Contested Public Spheres: Female Activism and Identity Politics in Malaysia

Product Description 1. 1 Researching the global everyday of women activists 1. 1 Researching the global everyday of women activists: Experiencing and doing globalisation Going through the broad spectrum of globalisation research and literature, one might be astonished at how much it assumes the force of global change, and how little of this literature demonstrates this force in an empirically grounded way. This study, being based on six months of empirical research in Malaysia in 2004, sets out to counter this lack of thick description of globalisation processes. It takes up the challenge of researching the “global everyday” (Appadurai 2000, 18) of civil society actors in Malaysia and focuses on how social activists belonging to different branches of the women’s movement selectively app- priate, transform and even create global meanings and materialise them in local practices. The methodological endeavour of combining globalisation research and ethnography has been taken up by a diversity of authors. Burawoy and his research team have developed a complex methodological framework by focusing on the experiential dimensions of globalisation. They want to produce a “grounded globalisation” or “perspectives on globalisations from below” (Burawoy 2000b, 338, 341). This perspective is very fruitful, as the notion of experiencing globalisation as “forces, connections, and imaginations” (Burawoy et al. eds. 2000) relocates the global in the local and ties both together in mutual constitution. Book Description Female Activism and Identity Politics in Malaysia From the Back Cover This ethnographic monograph deals with women’s organisations in an increasingly Islamised Malaysia and how they are fighting for women’s rights and gender equality. Departing from an in-depth description of the life-world of female activists, Anna Spiegel highlights the significance of the global negotiations of gender relations for identity politics, the articulation of the local and the global within translocally acting social movements and the significance of globalisation for female agency. The study discusses the role of counterpublics in the development of subversive identity constructions and the renegotiation of the normative bases of publicness in the gendered fields of dress, cultural belonging, epistemic culture and Islam. Bringing together the global and the local, this is a global ethnography in the truest sense. This book is essential reading for researchers in the social sciences, in particular, cultural studies, subaltern studies, sociology, gender studies and Islamic studies. In addition, it is also of interest to scientists looking for new research methodologies in the study of globalisation. About the Author Anna Spiegel is currently employed at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she is coordinating desiguALdades.net, the Research Network on Inderdependent Inequalities in Latin America.