Revisiting Gendered and Ethnic Familiarities in Malaysia Through Digital Conversations: The Yang People Podcast
摘要
Podcasts have grown in popularity as a medium for digital storytelling in tandem with the burgeoning digital landscape characterised by the predominance of the Internet, social media platforms and streaming services. Malaysians have also been exploring podcasts as a new means of having conversations, and being a multi-ethnic country, it is imperative to examine how podcasts are shaping or changing discourses on ‘race’ and religion—two of the 3R that influence Malaysia’s society, politics, and economy, among others. This chapter discusses the use of podcasting as a new genre in the communicative platform among millennials in Malaysia. Specifically, it examines selected episodes from the podcast channel Yang People, created by a millennial Malay woman, to see how dominant narratives on race and religion are unpacked and challenged from a gendered perspective. These episodes make up the ‘Perempuan Malaysia’ (Malaysian Women) series of the podcast, featuring conversations with millennial Malaysian women representing the nation’s major ethnic groups—Malay, Chinese and Indian—who discuss and compare notions of femininity, expectations of women and gendered/other stereotypes according to race and religion. We also investigate the significance of the creator’s subjectivity as an urban, millennial Malay woman mediating the conversations, as she attempts to articulate her identity as a Malay woman in the twenty-first century. The analysis examines the content of the podcasts through the framework of identity politics, focusing on themes of race, religion and being a woman in multi-ethnic Malaysia.