Sharon A. Bong is Professor of Gender Studies at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. She has authored “Becoming Queer and Religious in Malaysia and Singapore” (2020) and co-edited “Gender and Sexuality Justice in Asia” (2020). She is former consultant to and coordinator of the Ecclesia of Women in Asia, an academic forum of feminist Catholic women theologians in Asia, a forum writer for the Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (on ecological ethics, sexual ethics, postcolonial theories and LGBTQ theologies), and a member of the Board of Editors and Board of Directors for Concilium, the international journal for theology. She has facilitated gender-sensitisation workshops on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Bar Council (law students). In 2016, she established the undergraduate area of specialisation in gender studies at Monash University Malaysia and currently serves as the Graduate Research Director for the SASS.

Where do you see the most exciting research or debates happening in your field today?

In my intersectional fields of study – genders, sexualities and religions in a Southeast Asian context – the contemporary challenge is AI, climate change (which permeates all research, I would argue), and intergenerational activists who are engaged in making sense of these challenges.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

Academically, these mindset shifts have broadened rather than changed over time, and my research bears witness to these shifts: from dead poets to living narratives; and from women’s rights narratives navigating religions, to narratives on becoming queer and religious, and narratives of faith-based ecofeminists. I identify as a feminist, and I attribute this standpoint to my mum. This feminist theoretical framework has been a constant in my academic journey as well as a passion in engaging with Religious Studies, which is an uncommon pursuit for a Catholic laywoman with very little job prospects at a higher education institution in Malaysia. As a twenty-something-year-old, I was drawn to gender and Religious Studies in my quest to better articulate and channel my anger at the barriers to women’s ordination within the Catholic Church!   

In The Tension Between Women’s Rights and Religions: The Case of Malaysia, you explore how critical relativism can help navigate tensions between universal women’s rights and culturally specific norms. What does this mean in practice, particularly in the........

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