ORCID Profile
0000-0002-5240-1143
Current Organisation
The Kirby Institute
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Publisher: Edinburgh University Library
Date: 06-11-2020
DOI: 10.17157/MAT.4.2.399
Abstract: This think piece reflects on the ways in which the category ‘transgender’ is used by waria – Indonesia’s ‘national transvestite’ (Boellstorff 2007) – based on ethnographic data collected from informants aged forty years or older in Yogyakarta and Jakarta. I was struck by how this group used the category ‘transgender’ with reference to a particular time in life that stretched from mid-teens to late twenties, a period marked by national and transnational migration for intensive sex work and other labor. Their use of ‘transgender’ to describe certain times of their lives but not others validates scholarly calls to question the privileging of gender and sexuality in analyses of subjectivity. It also troubles the basis of Western assumptions about aging and its relationship to the self, which presumes an experience of time as an orderly chronological progression. Finally, their use of ‘transgender’ demands closer attention to why the use of categories of gender and sexuality might shift across the life course. My informants’ narratives invite us to consider how people in different locations draw upon globalized categories to make meaning. Greater ethnographic attention towards how categories are drawn upon to produce and reflect subjectivity in erse ways may produce a reflexive understanding of the relationship between categories and the context of entrenched structural inequalities in which they are used.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 22-11-2022
DOI: 10.1111/VAR.12274
Abstract: Following the authoritarian New Order in Indonesia (1965–1998) the state‐issued identity card was transformed into a symbol available for reproduction by ordinary citizens. One Indonesian transgender population known as warias used the card to engage with the terms of recognition offered by the state. In 2014, warias in Yogyakarta made organizational membership cards that closely mimicked but did not copy the visual form of the original. Warias efforts to expand the state's bureaucratic form through the manipulation of the symbolic and material qualities of cards raised the possibility that the state did not hold a monopoly over powers of recognition.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date: 08-2021
Abstract: This essay contains an introduction and a translation of an account provided in Indonesian by Rully Mallay, a transgender community leader and activist at the Kebaya Foundation, a shelter for people living with HIV in the province of Yogyakarta. It describes the impact of restrictions imposed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and mobilization in response to it by those who identify as “waria” between February and September 2020. Waria played a pivotal role in mobilizing a community response in that city, providing support not only to their own community but also to other marginal groups impacted in similar ways. Harsh lockdown measures imposed to respond to COVID-19 disproportionately affected waria, cutting off access to economic and community support. This was particularly acute for the many waria without state-issued identity cards. Nevertheless, Rully expresses her hope that through the skills and adaptability they have demonstrated in their response to the public health emergency, they might achieve recognition and acceptance from Indonesian society.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 19-02-2017
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date: 08-2018
Abstract: Indonesia's waria commonly assert that the bodily transformations they undertake on a temporary but daily basis, which they call déndong, are central to their understanding of the self. The onerous efforts that waria make to craft their male body in line with frequently glamorous forms of feminine beauty nests within efforts to achieve visibility on the national stage. Waria also describe their gendered embodiment in terms of a personal narrative of self-actualization that sees it as one aspect of a process they call becoming. However, waria do not see déndong primarily as the expression of an in idual self but assert that it is a reflection of the work of others. In this view, meeting more waria and interacting with them results in irrevocable changes to one's outer self. This article describes the historical emergence of this common understanding of selfhood and embodiment during the New Order in Indonesia (1967–98), a period characterized by the rapid growth of the mass media in the context of military rule. Emphasizing waria's own memories of this period alongside archival sources and personal photographs helps us understand how gender presentation both animates and undermines the fragile promise of national belonging in Indonesia.
