Tom Boellstorff

A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia

In A Coincidence of Desires , Tom Boellstorff considers how interdisciplinary collaboration between anthropology and queer studies might enrich both fields. For more than a decade he has visited Indonesia, both as an anthropologist exploring gender and sexuality and as an activist involved in HIV prevention work. Drawing on these experiences, he provides several in-depth case studies, primarily concerning the lives of Indonesian men who term themselves gay (an Indonesian-language word that overlaps with, but does not correspond exactly to, the English word “gay”). These case studies put interdisciplinary research approaches into practice. They are preceded and followed by theoretical meditations on the most productive forms that collaborations between queer studies and anthropology might take. Boellstorff uses theories of time to ask how a model of “coincidence” might open up new possibilities for cooperation between the two disciplines. He also juxtaposes his own work with other scholars’ studies of Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore to compare queer sexualities across Southeast Asia. In doing so, he asks how comparison might be understood as a queer project and how queerness might be understood as comparative. The case studies contained in A Coincidence of Desires speak to questions about the relation of sexualities to nationalism, religion, and globalization. They include an examination of zines published by gay Indonesians; an analysis of bahasa gay —a slang spoken by gay Indonesians that is increasingly appropriated in Indonesian popular culture; and an exploration of the place of warias (roughly, “male-to-female transvestites”) within Indonesian society. Boellstorff also considers the tension between Islam and sexuality in gay Indonesians’ lives and a series of incidents in which groups of men, identified with Islamic fundamentalism, violently attacked gatherings of gay men. Collectively, these studies insist on the primacy of empirical investigation to any queer studies project that wishes to speak to the specificities of lived experience.

A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies

The information age has, under our noses, become the gaming age. It appears likely that gaming and its associated notion of play may become a master metaphor for a range of human social relations, with the potential for new freedoms and new creativity as well as new oppressions and inequality. Although no methodological or theoretical approach can represent a cure-all for any discipline, in this article the author discusses how anthropological approaches can contribute significantly to a game studies nimble enough to respond to the unanticipated, conjunctural, and above all rapidly changing cyberworlds through which everyone in some way is now in the process of redefining the human project.

The emergence of political homophobia in Indonesia: masculinity and national belonging

This paper explores an unprecedented series of violent acts against ‘gay’ Indonesians beginning in September 1999. Indonesia is often characterized as ‘tolerant’ of homosexuality. This is a false belief, but one containing a grain of truth. To identify this grain of truth I distinguish between ‘heterosexism’ and ‘homophobia,’ noting that Indonesia has been marked by a predominance of heterosexism over homophobia. I examine the emergence of a political homophobia directed at public events where gay men stake a claim to Indonesias troubled civil society. That such violence is seen as the properly masculine response to these events indicates how the nation may be gaining a new masculinist cast. In the new Indonesia, male–male desire can increasingly be construed as a threat to normative masculinity, and thus to the nation itself.

Bodies of emotion: rethinking culture and emotion through Southeast Asia

Emotion has represented a tantalizing subject for social scientific inquiry because it appears to tell us about our true selves; the self that, after all the thinking and interacting are done, feels the welling-up of rage, the tender pangs of love, the black emptiness of despair. Invoking methodological individualism, our phrasing here frames emotions as the property of persons, and indeed the majority of research on emotion has assumed that the individual experience of emotion is fundamentally prior to its social experience, its so-called ‘context.’ In this tradition (see Lutz & White 1986 for an overview and critique), emotion’s location in culture is acknowledged in broad terms. An example of this is the notion of an ‘emotion lexicon’ drawn upon by persons from a ‘cultural group,’ where the latter term means ‘speakers of the same language.’ Languages (almost always authorized national languages) stand in for culture, and researchers discover that all speakers of a language share a cognitive structure for emotion (Kovecses 1990, 2000; Wierzbicka 1999). Difference is downplayed; for instance, a recent questionnaire-based social psychological study of gender and emotion ‘found the anticipated effects of sex of respondent with respect to all three aspects of emotion (intensity, duration, and expression), showing that women in all countries reported more intense emotions, and of a longer duration, and that they also expressed their emotions more overtly’ (Fischer & Manstead 2000:88). The dominant social psychological approach thus pairs a methodological individualism with a theoretical universalism, and ‘culture’ — that historically specific mediating level as fundamental to human experience as ‘English,’ ‘Thai,’ or ‘German’ — is elided. This approach continues to this day in research on emotion in Southeast Asia (the areal focus of the present collection), and can justly claim to have significantly broadened our understanding of lexicons

