Queering Malaysian Malay-Muslim Cohesiveness (Op-Ed)

My recent chapter in Queer Sexualities: Diversifying Queer, Queering Diversity entitled “Malaysian Masculine Exposé: Queering the Politics of Non-Heteronormative Malay-Muslim Men” argues that non-heteronormative Malaysian Malay-Muslim men confront and lay bare political agendas which rely on the heteronormative assemblage of masculinity and sexuality. This assemblage, which has assumed spaces of privilege, converges with, affects and is influenced by issues of religion, ethnicity, patriarchy and citizenship. Insistence on performativities of masculinity and men’s sexuality serve to undergird an imagined “Malay-Muslim cohesiveness.” While “non-heteronormative” refers to a gamut of gender identities and sexual expressions that defies gender and sexual conventions, I use it in reference to men whose lives are incongruous with socio-cultural and religio-political endorsements of masculinity and heterosexuality as essentialised and stable traits. Any variation of or divergence from these definitions is unequivocally excoriated as deviant and/or sinful. In queering the aforementioned political agendas, I challenge the normalisations and uncritical acceptance of these intersecting issues, and foreground the lived experiences of non-heteronormative men. My aim is to expose how the imagined Malay-Muslim cohesiveness belies the real intent of political security and power … Read more in Goh, Joseph N. “Queering Malaysian Malay-Muslim Cohesiveness.” New Mandala (August 2013). Australian National University (ANU) College of Asia and the Pacific.