Counterpublics of care: making space for mediated intimacy and romantic self-making in Malaysia

Abstract

Among committed readers of romantic fiction in Malaysia, constructed ideals of intimacy are mobilised as a matter of personal moral enterprise and a panacea for emotional asymmetry between the sexes. Yet, such ideals are as much an outcome of collective meaning-making as an individual one. As this article will show, the affective rewards of mediated romance are relational and have a distributive, contagious, transformative as well as spatial effect crossing spaces both ‘private’ and ‘public’, work and leisure, personal and community. I argue that aspirations for marital success and personal self-actualisation motivate a range of affective creative labour for sustaining ethical relationships with the self, significant others, family, and community in what I call the counterpublics of care, which refer to social assemblages committed to the revaluation of intimacy, emotion work, and love.

Keywords:

• affective creative labour
• counterpublics
• romantic fiction
• self-making
• women’s media practices

Acknowledgements

Sections of this article were presented at the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) in Leiden and the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies conference in Berlin, both in 2019, the Harvard Divinity School public lecture in October 2019, and the Gatty Lecture at Cornell University in December 2019. The author would like to express her deepest appreciation to her colleagues at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive feedback on this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alicia Izharuddin

Alicia Izharuddin is a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies at Leiden University. She has published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Indonesia and the Malay World, Asian Cinema, Feminist Media Studies, among other journals. Her first book is Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema and she is currently writing her second book on the print culture of romance.