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Among committed readers of romantic fiction in Malaysia, constructed ideals of intimacy are mobilised as a matter of personal moral enterprise and a panacea for emotional asymmetry between the sexe...

Women from newly liberated postcolonial societies have produced fiction and non-fiction work with a critical view on women’s inferior status and discriminatory cultural practices that powerfully re...

What accounts for the endurance of forced marriage (kahwin paksa) narratives in Malaysian public culture? How does one explain the ways popular fascination with forced marriage relate to assumptions about heteronormative institutions and practices? In a society where most who enter into marriages do so based on individual choice, the enduring popularity of forced marriage as a melodramatic trope in fictional love stories suggests an ambivalence about modernity and egalitarianism. This ambivalence is further excavated by illuminating the intertextual engagement by readers, publishers and booksellers of Malay romantic fiction with a mediated discourse on intimacy and cultural practices. This article finds that forced marriage in the intimate publics of Malay romance is delivered as a kind of melodramatic mode, a storytelling strategy to solve practical problems of experience. Intertextual narratives of pain and struggle cast light on ‘redha’ (submission to God’s will) and ‘sabar’ (patience), emotional virtues that are mobilised during personal hardship and the challenge of maintaining successful marital relations. I argue that ‘redha’ and ‘sabar’ serve as important linchpins for the reproduction of heteronormative institutions and wifely obedience (taat). This article also demonstrates the ways texts are interwoven in the narratives about gender roles, intimacy, and marital success (or lack thereof) and how they relate to the modes of romantic melodrama.

This essay reviews three books that investigate the intellectual significance of decentering Eurocentric models in sociology. Each takes a different approach: Syed Farid Alatas and Vineeta Sinha’s Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon employs the comparative biographical study of ‘canonical’ and less well known non-Western social theorists. Julian Go and George Lawson’s edited volume, Global Historical Sociology, develops a robust paradigm that departs from the ‘methodological nationalism’ that defines and limits contemporary sociology and related disciplines. The third book in this review, James V Spickard’s Alternative Sociologies of Religion: Through Non-Western Eyes, turns traditional sociology of religion on its head by examining contemporary Christianity and Islam using concepts developed in ancient China and 14th-century Tunisia. The three books share a similar aim: to shed light on the limits and oversight of Eurocentric sociology that emphasizes the stable sovereign nation and the individual but fails to provide due recognition to the interrelationships and mutual dependence that propel social identities in motion across time and space.

Voluntary unveiling by Muslim women has largely been overlooked within the context of Islamization. In Muslim-majority societies where the hijab is not legally imposed on women, Muslim wome...

Non-normative genders and sexualities were sutured into the cultural fabric at the dawn of Reformasi in Indonesia, the period of democratic renewal after the fall of General Suharto in 1998, when same-sex romance and transgender identities began to make a significant presence in the wave of counter-cultural filmmaking. Two films about transgender motherhood from this period are discussed in this chapter: the popular 2006 film Realita, Cinta, dan Rock n Roll (Reality, Love, and Rock n Roll) and the 2011 film Lovely Man. Both films demonstrate the stereotypical conventions of transgender identities onscreen—the ‘reveal’, hyperfeminine drag, and the embodiment of trans-femininity by muscular leading men. This chapter considers the ways in which trans-motherhood reconfigures the Indonesian nuclear family into a more unsettling/unsettled unit that resists fixity of boundaries. I argue that ‘archipelagic intergenerational relations’ bring into focus the ways in which the Indonesian family is transed when the transgender mother and biological child reunite after estrangement. Archipelagic intergenerational relations are intertextual and rely on the ever-shifting ways transgender characters are defined and captured in Indonesian cinema and discourse.

The rise in LGBT-themed novels in Indonesia over the last decade demonstrates the sea-change in social attitudes and the public presence of sexual and gender minorities in Indonesia. The genre emerges from the popularity of sexually-charged novels by female authors such as Ayu Utami and Djenar Maesa Ayu. However, many novels were criticised for the supposed westernisation of Indonesian culture that threatens the national identity and moral disposition of its readers. This article explores the underlying themes of these criticisms—nationhood, cultural authenticity, and morality—and juxtaposes them with the claims of cultural authenticity and legitimacy made by gay and lesbi Indonesians. Representations of “traditional” homoeroticisms in the novel Mairil by Syarifuddin bring these lines of arguments together and synthesise a discursive space where cultural and national authenticities are “queered.” It is my contention that religious and traditional elements that foster same-sex practices offer a key...

The image of the veiled Muslim woman in post-New Order Islamic cinema is caught in the geopolitical discourse of the post-9/11 era. Although she demonstrates agency, her body is prominently foregrounded in cinematic narratives and visual codes as a site for Islamic and moral issues. She embodies geopolitical discourse through the veil she wears and her Muslim femininity is defined through suffering and abuse. This chapter, however, makes a case for agency in domestic struggles, terrorism, and religious conversion displayed by the female characters discussed even though their images are produced by Muslim men in the service of debates about women and Islam. This chapter also features an analysis of the rise of Islamic film female actors which reveals the intertextual relationship between film and off-screen image that articulates a new moral cinematic aesthetic and regime of representation in post-New Order Indonesia.

Through events such as the attacks on 9/11 and its global reverberations, the fear of global Islamist terrorism, and the continued intellectual links with the seat of Islamic learning in the Middle East, the Muslim man in post-New Order cinema needs to be worldly and aware of his place in the world. However, this awareness comes equipped with the Othering of masculinities that do not fit the standard of Indonesian Islam and Indonesian Muslim masculinity. This chapter shows that although there have been attempts by post-New Order filmmakers to recoup the image of the Muslim man, the results are more ambiguous and sometimes contradictory. Fear of terrorism, economic disparity, and anxieties about Islamic practice all contribute to an ambivalent cinematic narrative of what it means to be a Muslim man in contemporary Indonesia. This ambivalence has meant that the divide between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslim man in Indonesian Islamic cinema is sometimes less clear than it used to be in the New Order period.