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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tends to articulate its social meaning in relation to tradition and modernity mapped onto past and present as stable historical reference points.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.