Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Co-Director of the Global Middle East Studies Minor Program
Affiliated Faculty, South Asian Studies Minor Program
Associate Faculty, Department of Asian and Asian American Studies
Azza Basarudin is an Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). Her interdisciplinary research examines gender, sexuality, religion, feminist ethnography, and transnational feminist movements, with particular attention to Southeast Asia and Muslim societies. Her work bridges feminist theory, ethnographic research, religious studies, and legal studies to investigate questions of gender/sexuality justice, activism, and social transformation. She also writes on transnational feminist foodways. She received a PhD in Women's Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Basarudin has held teaching, postdoctoral, and research fellowship appointments at Harvard Divinity School, Syracuse University, the University of California, Los Angeles, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Sains Malaysia, and the American University in Cairo, and has consulted for the United Nations Population Fund. In 2026, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Penang Institute and at the Center for Research on Women and Gender (KANITA) at Universiti Sains Malaysia in Malaysia.
Her writings have appeared in journals such as Feminist Studies, Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Feminist Formations, Al-Raida: The Pioneer Journal, and The Scholar & Feminist Online. She is the author of Humanizing the Sacred: Sisters in Islam and the Struggle for Gender Justice in Malaysia (University of Washington Press, 2016). In this intimate feminist ethnography, she explores Muslim women's activist practices in Malaysia to reconfigure Islamic legal codes from a feminist perspective to advocate for equality-oriented reform in the Muslim family, such as increasing the legal marital age for girls and obtaining unilateral rights to divorce.
The University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the National Science Foundation, among others, have funded her research.
Along with numerous U.S.-based presentations and talks, Basarudin has delivered international presentations, including Food and Memory: Practices, Narratives, and Afterlives of the Past (Italy, 2026); Friendship — Continuities and Social Change (Scotland, 2025); the International Federation for Research in Women's History (Japan, 2024); International Marxist Feminist Conference (Poland, 2023); Anti-Feminist Backlash in the Global South: Cross-Regional Discussions, Strategies, and Innovative Practices (Lebanon, 2023); Critical Approaches to the Study of Religion (Belfast, 2022); Charting a Course for Muslim Advocates for Freedom of Religion/Belief and Women's Rights (Kenya, 2021); Women and Politics in the Age of Uncertainty: The Road to Sustainable Democracy and Democratization (Morocco, 2017); International Conference on Resistances: Between Theories and the Field (Belgium, 2016); Global Islamophobia Conference (Qatar, 2016); Feminism and Islamic Perspectives: New Horizons of Knowledge (Egypt, 2012).
She is completing her second book, based on ethnographic research, that explores the lives and communal intimacies of transgender Malay Muslims in contemporary urban Malaysia.
Basarudin is the current Co-Editor of Feminist Formations, a leading journal for innovative work in women's, gender, and sexuality studies published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Reach me about speaking invitations, research collaboration, media inquiries and questions.