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing
Date: 2020
DOI: 10.1071/SH20065
Abstract: Abstract Background Community-based outreach programs play an important role in the provision of HIV testing, treatment and health care for men who have sex with men (MSM) in Indonesia. However, qualitative studies of community-based HIV programs have mostly focused on clients rather than on outreach workers (OW). The experiences of MSM peer OW provide insights into how to extend and improve community involvement in HIV programs in Indonesia. Methods: This is a qualitative study based on focus group discussions, which brought together MSM OW (n = 14) and healthcare workers (n = 12). This approach facilitated documentation of the challenges associated with community-based outreach programs in Indonesia through a participatory focus group discussion between OW and healthcare workers. Results: Findings are reported in relation to challenges experienced in the context of community outreach, and solutions to the challenges faced by OW. It was found that awareness of a shared commitment to delivering HIV programs can facilitate good relationships between OW and healthcare workers. Conclusion: Future efforts should consider the role of OW within broader relationships, especially with healthcare workers, when developing community-based responses to HIV testing and treatment. Documenting the role of OW can help contribute to an understanding of ways to adapt HIV programs to reduce barriers to access both for those identified as MSM and others who are ambiguously placed in relation to the programmatic use of such categories.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date: 30-07-2021
DOI: 10.1017/S0021911821000747
Abstract: The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam —a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date: 09-02-2016
Abstract: The globalization of transgender and its relationship to human rights has been accompanied by increased media interest in those so identified around the world. In Indonesia, this mostly involves the representation of male-to-female transgender-identified waria. While most mass media representations do portray them in narrow terms as the victims of violence, this does not undermine the value of transgender for waria. Seeing interaction with mass media in economic terms, many waria charge money for interviews and other media appearances. This article describes how waria understand affective labor for transnational mass media markets. They do so in terms of the historically understood association between work and visible claims for national belonging and recognition in Indonesia. Although such possibilities are situated in a context characterized by inequality, waria do consider the global scope of transgender to be of value as a way to expand their claims. A perspective that analyzes the circulation of transgender as it relates to global political economy helps clarify how the category produces uneven forms of value as it encounters erse national and local contexts.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-09-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2022
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 20-02-2019
Abstract: This article reflects on the concept of ‘queer generations’ as developed in the context of an ongoing study about belonging and sexual citizenship among two social generations of gender and sexual minority youth in Australia. We define the concepts ‘queer’ and ‘generations’ in the context of recent theoretical interest in temporality in childhood and youth studies in an attempt to think differently about gender and sexual difference. The main theoretical tension that lies at the heart of this article is how to take seriously the shared experience of growing up LGBT without insisting on a uniform narrative that is inherent to it. Drawing on an archival fragment from an HIV c aign produced in Australia and distributed in the 1990s and targeted at young gay and bisexual men, we consider the shifting conditions through which visibility has featured as a key problem for the deployment of sexual citizenship. This archival fragment is valuable because of the way that it problematizes the in/out, visible/invisible, gay/straight binaries that have dogged attempts to grapple with the at once in idual and collective experience of growing up LGBT. The concept of ‘queer generations’ suggests critical insights into the limits and affordances of the production of generations as containers for generalized experience.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 12-2022
DOI: 10.1111/ETHO.12325
Abstract: Peer outreach workers play a pivotal role in assisting HIV‐positive people to access pharmaceutical treatment. In their role mediating between everyday sexual cultures and biomedical knowledge, outreach workers for men who have sex with men in Indonesia's capital city Jakarta emphasize the need to manage the visibility of the HIV‐positive body as it appears to others. In order to enter clinical spaces, clients must adopt neat attire, strive to embody a physique that is robust, and maintain a clear skin tone. Clients must also learn to gain mastery over their gender performance as a revelation of their sexuality. Outreach workers interpret the in idual sexual and HIV‐positive status of their clients as either “open” or “closed” in relation to their audience, an understanding that generates a demand for self‐discipline directed at outer appearances. Attending to paradigms of visibility that discipline the biosocial body reveals the social relations necessary for accessing treatment.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 25-04-2019
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 03-10-2022
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Date: 2019
DOI: 10.7560/JHS28102
Location: Australia
Start Date: 2019
End Date: 2019
Funder: National Library of Australia
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