Female Youth Responding to Popular TV Fiction: Unconscious Malay Psyche and Resistance

摘要

Within contemporary culture, resistance among youth remains a scholarly fodder. Portrayal of youth’s resistance against hegemonic, elitist claims can describe such situation. This paper discusses this issue by exploring some of the many female youth voices resisting to governmentanxieties over youth involvement with modernity as enmeshed in popular TV fiction. Instead of indexing to modernity-related ‘transgression’ as claimed by some nation-state elitists, the findings indicate female youth resisting these claims by regressing to local, familiar, fragments.This resistance against government-sanctioned voices leads to an understanding of what we will call unconscious Malay psyche. By exploring focus group interviews among female youth, ‘windows’ to understanding resistance, cultural subjectivities, and youth culture are exposed.