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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...

Edited by Shirlena Huang and Kanchana N. Ruwanpura, the Handbook on Gender in Asia makes a timely contribution to the body of scholarship on gender, geography and migration within and from Asia, in...

The laughing woman represents a special kind of excess and cautionary reminder of social and moral decay. With her head cast back, the open laugh of a woman is disparaged as a sign of provocation, ...

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...

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...

What is the impact of the rising class of the academic precariat - defined as academic workers contracted to teach and conduct research on short-term, zerohour contracts - on Malaysia’s rapid industrialisation of higher education? This article seeks to illuminate the employment pattern of this growing class of insecure academic labour at a time when there is a decline in tenured appointments and academic positions for new PhD graduates in Malaysia. The work environment of the academic precariat is characterised as flexible at best and exploitative at worst; an average academic precariat may experience a drop in wages commensurable with their qualification and experience, lack of employment benefits and office hours, and "docility" under the disciplinary management of a neoliberal institution. This article also seeks a sensitive reading of how freelance academics understand themselves by highlighting their affective or emotional labour and whose experiences are specifically shaped by insecurity, vulnerability and uncertainty. Taking a sociological approach to examining this phenomenon, this article argues that the rise of the academic precariat can be attributed to the discursive climate within and at the peripheries of Malaysian higher education that operates alongside the restructuring of funds into higher institutions of learning. Such a discursive climate surrounds the unstable semantic reproduction of the designation "academic" and its catch-all usage to describe individuals within and at the peripheries of academia. Arguing that the rise of the academic precariat is a bleak indication of the state of higher education in Malaysia, this article closes with strategies for mobilising resistance and marshalling support through the strengthening of unions for full-time, part-time and freelance academics.

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 aftermath of 9/11 saw the production of images in the Western media that suggested the link between Islam and the oppression of Muslim women. In response to the often vilifying Western discourse about Islam and Muslim women is the emergence of films by Indonesian filmmakers intent on representing a more peaceful and tolerant image of the faith. These films now belong to a recently identified genre of ‘Islamic cinema'. Representations of ‘strong', career-minded, highly educated, and vocal veiled Muslim women in Indonesian cinema came to counter the silent and passive veiled woman circulating in Western mass media. While these representations have been mostly unproblematic and often championed as ‘positive’, the face veil or cadar is contentious. In the 2011 film Khalifah by Indonesian filmmaker Nurman Hakim, the cadar is a visible marker of otherness, a political, cultural and national problem to be solved. This article discusses the ways in which the veiled body in Indonesian cinema has become inscrib...

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...

This chapter considers how, in certain Islamic films produced during the New Order, nationalised images of men and women are reproduced in narratives about proto-nationalism and the Indonesian nation. These images thereby represent the gendered dimension of New Order films that, according to Karl Heider, construct ‘Indonesian nation and culture’. Masculinity in New Order Islamic films emphasises the role of men as restorers of order in a morally wayward society. Films that engage this theme: Sembilan Wali, Pahlawan Goa Selarong, Al-Kautsar, and Perjuangan dan Doa feature men who personify social change and guide their fellow Muslims to a new understanding of Islam and (proto)-nationhood. In Tjoet Nha Dhien and Para Perintis Kemerdekaan female characters have prominent roles as rebel leaders of an emerging nation, their leadership is offset by an emphasis of their domesticity; namely their roles as mothers and wives.

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.

Representations of women in Indonesian cinema, particularly those in the New Order period, have often been described as centred around the Freudian model of virgin-mother/virago-whore. That the limited range of feminine representations in Indonesian cinema is a symptom of a lack of women behind the scenes can be attributed to the gender inequality in the political economy of the industry itself. In some cases, the binary model of femininity is a product of changing economic imperatives. Market demands and ‘disorderly’ women of the 1990s triumphed over New Order regulations on sex and violence contributing to the disintegration of the order-disorder-order narrative cycle upon which the New Order government depended to symbolise its legitimacy. The film industry is a risk-averse industry in which large financial investments are marshalled into making a commercial film. Being risk averse, filmmakers are more inclined to produce narratives that may appeal to the majority of audiences. This may include narratives whose storytelling devices reproduce sexist and titillating material to conform with the assumption that sexual objectification of women sells and that safe images of domestic and demure women do not challenge the viewer’s sensibilities. The film industry is also the preserve of the elite that privileges those with greater financial resources. The industry may indeed be a microcosm of a society where men in general are politically and financially more powerful than women.

To fulfil Islamic cinema’s function as a medium for dakwah, films may begin with excerpts from sacred texts, a sermon, or a statement to suggest that a lesson may be learnt from watching the film. These devices have been criticised by prominent Indonesian filmmakers for being too formalistic and superficial in their evocation of Islamic principles. Despite the criticisms, the didactic devices are routinely incorporated into the Islamic film genre along with a standard narrative formula, aesthetic cues, ethics of film production, and extra-textual modes of publicity, such as poster art and theme songs. The purpose of films as a medium for dakwah throughout the history of Indonesian film indicate the perceived role of cinema as a powerful source of moral good. But even then, the making of Islamic films is fraught with political, commercial, and ideological obstacles. Although the relaxation of strict media regulations after the fall of the New Order was welcomed by some, new media freedoms were greeted with a censorious backlash that was seen as ‘Islamic’ in its manifestation.

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.

Islamic films are thought to generate ‘positive’ images of moderate Indonesian Muslims for audiences to empathise with. This function of the Islamic film genre is more political in the post-New Order period to counter the negative terrorist stereotypes associated with the global aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The tension between the commercial interests and spiritual aims of the Islamic film genre disassociates it from the sensationalist elements that make other mainstream Indonesian films successful. In other words, Islamic films that have made it into the mainstream are free from sex and violence. It is fair to surmise, however, that the tension is not easily resolved as the boundaries that separate commercial entertainment from spiritual reflection within the Islamic film genre are far from definitive.