Emotion and Passion in Gender Policy: The Medium is the Message
Venue: Penang Institute
Date: 7 April 2026
Time: 3:00 – 4:30pm
Speaker: Maznah Mohamad
Discussant: Azza Basarudin
About the Talk
Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message,”, argues that the form through which we communicate shapes society more deeply than the content itself. Feminist media theorist Sarah Sharma (2022) revisits his work to show how media technologies reproduce and amplify inequality. Drawing on these debates this talk will explore themes from the book, Sexuality and Islamic Spirituality in Early Malay Texts (2025) which traces how concepts of intimacy evolved from sixteenth-century Malay manuscripts—syair, hikayat, kitab—to early twentieth-century printed works.
Using two issues, “marital rape” and “wife-beating” as focal points, the talk examines how they are understood and transformed moving through the medium of spiritual text to instructional poetry to gender policy to legal code. How can the experience of the same story —its emotional force, social habits, disciplinary effects, and moral imagination— differ through the medium it is conveyed?
About the Speaker
Maznah Mohamad is Honorary Fellow at the Department of Malay Studies, National University of Singapore, and Professor of Gender Studies at the Asian Women’s Leadership University College, Penang. Her research spans Gender and Islamic Studies, Malaysian politics, and Malay manuscript traditions. Her authored books include The Divine Bureaucracy and Disenchantment of Social Life: A Study of Bureaucratic Islam in Malaysia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). Her latest co-authored book with Syahirah Rasheed, Sexuality and Islamic Spirituality in Early Malay Writings: A Textual History of Sex and Gender, was published by I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury in 2025.
About the Discussant
Azza Basarudin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). She writes and publishes on social and legal regimes of gender, feminist theories, Islam and gender, and transnational feminisms, with a special focus on Southeast Asia. Her book, Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia, was published by the University of Washington Press (2016). Her current research explores transgender lives and communal intimacies of Muslims in contemporary urban Malaysia. She is a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Research on Women and Gender (KANITA) at USM and Penang Institute.