Intimate Assemblages

The Politics of Queer Identities and Sexualities in Indonesia

Hendri Yulius Wijaya

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9789811528774
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811528781
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Written in the aftermath of Indonesia's anti-queer panic in 2016, this book tells the story of local queer movements in challenging the heteronormative society and resisting the homophobic hostility from religious conservative groups and the state. The year 2016 was a touchstone moment for queer issues in Indonesia, marked by the ubiquity of anti-queer campaigns, along with the pervasive use of the term 'LGBT' in public. Drawing on historical archives and his engagements with local queer activisms, Hendri Yulius Wijaya traces the historical shifts of gender and sexual identities in Indonesia, from gay and lesbian, to LGBT, to SOGIE minorities, while exploring their connections with the country's socio-political circumstances and the globalization of queer rights.

 

Using a strategic blend of queer theory and assemblage framework, Wijaya demonstrates how activists refashion transnational sexuality discourses to balance international developments of queer rights against the contingencies of daily life in Indonesia. Equally importantly, he sheds light on emerging practices in activist landscapes, including the emergence of sexuality experts and the professionalization of activisms. In analyzing the rising tide of homophobic paranoia, Wijaya further shows how the current anti-queer campaigns have branched out into a broader assault on feminism and promoted a form of 'aversion therapy' that positions same-sex attraction as a divine ordeal. 

 

Intimate Assemblages follows the travails of queer activists in defining what it means to be queer in contemporary Indonesia.  

© The Author(s) 2020

H. Y. WijayaIntimate Assemblageshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-2878-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Intimate Assemblages: Sexual Technologies and Identity Politics in Indonesia

Hendri Yulius Wijaya¹

(1)

Jakarta, Indonesia

Hendri Yulius Wijaya

Keywords

QueerActivismTechnologyAssemblagesIdentityPoliticsDiscourse

End Abstract

The Rise of Anti-LGBT Sentiment

Indonesia is a place where sexuality is not supposed to be talked about openly. Because issues of sexuality have been widely understood as not only a private matter but also a taboo, Indonesians have tended to avoid such subjects in their daily conversations. If they want to discuss the subject matter openly, more than just a little bravery is required. That is the shared cultural understanding and practice concerning sexuality that mainly appears in the public realm, although intimate discussions about sexuality and non-normative sexual practices , including extramarital and same-sex relations , are not too difficult to find in the private lives of many Indonesians.

Over the past few decades, homosexuality received only occasional and fragmented coverage in the Indonesian press. Most of the media reports on homosexuality and waria (inadequately translated as ‘transgender woman’ ) issues and people were mostly presented with a sensationalist tone and from a voyeuristic gaze, to satisfy public curiosity about what those subjects did in their private lives (UNDP, USAID 2014, 40–41). More often than not, these subjects were seen as abnormal people since they had deviated from heterosexuality, which was positioned as the default setting of a person’s sexuality by Indonesian society. Before the entrenchment of the term lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) in the local landscape, the term ‘homo ,’ ‘gay ,’ ‘lesbi ,’¹ and ‘waria’ were the most common category the press and people used to refer to non-normative gender and sexual subjects in the country. The local terminology waria—an amalgam of the terms wanita (woman) and pria (man)—was introduced by Governor Jakarta Ali Sadikin in 1978 (ibid.).²

Since 2016, a dramatic wave of transformation has been happening in Indonesia: LGBT issues have rapidly attracted national attention. Between January and May the same year, state officials, politicians, the press, civil society groups , and socially conservative religious leaders regularly made derogatory statements about LGBT people. They largely framed and described LGBT Indonesians as the products of ‘Western intervention,’ a form of ‘contagious disease or behavior ,’ a structured movement to import same-sex marriage, or as ‘insatiable sexual creatures ,’ conflating their identity with ‘child molesters,’ among others. In one bizarre case, their condition was even said to be the result of ‘overconsumption of instant noodles and canned formula milk’ (Horton 2016)! The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report These Political Games Ruin Our Lives (2016a) meticulously documented these public denouncements, recording who said what and acknowledging the direct impact these statements had on the relevant communities.

The year 2016 was a touchstone moment for LGBT issues in Indonesia. Western connotations attached to the LGBT label have offered public figures, politicians, and conservative religious leaders the opportunity to exploit deeply held prejudices on homosexuality while simultaneously building public support around affirmations for protecting national values and identity (Altman and Symons 2016, 108). The Defense Minister at that time, Ryamizard Ryacudu claimed in a public statement that LGBT individuals and movements were an embodiment of a ‘proxy war’ between Indonesian and other countries, in which foreign countries deliberately used LGBT issues to control and destroy Indonesian cultures without using a military force (Tempo 2016). Equally troubling, a conservative Islamic pro-family group, Family Love Alliance (Aliansi Cinta Keluarga, AILA) pursued legal pathways in an attempt to outlaw consensual same-sex relations and extramarital sexual relationships on the grounds that they ‘endangered’ the nation’s morality and values (Hermawan 2016). As a consequence, this upsurge of interest in LGBT issues led to a sharp increase in the use of the term in the Indonesian press in that same year (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

The frequency of the use of the term ‘LGBT’ in Indonesian language media

(Source Factiva Database, accessed February 10, 2018)

The outcome of this public hysteria was twofold. While LGBT was framed as ‘foreign’ and ‘politically threatening,’ at the same time, it has also made ‘LGBT’ a part of the everyday vernacular of many Indonesians. Since then, the category LGBT has increasingly been used as a catchall to refer to any person with non-normative sexualities or non-conforming gender expressions. No wonder, then, someone like myself is nowadays frequently referred to in Indonesia as ‘LGBT,’ instead of as a ‘gay man.’ A lesbian activist with short hair and a masculine appearance recently reported that she was waiting in a queue at a convenience store when she overheard a woman whispering to her husband, ‘Look, she must be LGBT!’ (Yulius 2017).

