Ruzy Suliza Hashim's areas of interests include gender matters in literature and the new media. Her book Out of the Shadows: Women in the Malay Court Narratives won the National Book Award in 2005. Her current book "Health and Beauty from the Rainforest: Malaysian Traditions of Ramuan" which she co-edited with medical doctors, health practitioners, scientists, and anthropologists from Australia, Germany and Malaysia is an example of her interdisciplinary approaches in research. Working seamlessly into the past and the future, her present work looks into women's blogs as part of her continuing fascination with the self-narratives of Malaysian women.
We learn how to read people’s genders by learning which traits culturally signify each gender and by learning rules that enable us to classify individuals with a wide range of gender presentations into distinct and specific gender categories. Markers such as our appearances, mannerisms, and ways of speaking are constantly being read as part of our gender display. We do gender consciously and unconsciously. In this paper, I explore Malaysian students’ voices of what it means to be gendered and what cultural practices are imbued with gender identities. First hand insights into the way in which gender realities are played are gathered through focus group discussions and elaborate narrative essays. On the one hand, the focus group discussions provide a public “unofficial” forum for the young people’s presentation of selves and gender practices. On the other, the narrative essays provide insights into “official” documentation of their social constructions of gender. By looking at these two forms of data, I show the slippages between the projections of “conscious” and “unconscious” versions of gender identities.