and religious vulnerability under Sharia law.

This observation is significant when considered within Malaysia’s dual legal system, which operates under both civil and Islamic law. While prostitution is criminalised under civil law for all citizens, Islamic law, applicable specifically to Muslims, imposes harsher penalties, including caning and imprisonment. Beyond just moral regulation, the broader structure of inequality is reinforced by other legal frameworks such as the 1971 New Economic Policy (NEP), which privileges the Malay-Muslim majority and deepens socioeconomic disparities between different groups.

Concepts

Building on this long-standing separation between the Malay-Muslim majority and other groups, this analysis primarily engages with the concept of racialised frameworks within Malaysia’s model of multiculturalism. This racial organisation of society has been reinforced through postcolonial development policies, which continue to link ethno-religious identity with both economic and moral worth.

Development policies in Malaysia reveal how state-defined categories both shape and are shaped by ethnic relations, producing uneven access to legitimacy and social respectability. The Malay-Muslim majority, positioned as the moral guardians of the nation, are afforded protection and privilege under a framework that reinforces their economic as well as cultural authority. In contrast, minority and migrant groups are informally excluded from this moral economy, rendering their unconventional labour, including sex work, simultaneously hypervisible as “foreign vice” and invisible as legitimate economic contribution. These structural inequalities are also further reinforced in public narratives, which exacerbate negative perceptions of minority sex workers and perpetuate their marginalisation, keeping them trapped in cycles of economic precarity.

Analysis

At the structural level, Malaysia’s government policies, particularly the NEP, were designed to elevate the socioeconomic position of ethnic Malays in the decades following independence. While these initiatives aimed to address historical inequalities and foster national unity, they have also institutionalised ethnic hierarchies within Malaysia’s political economy. Affirmative action measures have consolidated Malay-Muslim dominance in formal sectors, effectively shaping who has access to “respectable” economic participation.

Conversely, non-Malay citizens are systematically constrained by their exclusion from these redistributive benefits, limiting their social and economic mobility. This exclusion is even more pronounced for foreign migrant workers, who, despite constituting a significant portion of Malaysia’s labour force, remain outside formal labour protections and are subject to precarious employment, social marginalisation, and legal vulnerability. As a result, non-Malay-Muslim groups disproportionately occupy Malaysia’s informal and hidden economies (not only in sex work but also in domestic labour and other precarious forms of employment).

These dynamics illustrate how informal economies emerge from structural exclusion and the state’s selective regulation of labour within a racialised political economy framework. In this sense, the NEP’s racialised logic not only privileges Malay-Muslim participation in the “respectable” economy but simultaneously relegates others to the economic margins. This duality mirrors Malaysia’s dual legal system, where the formal recognition and protection of certain groups is paired with the systematic invisibilisation and criminalisation of others.

The separation between civil and Sharia law further entrenches Malaysia’s moral and ethno-religious dichotomies. By legally distinguishing Muslims from non-Muslims, the state protects the moral image of the Malay-Muslim majority while rendering the labour and bodies of minorities morally suspect or expendable. These punitive measures not only deter participation but also symbolically position Malay-Muslim women as inherently incompatible with certain forms of low-status labour. This institutionalised “outcasting” ensures that the hidden economies the state seeks to suppress are able to continue to operate, albeit invisibly. In practice, this creates almost a moral and legal paradox. While sex work is officially illegal, the labour of non-Malay-Muslim workers is tolerated, as they are perceived to occupy a distinct, lower moral status. This differential treatment exemplifies the concept of the foreignisation of blame, whereby illegal or socially disapproved activities are attributed primarily to non-majority groups, deflecting scrutiny from the structural conditions that produce such labour.

It is also important to note that while Malaysia’s government structures explicitly institutionalise hierarchies through legal frameworks, public narratives serve as equally powerful mechanisms sustaining these inequalities too. Sex work, in particular, is predominantly framed in public and media discourse as one’s personal moral or legal failing rather than a manifestation of deeper socioeconomic forces. Police raids, arrests, and even deportations reinforce the dominant moral condemnation of sex work as inherently deviant, thereby diverting public attention away from the structural causes, such as economic precarity, labour market exclusion, and migration dynamics, that produce and reproduce the sex industry. Moral condemnation coupled with foreignisation, functions not simply as passive reflection but as active reinforcement of the dual economic and legal order imposed by the state—one that criminalises and marginalises certain bodies while still maintaining a stable supply of precarious labour that is can be argued as essential for capitalist accumulation. By normalising structural exclusion and shielding state policies from critique, public narratives perpetuate systemic inequalities tied to race, class, and migration within Malaysia’s political economy.

Gendered Lens

Yet, this moral economy also imposes a distinct form of control over Malay-Muslim women too, emphasising another layer of vulnerability. The language of “protection” functions as a gendered extension of the same ethno-moral order, one that does not merely exclude but actively disciplines. The state’s portrayal of Malay-Muslim women as needing moral protection, whether through Sharia enforcement, dress-code regulations, or public decency campaigns (Mahmood, 2014), serves an ideological rather than emancipatory purpose. Such “protection” safeguards the moral image of the Malay-Muslim nation more than it secures the lived safety or autonomy of women. By positioning women as vessels of communal virtue, the state transforms morality into a form of soft governance, where ideals of modesty and obedience become national symbols. I argue however, that this protection is deeply conditional, granted only to those who conform to patriarchal expectations of piety and chastity. Those who fail to do so are hence, not protected and instead, punished, revealing how morality operates as a mechanism of social control rather than genuine care.

This moral “protection” of Malay-Muslim women often translates, in practice, into intensified surveillance. Religious authorities, media outlets, and even ordinary citizens take part in monitoring women’s conduct, turning private behaviour into public spectacle through online shaming and state-sanctioned moral policing (KRYSS Network, 2021). Malay-Muslim women thus become hyper-visible as moral subjects (watched, regulated, and disciplined) yet paradoxically invisible in other domains, as reflected in Malaysia’s persistent gender inequality (United Nations Development Programme).

Their seeming absence from so-called “immoral” or “dirty” sectors such as sex work is not incidental but the outcome of a system that equates femininity with moral purity. This exclusion fosters an illusion that Malay-Muslim women are naturally protected from economic precarity, when it is actually, the structural poverty and limited formal employment opportunities that often push them into informal or hidden economies that society will then refuse to recognise.

Consequently, to be a Malay-Muslim woman is to inhabit a double bind. When one conforms, she is constantly surveilled as the bearer of communal virtual; when she deviates, she is punished both for her transgression, as well as for failing to embody the idealised image of moral womanhood. Morality hence becomes not a shield of care but a mechanism of discipline that sustains the patriarchal hierarchy within Malaysia’s political economy.

Conclusion

It is therefore evident that the same logic that marginalises migrant and non-Malay labour in the hidden economy also confines Malay-Muslim women within moral boundaries. Both race and gender operate as instruments that the state uses to sustain their authority: foreign and minority women are rendered disposable through criminalisation while the Malay-Muslim women are surveilled under the guise of moral protection. These processes are not oppositional but complementary, together, producing an order where exclusion and control pose as social harmony. Through this, the Malay-Muslim Male elite can consolidate their position as of dominance, anchoring the hierarchy of patriarchy, race and religion as the enduring foundations of Malaysia’s political economy.