These developments invite the question: Why now? Why did the phenomenon not arise ten or twenty years ago? What does this socio-cultural shift tell us about the politics of gender and sexuality in Indonesia, and its relationship to the increased international attention to LGBT identities and rights? What were the direct impacts this seismic shift had on the Indonesian LGBT communities?

Today, the massive politicization of LGBT issues in Indonesia is not merely the reactionary response to the globalizing force of LGBT identities and rights from the West. It is also the product of the country’s own socio-cultural and political circumstances, particularly its process of democratic transition after more than thirty years of authoritarian-military rule under the New Order regime (1966–1998). Following the advent of democratization in 1998, Indonesia’s burgeoning civil society movements, with support from international humanitarian or human rights organizations, have increasingly engaged in campaigns and advocacy for increased human rights recognition and protection, precisely at the moment when the discourse of LGBT identities and rights has also been gaining momentum internationally. This particular confluence inspired and subsequently enabled Indonesian queer activisms to become more visible and political in public discourse. Those activists began to articulate their demands for recognition and protection from the state. As we shall see, however, all these local and international developments of sexuality rights are intertwined and are always in tension.

Surprisingly, the political contestations in democratic Indonesia have also manifested in another unexpected configuration. Not only have democratic and pro-human rights civil society movements burgeoned, but the democratic reforms have also ironically enabled conservative Islamic groups, which were previously suppressed under the New Order ruling, to acquire more political power in the public sphere and influence public opinion on many issues, including morality, blasphemy, and sexuality. As such, scholars have often described this emerging force as the rise of Islamic conservatism or political Islam (see Robinson 2015; Heryanto 2018; Lindsey 2018; McGregor 2018; Salim 2018; Weintraub 2018).

In their efforts to generate more public support for their existence, the Islamic conservatives often exploit and politicize non-normative sexuality as a subversion of Indonesian culture . In doing so, homosexuality has been positioned as a form of ‘un-Indonesian-ness’ and a ‘foreign threat’ (mainly imagined from the West) that, if no one takes any immediate action to curb it, would put national identity and morality at stake. Religious vigilante groups , often associated with the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam, FPI), have also been central in disrupting queer events and activisms (Davies 2018, 327; Wijaya and Davies 2019). For example, since 2011 these vigilante groups have staged protests in public and openly attacked the Q! Film Festival, which was the prominent queer film festival in the country, to the point that the event was canceled abruptly. Further, greater regulations of bodies and sexualities were passed in response to pressure brought to bear on the government by these male-dominated Islamic vigilante groups (Robinson 2015).

Most recently, the globalization of LGBT identities and rights, particularly the push to recognize same-sex marriage in some Western countries, has also ironically brought new challenges for Indonesian queer people and activisms. It is not my purpose here to engage with the debates on the issue of marriage equality that have long proliferated in queer theory forums. Current statements by Islamic conservatives and some state actors have asserted that same-sex marriage is a goal of Indonesian LGBT activists, positioning LGBT activism as dangerous to traditional family norms and the future of the nation-state. Observing these developments, Selvi, a staff member of an international humanitarian organization asserted:

[In relation to the current anti-LGBT sentiment], the turning point was when President Barrack Obama finally declared same-sex marriage officially legal in the U.S., and that decision made people in Indonesia emotionally disturbed (gerah)….Shortly after that, the conservatives began to raise their concern about this subject matter. (interview, January 2017)

To justify its argument in favor of the criminalization of homosexuality in the Constitutional Court, AILA even argued that same-sex marriage in the U.S. had led to the outbreak of sexually transmitted diseases (see Chapter 5). Reports in the media also often highlighted opposition from politicians and conservatives to same-sex marriage, as if the recognition and protection of LGBT rights could only be manifested through marriage equality.

The above stories sketch the dynamics of LGBT issues at the macro level in Indonesia. They reveal that increased international attention to LGBT identities and rights have been met with increasing hostility from conservatives in the context of democratization. Nevertheless, something important is missing here, and that is the question of the queer activists themselves. How have they reacted and responded to this shifting terrain? What kinds of activist strategies have they deployed to counter rising homophobia? Moreover, as LGBT rights have become a concern of the international human rights community, what forms of practice have emerged from encounters between local activists and transnational sexual rights discourses? To what extent have global discourses on LGBT human rights influenced their strategies? And, how have they sought to offset the power and scaremongering of religious-nationalists?

My attempts to find answers to these questions have sig...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Intimate Assemblages: Sexual Technologies and Identity Politics in Indonesia
• Part I. Queer Activisms and the New Order Regime (1982–1998)
• Part II. Queer Activisms and the Democratic Regime (1998–2015)
• Part III. Queer Activisms and Escalating Anti-LGBT Panic (2016–Present)
• Back Matter