Living on the Line: Gendered Invisibilities among Queer Women and Transmen in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This article explores the lived experiences of queer Indonesian women and transmen in urban centres in Bali and Java. It is based on a multi-sited ethnographic study that took place between 2017 and 2020 among queer individuals and groups, including activists, scholars and religious leaders. The recent surge in attention to the variety of subjectivities gathered under the catch-all terms ‘LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender)’ and ‘queer’ has been accompanied by an increase in institutionalised discrimination and social stigmatisation. Although these developments affect all queer Indonesians, the experiences of those who were labelled female at birth are coloured by their particular positions on a familial, societal, legal and religious level. This article analyses the diverse range of experiences, strategies and alignments that arise from the relative invisibility and exclusion of queer women and transmen from queer as well as heteronormative spaces and discourse. I suggest that while invisibility contributes to the marginalisation of queer women and transmen in Indonesia, it is also instrumental to how they negotiate their position in a heteronormative context. Therefore, the increased visibility of the queer community risks intensifying multiple marginalisations along the axes of gender, class and religion.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• sexuality
• queer
• visibility
• Indonesia
• women
• transgender
• Southeast Asia

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited greatly from comments provided by the GAMS team at the Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this journal. I am grateful to all of them for their insights. I am deeply thankful also to all the individuals whose stories feature in this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Examples include Instagram platforms such as @Kamusqueer and @Transhition, as well as QueerTalksIndonesia (a pseudonym), a hybrid offline/online social collective meant to connect a diversity of queer Indonesians.

² The term cis or cisgender, which refers to people whose gender identity conforms with the gender they were assigned at birth, was known to most but not all the queer Indonesians in this article, and it was not widely used. I use it here out of linguistic necessity. The definition of the term waria, though often translated as and used interchangeably with ‘transwoman’, is contested and subject to constant debate. Among my interlocutors, some indeed saw the two as interchangeable, whereas others clearly preferred one over the other. It is important to emphasise that my clustering of women and transmen in the same article by no means implies a shared identity or self-conceptualisation between the two groups. Rather, it is the result of the consideration of the power relations and discriminatory processes that affect both groups in comparable ways, largely as a result of patriarchal structures as well as the undesirable and harmful categorisation of transmen as ‘women’ by others. Also, while being aware of the risk of essentialisation of writing ‘transwoman’ and ‘transman’ as one word rather than using ‘trans’ as an adjective, I have chosen to maintain this spelling due to its overwhelmingly common usage among gender diverse individuals in contemporary Indonesia.

³ The immense interest in waria communities by both journalists and academics was already evident during my fieldwork in 2017. Many community leaders had become weary of the attention, which did not always have beneficial effects for the waria community itself. Some more public waria have therefore started to ask journalists and academics for a fee to be interviewed.

⁴ To ensure the confidentiality and safety of the people involved in this study, all individual names and most of the organisation names in this article are pseudonyms. In addition, specific locations and other identifying markers have been changed or kept deliberately vague.

⁵ Literally meaning ‘to turn’, belok is a colloquial term used by women to refer to queer women, as opposed to lurus (‘going straight’).

⁶ At the time of my fieldwork, the term normal was commonly used by (queer) Indonesians to refer to heterosexual and normatively gendered people. The word, aptly enough considering the colonial legacies in the context of gender and sexuality, stems from the Dutch word normaal, which means common or ordinary and has a normative undertone, which is illustrated by the proverb ‘Doe maar normaal, dan doe je al gek genoeg’ (‘Just act normally, that is crazy enough’). When the term normal is italicised in the testimony of interviewees in this article, I am using the term in the same way as queer Indonesians.

⁷ For security purposes, QueerTalksIndonesia is a pseudonym.

⁸ As this particular part of the meeting was English language practice, the he/she pronouns were indicative of gender. In Bahasa Indonesia, the personal pronoun dia is not gendered. (Mis)gendering in Indonesian more commonly depends on the form of address that is used for a person – for example, Ibu for women or Bapak for men, or local alternatives such as the Javanese mbak/mas.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on my research on activism and religion among queer Indonesians, funded by the Einstein Stiftung and the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies.