Homeless By Choice Analysis

It is crucial to take into account that art is the relationship that exists between the process of unifying a particular nation and the ability to build a society that is aware about issues happening around them. This is why it is rather important to look at Mislina Mustaffa’s experiences as a performance artist who left her acting career to embark on a journey to discover her identity. Mislina Mustaffa’s role as an artist and a woman living in the twenty-first century Malaysia have depicted to society that the body alone is insufficient of defining her as a woman. A woman is in fact an incomplete depiction of what people see in reality, but rather a woman is an subject to become or fight to impersonate and it is in this act of becoming a woman

Mislina Mustaffa sought to answer the question if having a house or home sustains or cultivates one’s existence or is it a parasitic institution, where one is constantly disfigured and affected by rising daily expenses? If such a case is true, then why does society stereotypically considers or judges a person’s stability based on his or her ability to own a house? If a possessing a house indicates the ideal picture of a person’s security and having more material possessions reflect a person’s dependability, what then would happen to people who decide to be mobile especially women, especially the ones who have been doing life long enough, seek for her own personal space? Mislina Mustaffa’s book Homeless By Choice is a book that describes the inner struggles of women today and challenges the notion about how women are supposed to act and behave. Mislina Mustaffa begins by questioning on ‘the myth of security’ that the government and consumerism have imposed on the Malaysian society by assuring happiness that comes in a form of a ‘house’; followed by the artist’s immense reading on explaining the feminist view of the role of a women in the society and the restrictions that a woman has to face of her due to the social-constructed discovery and success of a woman’s role in the twenty-first century that nourishes the gender inequality. Mislina Mustaffa, an unmarried artist, decided to leave

This common interest of postmodern feminists about women’s bodies and how it serves as a “feminine language” to define identity continues to represent explorations, discovery and opinions of the traditional mind and body dualism, the role of sexual analysis in the development of gender and the self as well as the analytical modes of exploration of the body which all in all defines what it means to discuss about postmodern feminist issues in this twenty-first century. For example, in Mislina Mustaffa’s opinion, the female body directly reflects an artistic subjection to what is considered a norm to women in society today. Nevertheless, the artist disagrees with such manner. The entire discovery of what makes a woman a woman in fact lies in the matter other than the body itself. One route of inquiry along these lines concerns reevaluation of the senses and the conservative materials that are fashioned into forms or ideas that define the identities of women today. As more and more opinions about how women should act and behave are starting to rise and whilst considering philosophies of how women should stand up for their rights and the formation of the idea of the creative society regarding women’s identities, the literal sense of creating an escapism or foundation for women has customarily never been considered a truly “ideal” sense for