Mak Bedah goes shopping for a real candidate in Malaysia's 2008 general elections

On the eve of the campaign period of Malaysia's general elections in 2008, the plans of the Women's Candidacy Initiative (WCI) to increase the number of independent women in Parliament were thrown into disarray when their candidate was forced to withdraw at short notice. Rather than abandon their participation in those elections, WCI went through a creative moment during which they developed an innovative voter-education campaign revolving around the fictional character of Mak Bedah (Aunty Bedah). This campaign sought to draw attention to the issues that WCI felt were important, such as women's poor representation in Parliament. Through a novel and playful campaign, WCI made public a number of candidates' views on issues important to WCI, and succeeded in attracting significant media attention. The creativity exhibited in the development and deployment of this campaign is analysed in this article in the light of literature pertaining to the public sphere. I argue that when considering such interventions in the public sphere, we should not give undue emphasis to the content of discourses deployed but rather see discourses as a means by which ends are achieved. Using WCI's Mak Bedah campaign, I demonstrate how political demands, as much if not more so than discursive logic, may result in given movements gaining broad political traction.