Contestations of Gender, Sexuality and Morality in Contemporary Indonesia

Platt, Maria; Davies, Sharyn Graham; Bennett, Linda Rae

doi:10.1080/10357823.2017.1409698

Cited by 62 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…In the context of Burma, Chie Ikeya (: 59) has analysed in detail the development of the ‘ideal of the scientific and hygienic housewife‐and‐mother’, a process authored through Western understandings of scientific advancement and bourgeois femininity, as well as through anticolonial nationalist ideals. In the Indonesia setting, an expanding literature similarly charts the gendered nature of the postcolonial national teleology, the association of women's citizenship with their roles as mothers and wives, and the state's active interest in the nuclear family as the ideal unit to both stabilise, and replicate in miniature, the patriarchal order of the state itself (Sajed, ; Platt et al, ). This is captured in the concept of State Ibuism, which can be understood as the broad frame for the state's shifting understanding of the ideal Indonesian woman as the proper housewife and devoted mother, derived from the European housewife and Javanese Priyayi ideals (Suryakusuma, ).…”

Section: Gendered Scripts Of Urban Rationalisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban evictions, public housing and the gendered rationalisation of kampung life in Jakarta

Tilley

Elias

Rethel

2019

Asia Pacific Viewpoint

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The dispossession of urban communities across class and racial lines is a global phenomenon linked to the expansion of international investment in the development of ‘exemplary’ city space. However, city evictions are also historically informed and gendered processes which are continuous with past colonial and postcolonial urban rationalisation projects. Drawing on testimonies of women evictees in Jakarta, as well as interviews with public housing managers, this article details the gendered nature of the rationalisation of urban life in the context of a contemporary evictions regime. We argue that the rationalisation of urban space serves to sharpen the gender order by placing material constraints on women's roles, limiting their economic activities and defining them as hygiene‐responsible housewives. Further, and in turn, the limited provision of ‘rusunawa’ public housing, which we show to be a gendered spatial and social transition informed by state doctrine on the family, provides the state with justification for dispossession itself. Finally, women's everyday acts of refusal and resistance show not only that kampung forms of social life continue to be preserved in Jakarta, but also that rationalisation itself is a negotiated and contingent process.

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Section: Gendered Scripts Of Urban Rationalisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban evictions, public housing and the gendered rationalisation of kampung life in Jakarta

Tilley

Elias

Rethel

2019

Asia Pacific Viewpoint

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“…The reformation era that was optimistically considered by many as one that would lead Indonesia to a better democracy, was, on the contrary, more oppressive and discriminatory regarding sexuality (Platt, Davies, & Bennett, 2018). Initially, there was a high expectation, among other hopes as well, that the new government would legitimize the existence of the LGBTQ people.…”

Section: After the Reformationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The History of LGBTQ Discourses in Indonesia

Tumanan¹

2020

InterViews: An Interdisciplinary Journal in Social Sciences

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There is prevalent perception that the past colonialization and the expansion of Christianity have deeply affected the sexual regulations and norms in the former colonized countries. This perspective unavoidably affects how Christians today see the recent debate on the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) issue. The most prevailing perspective embraced by many conservative Christian leaders in the Global South today is that there is a political agenda from western countries by importing their liberal opinion on sexuality as a socially-chosen construct and not a naturally-given condition. For them, this is a new kind of colonialism. By discussing the specific case of Indonesia, the author argues that this is not always the case. By tracing back to the history of LGBTQ discourses in Indonesia, he attempts to show that colonization brought no impact on the recent LGBTQ debates. The discourses began to thrive in the last twenty years, mainly due to the internal political dynamics of Indonesia and the rise of Islamic populism after the 1998 reformation.

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“…Waria street nightlife locations have also been targeted with municipal police raids, highlighting the tense context of surveillance of the sexual selves of waria, and non-heteronormative sex more generally. Recently the government has tried to eradicate prostitution in Indonesia and over a hundred designated female sex work areas (lokalisasi) have been closed (Solehudin 2018), which, through association with the issue of 'morality', puts waria nightlife under further pressure (see also Platt et al 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Due to the prevailing heteronormativity and 'moral panic' around non-heteronormative sexualities in Indonesia (Platt et al 2018), waria face relentless social and spatial exclusion that relegate them to the margins of society. Yet as a response to these forces, and as a survival strategy, waria continuously reinforce their embodied worldmaking in spaces and at times that are available for their use.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between Abjection and World-Making: Spatial Dynamics in the Lives of Indonesian Waria

Toomistu

2019

Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics

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The lives of Indonesian waria (transgender women) are substantially shaped by spatial dynamics. As a result of social and spatial exclusion, subsequent migration and economic needs, a lifestyle pattern around daily work in beauty salons and street nightlife tied to transactional sex has evolved in many parts of urban Indonesia. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Indonesian regions of Java and West Papua, I demonstrate that despite tremendous spatial abjection, salons and street nightlife are also productive, transformative and conjoining spatialities that foster waria subjectivity in affective relations with their intimate partners, the community, the phantasmic promise of the transnational mediascape and Indonesia as a nation. The places that waria occupy may spark moral prejudice and targeted violence, but simultaneously they are sites of agency at which waria experience self-affirmation and a sense of belonging while embodying through gendered performance the envisioned mobility at both national and transnational scales. The paper thus foregrounds how spaces and subjectivities are mutually constitutive, forging one another, as well as how certain spatialities hold potential to disrupt the sense of marginality.

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Contestations of Gender, Sexuality and Morality in Contemporary Indonesia

Cited by 62 publications

References 35 publications

Urban evictions, public housing and the gendered rationalisation of kampung life in Jakarta

Urban evictions, public housing and the gendered rationalisation of kampung life in Jakarta

The History of LGBTQ Discourses in Indonesia

Between Abjection and World-Making: Spatial Dynamics in the Lives of Indonesian Waria

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