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- Convenors:
-
Sara Niner
(Monash University)
Sharyn Davies (Monash University)
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- Discussant:
-
Geir Henning Presterudstuen
(University of Bergen)
- Formats:
- Panels
- Location:
- Slatyer room (N2011), R.N Robertson Building
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 3 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Sydney
Short Abstract:
Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific are frequently considered exemplary regions for the study of gender and sexuality. This panel invites ethnographically grounded papers from both regions as a way to draw out new possibilities for comparison in the role of understanding broader transformations.
Long Abstract:
Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific are frequently considered to be exemplary regions for the study of diverse genders and sexualities. This panel invites papers from both regions as a way to draw out new possibilities for considering the role of anthropological comparison in the study of genders and sexualities.
This panel engages with the possibilities of 'queer comparisons' in two ways. First, it examines how comparison between gender and sexuality in these two regions might generate new understandings. Second, it asks how doing so might serve to queer (critique the implicit heteronormativity) of comparison in its classical anthropological mode.
Recent ethnographic studies of gender and sexuality in the Pacific (such as Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff's Gender on the Edge) and island Southeast Asia (such as Tom Boellstorff's The Gay Archipelago) emphasise the centrality of archipelagic forms of transmission and interaction. Equally, both regions highlight how gender and sexuality are not marginal but offer critical insights into understandings in the role of understanding broad scale social transformations. Lastly, both highlight how certain nations and islands remain awkwardly placed 'in-between' these two regions, and as such are often framed as marginal in studies of gender and sexuality.
This panel invites ethnographically grounded papers which focus on a single regional/national/local contexts in either island Southeast Asia or the Pacific. In doing so it hopes to stimulate discussion across papers on the panel theme as a whole.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 3 December, 2019, -Sharyn Davies (Monash University)
Paper short abstract:
In disentangling how morality shapes the role and position of women and LGBT subjects in Indonesia, this talk will discuss policewomen as moral arbiters.
Paper long abstract:
In disentangling how morality shapes the role and position of women and LGBT subjects in Indonesia, and the more specific question 'How is morality leveraged by and against Indonesian (police)women in efforts for selfhood and control,' this talk will discuss how packaging policewomen as moral arbiters justifies overt moral control. Understanding how morality is currently deployed helps us understand the power of moral discourse over the bodies of women and LGBT subjects, and of how women and LGBT draw on this discourse to pursue their own ends. I will use an analysis of the construction of the virginal, pious and beautiful policewoman to explore Indonesia's expansive moral surveillance, and through deployment of the notion of kinships of shame will argue that morality discourses have been so effective in the archipelago because the shame accrued to particular acts (e.g. homosexuality) imbricate not only extended kin but the whole nation.
Benjamin Hegarty (Deakin University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on ethnographic and historical research about the Indonesian category for transgender femininity (waria), focusing on the visibility obtained in the year 1968 and the capital city, Jakarta. Waria offer a perspective on gender and sexuality which emphasises its public meanings.
Paper long abstract:
Both the appearance of and meanings attributed to transgender femininity have been rendered ambiguous by the very visibility that enables their partial acceptance — reflecting one perspective on how moral concerns associated with gender and sexuality serve to mediate the meanings of social difference in Indonesia. This paper is primarily based on ethnographic and historical research about waria, focusing on the year 1968 and the capital city, Jakarta. I focus on the claim among waria that something remarkable happened at that time: transgender femininity moved from obscurity to hyper-visibility. Marshalling the tools of feminine expertise — the latest glamorous styles of make-up, hair and fashion — they dazzled admiring audiences across the archipelago in that year and the decades that followed. Current analyses of transgender femininity in Southeast Asia tends to articulate its social meaning in relation to tradition and modernity mapped onto past and present as stable historical reference points. By contrast, waria recall their emergence within historical time as making visible something that was always present (terlihat, nampak). That is, waria understand themselves to be located within historical processes which lie at the intersection of processes of continuity and change. In doing so, they mediate enduring social concerns in Indonesia as to the contradictory meanings of feminine visibility in the public sphere.
Angela Kelly-Hanku (University of New South Wales/Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research) Peter Aggleton (University of New South Wales) Ruthy Boli-Neo (Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research) Herick Aeno (Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research)
Paper short abstract:
PNG is rarely included in studies of gender and sexual diversity in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, therefore marginal within comparative work on these issues. We will examine the life histories of gender and sexually diverse Papua New Guineans narrating themselves out of the margins.
Paper long abstract:
Papua New Guinea is rarely included in studies of gender and sexual diversity in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific, therefore marginal within comparative work on these issues, and possibly not as progressed in the queering of comparative knowledge production. Its diverse cultures are predominantly patriarchal and patrilineal and within them a male child is highly respected and valued. In many parts of Papua New Guinea, rituals to ascribe manhood are undertaken to defeminise boys and turn them into men of a particular kind. Older men often assist in this transition through cultural performances which signify figuratively and literally the 'remnant substances' from the biological mother. Even in cultures devoid of such formal and ethnographically rich initiation practices, boys and men are expected to embody masculine qualities; boys in Papua New Guinea are not sanctioned to embody femininity. There exists no culturally recognised third gender in Papua New Guinea, as can be found in some nor do there exist there laws prohibiting boys from identifying as women/feminine. As a result, gender and sexual non-conformity, while present, goes largely 'unmarked' - linguistically and socially in many Papua New Guinean villages and communities. It is both there and not there, seen and unseen - although under the impact of modernization and globalization a range of new vocabularies and self-understandings are beginning to emerge and be appropriated locally. In this presentation we will examine the life histories of gender and sexually diverse Papua New Guineans narrating themselves out of the margins.
Sara Niner (Monash University)
Paper short abstract:
The LGBTIQ community in Timor-Leste has become more prominent in recent years through the work of advocacy groups and the holding a gay pride parade from 2017. This paper explores gender relations and the status of non-binary genders in Timorese indigenous cultures which is not recorded.
Paper long abstract:
The LGBTIQ community in Timor-Leste has become more prominent in recent years due to the advocacy and activities of a small network of local and international organisations and the holding of a gay pride parade in the capital Dili from 2017. While not criminalised, social stigma, discrimination, harassment and violence remains common for LGBTIQ people. Religious conservatism appears to largely be the logic behind these negative attitudes. This paper explores gender relations and the status of non-binary genders in Timorese indigenous cultures. The 13 distinctly identified ethnolinguistic groups on the island of Timor feature both Melanesian and Malay based languages and matrilineal and patrilineal social organisation. There are cultures in the Pacific and modern day Indonesia where third genders have had a place but the attitude of the various Timorese indigenous cultures to more fluid gender expressions that allows for attraction and sex between same sex individuals is not recorded.