
Can Public Asian Studies create space for untangling the knotted intertwinement of gender, religion, and culture for the purpose of enhancing public understanding and engagement? This panel aims to carve out such a space by addressing and interrogating the publicness and privacy of the ‘Muslim’ body. It acknowledges the ‘knotted’ nature of the ‘Muslim’ body that, though a dynamic locus of knowledge, can be treated as an object of cultural and religious sensitivity. This results in a range of outcomes, including avoidance, simplification, and homogenisation of gendered, religious, and cultural nuance and complexity. This roundtable panel brings together scholars who will interrogate the ‘Muslim’ body from various biopolitical aspects: ageing and trans, maternal, ritually cut, and ‘possessed’ by spirits in Malaysia and Singapore, and present them in a way that invites a wider critical conversation that deconstructs the terms of debate about the ‘private’ and ‘intimate’ for better public understanding. Whilst the geographical focus of the panel may be the Malay societies of Malaysia and Singapore, it seeks to draw generative connections that construct and reconstruct the ‘Muslim’ body across multiple scales: local, regional, and global.
PANEL
Chairperson: Lin Hongxuan | NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies
Alicia Izharuddin | NUS Department of Malay Studies
Nurul Huda Mohd Razif | Kyoto University
Syahirah Rasheed | Independent Scholar
Pavithra Menon | PhD student, CAS, National University of Singapore