Happy awal Muharram and secular New Year!

I’d like to wish every reader a wonderful Islamic and secular New Year! May 2009/1430 bring us more peace and happiness.
As for those new year’s resolutions, I’m planning on upgrading my library with more books on gender studies with a postcolonialist slant and Malay novels (because you can never have enough books), but paradoxically, I [...]

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Book review: Contrary Visions – Women and Work in Malay Novels Written by Women by Christine Campbell

Despite the clunky title, Contrary Visions (2004, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka) offers a rather comprehensive review of novels by Malay women written between 1940 and 1995, including a couple of early Indonesian novels thrown in for good, hazy archipelagoan measure. Alongside Virginia Hooker’s Writing a New Society: Social Change Through the Novel in Malay (2000), [...]

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Year end hiatus

Allow me to take this opportunity to thank you for visiting my fledgling blog these last few months. I would also like to thank all the blogs that were kind enough to promote my little corner of thoughts. This blog started out as a project to practice my writing skills and an extension of my [...]

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Happy Eid al-Adha

Wishing all Muslims a blessed Eid al-Adha and Selamat Hari Raya Haji! More great pictures of Eid al-Adha celebrated around world at The Guardian.

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For Muslim women, the personal is political

The recent fatwa on assumed female homosexuality has opened another can of worms. Yet again, the Malaysian religious authorities insist on tightening their grip on Muslim women by policing the way they dress, and who they choose to love, without fully understanding the complex nature of human sexuality. Meanwhile, a worrying proportion of the Malaysian [...]

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Reinforcing stereotypes through romance – Mills and Boon style

I have never read a Mills and Boon novel in my entire life, and am proud of it. I can go as far as to say that touching them might soil my hands. Even during my girls school days – a time to channel all that naughty hormones into sleazy paperbacks, I hardly knew about [...]

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Open thread: Films you’ve watched this year and loved, or hated.

I’ve been lucky to have the opportunity to watch pretty much any film I want whilst living here in the UK. And if you, like me, love watching films, you would agree that there’s no place better than where there is little to no form of censorship. In the last few years, I have been [...]

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