Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia

Sexual Politics, Health, Diversity and Representations

Linda Rae Bennett, Sharyn Graham Davies, Linda Rae Bennett, Sharyn Graham Davies

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317910961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2015 Ruth Benedict Prize for Outstanding Edited Volume

Sex, sexuality and sexual relationships are hotly debated in Indonesia, triggering complex and often passionate responses. This innovative volume explores these issues in a variety of ways. It highlights historical and newer forms of sexual diversity, as well as the social responses they provoke. It critiques differing representations of sexuality, pointing to the multiplicity of discourses within which sexuality and 'the sexual' are understood in modern-day Indonesia.

Placing sexuality centre-stage and locating it within the specific historical context of the Reformasi era, this landmark volume explores understandings and practices across a wide variety of sites, focusing in on a diverse group of Indonesian actors, and the contested meanings that sexuality carries. Beginning with a substantive introduction and concluding with a scholarly reflection on key issues, the volume is framed around the four themes of sexual politics, health, diversity and representations. It seeks both to present new empirical findings as well as to add to existing theoretical analysis.

This work fills an important gap in our understanding of the evolution and contemporary dynamics of Indonesian sexualities. It will be of interest to scholars and academics from disciplines including gender and sexuality studies, global health, sexual and reproductive health, anthropology, sociology and Asian studies.

Part I
Sexual politics

1
Surveilling sexuality in Indonesia

Sharyn Graham Davies ¹

Introduction

My parents – heck, my whole village – watches out for me. That’s how they show they care. (Ratna, a woman in Lombok in her early twenties, 2011)

Everyone tries to control me. They watch my every move so that I have no freedom to do anything. (Nadin, a woman in Lombok in her early twenties, 2011)

These two quotes reflect competing interpretations of surveillance at the village level. On the one hand, people think about surveillance as care, as someone watching over them, looking out for them, protecting them. People may talk about feeling safe because family members are monitoring their movements and actions, because neighbours can see and hear them, because police are vigilant, and because security cameras are tracking their every move. On the other hand, people may talk about feeling watched, trapped and imprisoned through the gaze of others, feeling they are unable to express themselves for fear of reprisals. For most people, though, surveillance conjures paradoxical feelings: neighbours provide security through the very act of prying; security guards offer comfort while invoking anxiety (i.e. guards are only on duty when danger is present).

In this chapter, I explore sexual surveillance in contemporary Indonesia across multiple spheres. The chapter starts by examining the divergent meanings of surveillance. After a nod to Foucault, I analyse Scott’s notion of performative regulation and Stein’s deployment of village biopower. I then turn to examine how the operation of surveillance specifically shapes sexuality in Indonesia. To demonstrate this shaping, I examine the notion of shame – a powerful regulator of sexuality in the archipelago. I then move from looking at normative ideals of sexuality to explore what happens when individuals deviate from expected behaviours: what happens when people have sex outside of marriage, or when people enjoy queer sex?² Here, I examine three specific case studies: police raids on hotels, a sex tape scandal and actions of police and the Islamic Defenders Front toward queer activities. These cases respectively show surveillance at local/private, national/private and national/public levels. I conclude the chapter by analysing these case studies with reference to surveillance theory, arguing that the use of performative regulation and village biopower provide insight into the concurrent constraining and productive power of sexual surveillance, and the agency and complicity of individuals in surveillance regimes.

The primary data analysed in this chapter has been collected during 14 years of ethnographic research into issues of gender and sexuality in Indonesia. Most recently, I spent six months (July to December 2011) in Lombok, two weeks in Bali (July 2013) and two months (July 2012, November 2013) in Jakarta, looking specifically at notions of surveillance, policing and sexuality. Data was collected through participant observation, interviews and focus groups. I have also undertaken analysis of newspapers, newsletters, web-based material and popular media such as television, film and magazines.

On surveillance

Modern technologies are increasingly rousing contrary feelings towards surveillance. Indonesia is no stranger to the widespread use of social media, being the fourth biggest Facebook user in the world (http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics), despite its status as a developing country. Photo uploading and tagging options available through social networking sites mean that mass audiences can monitor activities. For some people, life is only validated when watched, tagged and tweeted about. Indeed, Pecora (2002, p. 345) suggested that maybe “the desire to watch and be watched is a more deeply rooted element of the liberal democratic impulse than we normally care to admit.” Recognising the agency of the surveilled is thus a key aspect of inquiry into surveillance, “even if resistance sometimes confirms, more than challenges, the reach of abstract systems of control” (Monahan, 2011, p. 498). While a large audience may reinforce the significance of an individual’s life, the potential unintended viewing by those in authority, such as parents, a partner or an employer, can create various levels of surveillance anxiety.

