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Paper short abstract

In a nation where religious conservatism and colonial legacies shape the regulation of gender and sexuality, Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku is a powerful visual intervention. We here explore the cinematic expression of queer resistance rooted in anti-colonial aesthetics and local cultural epistemologies.

Paper long abstract

Set in the socio-political context of contemporary Indonesia, the film Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku (Memories of My Body) by Garin Nugroho (Indonesia, 2018) follows Juno, a traditional Lengger dancer, whose body and subjectivity challenge dominant heteronormative, nationalist, and religious discourses.

Through a close reading of the film, this study examines how queer identity is articulated not through globalised narratives of visibility or identity politics, but through Javanese ritual, affective memory, and symbolic embodiment. The film’s aesthetics were marked by non-linear storytelling, ritual performance, silence, and spiritual ambiguity, resisting dominant cinematic conventions and opening up space for queer presence beyond representation.

This analysis draws on theoretical frameworks from Third, Fourth, and Fifth Cinema to contextualise the film within broader histories of resistance cinema in the global South - and of displaced minorities in the global North. In doing so, it argues that Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku subverts both Western queer visuality and state-sanctioned moral narratives in Indonesia. Rather than offering fixed meanings or resolutions, the film allows ambiguity, pain, and beauty to coexist, reflecting the complexity of queer life within postcolonial structures.

This study contributes to ongoing discussions in visual anthropology and film studies by highlighting how cinema can function as a site of cultural memory, aesthetic resistance, and alternative knowledge production in non-Western contexts.