Biography

I started questioning normative ideas of gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia during a casual excavation of my family archive. This fascination was compounded when I learned that my family history was anything but an anomaly during Imagined Malaysia’s project, “#TanpaPerkauman: The Road to Discrimination-Free Malaysia”, through which I interrogated much of the nationalistic, reductionist narratives I had internalised. While official histories have downplayed the region’s inherent hybridity and fluidity through rigid racial and gendered demarcations, my research assistantship with Sudarshana Chanda uncovered how interethnic families disrupted such categorisations in their lived experience. Inspired by these discoveries, my MPhil project at Cambridge aims to study how colonial subjects participated in the making and remaking of sexual and gender norms in contemporary Malaysia and Singapore through engaging with British Malaya’s incoherent legal regime that disciplined sexuality. I look forward to what are to be transformative interdisciplinary exchanges with fellow Gates Cambridge scholars as I begin my journey in writing inclusive social histories that shed light on the complexities of gendered experiences in Southeast Asia.

Previous Education

University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus Int. Relations with French 2022
Sunway College - 2019