The aesthetics of kueer (ed) Muslimness: gender ambiguity, affect, and digital negotiation among ahkak Malays

Islamic masculinity in Malaysia is frequently framed as fixed, uniform, and anchored in heteronormative moral expectations. Yet the everyday practices of non-normative Malay Muslim men reveal a more complex picture—one shaped by aesthetic experimentation, vernacular humour, religious expression, and digital self-fashioning. This study examines how non-heteronormative Malay Muslim men articulate identity on Instagram, analysing how they perform, negotiate, and reinterpret Malay-Muslim masculinity in a context where religion, culture, and moral surveillance intersect. Building upon intersectional analyses of queer Muslim identities and local Malaysian scholarship on layered identity negotiations, the study introduces kueer—a researcher-coined analytic concept inspired by Malay cultural idioms and designed to theorise layered, culturally embedded forms of non-normativity that are not fully encompassed by Western LGBTQ frameworks. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of approximately 300 Instagram posts from twelve public accounts, the study examines visual and linguistic practices, including gestures, captions, religious idioms, humour, and vernacular labels. The findings demonstrate that ahkak Malays reframe Muslimness through ethical virtues such as sincerity, humility, and inner devotion, challenging claims that non-normative expressions inherently conflict with Islamic teachings. Instagram functions as a digital Third Space where these negotiations unfold, enabling selective visibility and the articulation of hybrid identities that balance self-expression and cultural constraints. Overall, the study shows that Malay-Muslim masculinity is being reimagined from within, reflecting layered and culturally situated forms of kueer(ed) subjectivity that resist rigid categorisation and expand the possibilities of Muslim gender expression in contemporary Malaysia.

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