Just as people feel simultaneously comforted and anxious about surveillance, people also feel both disempowered and empowered through surveillance. Surveillance is thus a regulatory mechanism that is concomitantly constraining and productive. As Monahan (2011, p. 498) showed, surveillance can be “mobilized to repress populations or bring about conditions of collective empowerment; it can be used by people occupying positions of high institutional status or by those excluded from traditional arenas of power and influence.” Surveillance can therefore serve “democratic or empowering ends if it brings about openness, transparency, accountability, participation, and power equalization among social groups and institutions” (Monahan, 2010a; as cited in Monahan, 2011, p. 498). Yet, as Monahan concluded, social sorting characterises just about all contemporary surveillance systems, with the net result being the amplification of many social inequalities (Monahan, 2010b).

There are various readings of surveillance, but what does surveillance actually mean? In a very broad sense, surveillance can be defined as the systematic monitoring of people to regulate and govern their behaviour. Monahan (2011) further noted that surveillance involves exercises of power and performances of power relations. While surveillance is commonly associated with institutional power in the form of governments, security personnel and the like, those with other forms of power, such as peers, neighbours and audiences, also regulate and govern behaviour. Indeed, Bauman (2000) argued that the most powerful group in shaping behaviour is one’s peers.³

Drawing on Foucault (e.g. 1977) and Goffman (e.g. 1961), Susie Scott (2011) showed that while subjects in the new millennium are never liberated entirely from Foucault’s docile bodies or Goffman’s coerced inmates, subtle forms of power continue to circulate through discourses and routinised practices to keep subjects committed to a social system. Scott called the process of active adherence by subjects to a social system ‘performative regulation.’ In a Foucauldian way, performative regulation shows more than just disciplinary power imposed on subjects and explores “the active involvement of individuals in the creation of their own regimes and adherence to them, as well as the mutual surveillance of members by their peers” (Scott, 2011, p. 30). Performative regulation also gives insight into the multidirectional flow of power as simultaneously top-down, bottom-up, horizontal and circulatory (Scott, 2011, p. 30). As such, disciplinary power can be seen to be exercised not only vertically but also by the penetration of authoritative knowledge into individual consciousness and by people actively submitting themselves to the gaze of others.

Rather than a purely passive or active construction of self, Scott worked through the tensions inherent in negotiations of self and tracks changes from manifest coercion and latent agency (as in Goffman’s time) to a current situation in the West of manifest agency and latent coercion. For instance, rather than being forced to join a drug rehabilitation institution, as might have happened in the 1950s, individuals are now volunteering to join self-help groups and desiring to be surveilled to assist them with their recovery. An Indonesian example of this shift towards manifest agency and latent coercion can be found in the current popularity among young urban women of joining self-improvement courses, often at great financial expense (Jones, 2010). Scott also drew on Bauman (2000), who wrote about changes in Western power dynamics and explored ways in which consumers now shop around, trying to find the best fit. Indeed, service providers have reframed their approach to make their product fit their consumer: “Authorities no longer command, they ingratiate themselves with the chooser, they tempt and seduce” (Bauman, 2000, p. 64, as cited in Scott, 2011, p. 37).⁴

Stein’s (2007) culturally embedded approach to readings of power and surveillance provides a fruitful theoretical framework in a non-Western setting. Researching midwives and Islamic morality in Indonesia, Stein cast his work around Foucault’s (1978) notion of biopower. Biopower refers to the use of bodily discipline and population control to shape biological life. A key reason that biopower is effective is the wide variety of institutions, such as schools, public healthcare and families, that are complicit in the surveillance, classification and sculpting of subjects. Are these models of power, Stein asked, effective outside of the West, with its attendant wealth and resources for control?

Stein found evidence, particularly in rural areas in Indonesia where forms of biopower are stretched to the limit, of adaptive incursions of life-governance into the realms of rural populations. He uncovered ways in which biopower actually works through “subaltern networks of authority, forms of knowledge, styles of performance and conceptions of morality to induce shifts in population size and health” (Stein, 2007, p. 57). Stein calls these local incursions of power “village biopower.” While including the term “village,” this conceptualisation is not confined to the village context; rather, it is about non-state power. In merging with local modes of power, Stein argued that “village biopower constructs an alternative modernity in which bodies may be ordered and managed, but without necessarily creating the same kinds of Western, individualised subjectivities described in Foucault’s work” (Stein, 2007, p. 57).

