![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In contemporary Indonesia, the fragmentation of a collectively-imagined future has generated ambivalent and contradictory ways of being and becoming a man. This article investigates this tension by drawing on interviews and ethnographic data collected from young men aged 18–30 who engage in transactional sex work in the capital city Jakarta. The narratives of these young men suggest that transactional sex is a choice linked to the cultivation of an appropriate form of masculinity. This understanding, however, is complicated by mobility in two ways. First, geographical mobility tied to migration is understood to be necessary to becoming a man who is independent from family. Second, temporal mobility involves future aspirations to marry a woman and become a father, a powerful template for joining middle-class society. Young men find the intersection of geographical and temporal mobility as a source of open-ended liminality in the midst of acute economic precarity and perpetually flexible employment. Serving as narrative accounts of the plasticity of the most widely-held assumptions about the immutable nature of gender, liminal masculinity helps to illuminate the ambiguous effects of global economic forces on forms of moral self-cultivation.
Acknowledgements
This article benefited from the engagement of Ana Dragojlovic and Fran Martin in their role as special issue editors. I would also like to thank Sandeep Nanwani and Yanri Subronto for their assistance with various aspects of the project, and especially the participants who volunteered their time and narratives.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on Contributor
Benjamin Hegarty is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Notes
1. During fieldwork in 2014, a scandal erupted when a real life arisan brondong (brondong lottery) was discovered to be run by a group of wealthy housewives who had been ‘neglected by their husbands’ (Damanik Citation2014) suggesting that the fictional depiction of the film Arisan Brondong contains a grain of truth. In 2016, in the context of a crackdown on LGBT groups and individuals, the media also reported on brondong prostitution rings which were disrupted by police.
2. The term brondong appears to have originated from gay/waria language (Boellstorff Citation2005: 25). As well as meaning ‘attractive, youthful young man’, the term also means ‘popcorn’.
3. I was mostly located in the city of Yogyakarta in 2014 and 2015 for ethnographic research, which involved participant observation, oral histories and archival research, but also travelled to Jakarta for approximately one week out of every month. The main focus of this earlier research was the historical relationship between transgender femininity and national modernity in New Order Indonesia (see Hegarty Citation2017a, Citation2017b, Citation2018, Citation2019), during which practices of transactional sex among young men emerged as a separate, secondary area of concern.
4. The project, undertaken together with Dr Sandeep Nanwani (Yayasan Kebaya) and Dr Yanri Subronto (Gadjah Mada University) investigated the relationship between employment participation, migration and participation in markets for transactional sex. Along with the interviews, the study included a survey, focus group discussions and interviews with NGO outreach workers, in addition to field visits to sites where young men engage in transactional sex. The study was conducted against a backdrop of a worsening HIV epidemic among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Indonesia (Januraga et al. Citation2018).
5. The findings of this research parallels those of qualitative studies of transactional sex among men who have sex with men undertaken outside of Jakarta, which suggest that economic opportunities are a powerful moral force which shapes the practice of masculinity throughout Indonesia. In Bali, Alcano (Citation2011, Citation2016) describes how young migrant men’s participation in transactional sex is shaped by forms of economic vulnerability that result in violent forms of group bonding. However, the kinds of open-ended migration and gendered desires for self-improvement among research participants in this article are more similar to Hardon and Idrus's (Citation2015) description of young male and female sex workers in South Sulawesi.