Tattooing among young middle-class people in Indonesia has increased noticeably since the late 2000s. I draw on ethnographic research in tattoo studios alongside interviews and magazine sources to locate the style known as kustom within its social and cultural context. I describe how kustom tattooing is the product of patterns of consumption centred on the body, drawing resources from a globalised, mass mediasaturated environment. Indeed, consumers describe it as an important avenue for self-expression. By contrast, tattooists and those inside the scene describe kustom as a way of transcending geographical markers of identity: to be 'anything and everything'. This article explores this tension between self-expression and the political aims of kustom. Kustom tattooing is also novel by virtue of its absolute emphasis on 'no expertise'. It thus exposes a space where the stress on expertise and selfimprovement, which characterises middle-class cultures in post-authoritarian Indonesia, gives way to creative and hybrid articulations of identity.

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 individual 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.

This paper examines the production of sexual citizenship in Australia through a study of some representations of heterosexuality produced and circulated during the recent same-sex marriage postal survey. We highlight three themes observed in these representations: authenticity, authority and the occupation of space. Through a reflection on how sexual citizenship is realised via depictions of heterosexuality we argue that what comes into focus is how sexual citizenship rests on normative understandings of class and race. We study heterosexuality as depicted in the survey material as an example of how Australian sexual citizenship relies on raced and classed fantasies of life (such as the ideologically-charged space of the suburban backyard) to deepen an understanding of gay marriage beyond simple binaries of progressive and conservative.

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 campaign 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 individual 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.

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