How might a reading of Stein’s village biopower help shed light on sexual surveillance in Indonesia? In what ways might village biopower be operating through subalternity, that is, through those with lesser forms of traditional power? How does village biopower relate to surveillance, and more specifically, to sexual surveillance? In which ways might an investigation of Scott’s performative regulation illuminate sexual surveillance in Indonesia? Is manifest agency increasing as latent coercion decreases, as Scott asserts is happening in the West? Are bodies being ordered and managed but not individualised? Is morality lessening as a force of compliance as there is a growing of self-directing propensities bringing subjects into line? To explore some responses to these questions, I shortly turn to a discussion of the case studies. However, to first contextualise sexual surveillance within Indonesia, I examine the notion of shame.

Shaming sexuality

There are many discourses operating within Indonesia that direct appropriate sexual behaviours. Discourses about healthcare, reproduction, religion and education, to name a few, shape notions of appropriate sexuality in numerous ways. Another powerful tool shaping sexuality in Indonesia is the notion of shame. Within parts of Indonesia, the possibility of evoking shame is so powerful that no further threats need to be made to ensure people curtail undesirable behaviour. The adage “tidak boleh” means more than the literal “it’s not allowed”; it taps into powerful embodied reactions of the shame that will result if an imperative is disregarded. To be accused of having no shame (tak tahu malu) is one of the worst insults that can be levelled upon a person. Sexuality is a topic entwined with shame, and indeed the term for genitals (kemaluan) comes from the root word malu (shame). Part of the reason that shame is such a powerful regulator of behaviour is because shame is cast not just upon the person who acted wrongly. Rather, if one person causes shame, their entire extended family is also shamed. I refer to this extensive shaming as “kinships of shame” and demonstrate here how it comes into play in everyday social life.

Shame is visited on and through the bodies of women far more than men. In Bugis South Sulawesi, for instance, women are conceived of as being the primary symbol of their family’s shame (siri’).⁵ As such, a woman’s behaviour is closely monitored so she does not threaten her family’s social standing.⁶ If siri’ is caused by extramarital sexual relations, both extended families are shamed, but it is the woman’s family who are to masiri’ – a Bugis term meaning those who must defend their siri’. Here, we see the application of double standards; while fornication contravenes norms for both women and men, it is the woman and her extended family who are most shamed and who must then defend their honour (Davies, 2010). It generally falls upon a male relative, such as a brother, to defend impugned family siri’. If a man does not defend siri’, he becomes mate-siri’ (socially dead) (Millar, 1983). Men thus have a vested interest in preventing siri’ and a responsibility to restore honour. One way that honour can be restored is by the couple marrying, which can happen through elopement.⁷

We see above the operation of kinships of shame. It is not just the couple caught having sex outside of marriage who are shamed, but their respective extended families also bear this burden and must respond to restore balance. While these kinships of shame usually involve relatives, people can become entangled in webs of shame through other networks – neighbours, friends, colleagues, one’s village and even the state. Individual agents thus act knowing that the consequences of their actions will also be borne by others connected to them. The consequences of being entangled in kinships of shame are varied; job opportunities may dry up and marriage prospects may reduce. We also see here how kinships of shame operate as a form of biopower regulating sexuality outside the formality of governmental institutions. Given then the centrality of shame, how does it shape sexuality?

A key way in which discourses of shame shape sexuality in Indonesia is through expecting individuals, but in practice mostly women, to refrain from premarital sexual relations. Through exhorting the virtues of virginity, the adverse consequences of premarital sex are reinforced. The value of virginity is promoted through positive affirmation, such as when the mother-of-the-bride proudly hangs out a blood-stained sheet the morning after her daughter’s wedding. The value of virginity is also reinforced through punitive means, such as the requirement outlined in the 2010 Indonesian Policewomen’s Handbook that unmarried candidates must consent to having bodily checks to ensure their hymen is intact; expensive operations are available to women who need to replicate an intact hymen. The value of women’s virginity prior to marriage and fidelity within it stem in many ways from the view that a family’s worth is represented through the chastity of its women. Avoiding shame by ensuring women are virgins at marriage is thus one way in which surveillance and shame work together to shape sexuality in Indonesia.

Notions of supposed reduced economic productivity, and the resulting shame, are also used to condemn fornication. In his study of factory workers in Bantam, Jo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: mapping sex and sexualities in contemporary Indonesia
• PART I Sexual politics
• PART II Sexual health
• Part III Sexual diversity
• PART IV Sexual representations
• Afterword: reflections on sexual rights, politics and sexuality studies in Indonesia
• Index