Paper short abstract:

This research project will frame two insular and culturally fragmented societies: Java and Trinidad—both island societies that stand in an antipodal and parallel relationship to one another. It interrogates how local perceptions of religion and sexuality contribute to shaping the good national subject and how they are both responsible for the making and unmaking of subjectivities.

Paper long abstract:

This research project will frame two insular and culturally fragmented societies: Java and Trinidad—both island societies that stand in an antipodal and parallel relationship to one another. It interrogates how local perceptions of religion and sexuality contribute to shaping the good national subject and how they are both responsible for the making and unmaking of subjectivities. Both Java and Trinidad are island societies which are homes to syncretic, diasporic Islams whose creolization with local belief systems renders them more receptive to non-heteronormative sexualites than orthodox Islam. Therefore, my interest in the relationship of Islam, local belief systems and alternative sexualities leads me to hypothesize that syncretic religions structure and support syncretic sexual and social lives. Along the same lines, my project looks at the ways in which Trinidadian and Javanese Islams exclude, include, and rank subjects in their respective societies and how each guards and regulates access to citizenship and social status. Through ethnographic work in Java and Trinidad, I seek to understand how friendship networks of marginalized people contribute to overcome societal marginalization and disempowerment. A secondary component of this project investigates how social movements function as practices of friendship linking the individual to society. This contributed to our understanding of how practices of marginalization are related to gendered culture and religious politics in these two distant, yet comparable archipelagic nation states. Through the working notion of "transoceanic syncretisms", this project revitalizes theoretical frameworks of Gender Studies, Anthropology of Religion, and Socio-Cultural Change.