When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time

I proffer this essay to a specific audience — those, like myself, with a commitment to both “queer theory” in some sense of the term and a critique of marriage that draws on concerns with its politics of recognition (and disrecognition of the unmarried), the place of marriage in capitalist production, and the inequalities and violences so often found within marriage and so often linked to hierarchies of gender, race, and class.1 I pitch this essay in an exploratory register, resisting a framework that would equate “offering solutions” with the horizon of relevance and political efficacy. Proscription is not the same thing as critique. While I do suggest an alternative mode of conceptualizing time, this suggestion is an invitation to conversation and debate. I am interested in questions like the one posed by Geeta Patel: “How can we think subjectivity through other possible times, given that subjectivities in the ‘modern’ are inseparable from particular ways of narrating time?”2 This essay considers the possibility of a queer theory not necessarily opposed to marriage. This is a tricky proposition, because some prominent arguments in favor of “same-sex marriage” claim it will “civilize” gay and lesbian persons into upholding “traditional” norms of monogamy and propriety. As the Gay Shame collective has noted in their “End Marriage” statement: “If you look at the rhetoric of the freedom to marry movement and the Republican Party their similarities are frighteningly apparent. In their ideal world we would all be monogamously coupled, instead of rethinking the practice of ‘coupling.’ ”3 Granted, some working for what they term “marriage equality” are careful to note that marriage may not work for everyone.4 But the Gay Shame statement is accurate in that “same-sex marriage” rhetoric commonly celebrates that possibility as a means to normalize queer sexuality and elides the relationship between marriage and “the reproduction of patriarchal relations,” a relationship long demonstrated by

The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies THE PERFECT PATH Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia Tom Boellstorff J n a 1997 ad for Ciputra Hotels that appeared in the Indonesian national airline’s in-flight magazine, a smiling Balinese dancer in bejeweled “traditional” garb stands juxtaposed to glittering hotel facades. The ad proclaims that “Indonesia is also home to Asia’s newest hotel concept. . . . While tradition thrives in Indo- nesia, the world’s most modern concepts are equally at home” (fig. 1). Presumably, one of these “modern concepts” is the “Western” male business traveler, who will feel “at home” under the domestic attentions of the female staff.’ It hardly takes a subversive reading to see that the ad constructs Indo- nesia as a hybrid of tradition, gendered female, and modernity, gendered male. This binarism has a long history, extending from colonialism to modernization theory. Many non-“Western” intellectuals have addressed its symbolic violence, including the man many consider Indonesia’s greatest living author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. His novel Footsteps, which opens in 1901, is set in the late colonial period but speaks by analogy to the Indonesia of the 1970s and 1980s, when it was written. The protagonist, Minke, has just come from Surabaya to the capital, known informally as Betawi. Alone and poor but on his way to medical school and a “modern” career, Minke frames his arrival as a change of time as well as place: Into the universe of Betawi I go-into the universe of the twentieth century. And, yes, to you too, nineteenth century-farewell! . . . People say only the modern man gets ahead in these times. In his hands lies the fate of humankind. You reject modernity? You will be the plaything of all those forces of the world operating outside and around you. I am a modern person. . . . And modernity brings the loneliness of orphaned humanity, cursed to free itself from unnecessary ties of custom, blood-even the land, and if need be, from others of its kind.2 GLQ 5:4 pp. 475-510 Copyright 0 1999 by Duke University Press Published by Duke University Press from

A Typology of Ethnographic Scales for Virtual Worlds

This chapter outlines a typology of genres of ethnographic research with regard to virtual worlds, informed by extensive research the author has completed both in Second Life and in Indonesia. It begins by identifying four confusions about virtual worlds: they are not games, they need not be graphical or even visual, they are not mass media, and they need not be defined in terms of escapist role-playing. A three-part typology of methods for ethnographic research in virtual worlds focuses on the relationship between research design and ethnographic scale. One class of methods for researching virtual worlds with regard to ethnographic scale explores interfaces between virtual worlds and the actual world, whereas a second examines interfaces between two or more virtual worlds. The third class involves studying a single virtual world in its own terms. Recognizing that all three approaches have merit for particular research purposes, ethnography of virtual worlds can be a vibrant field of research, contributing to central debates about human selfhood and sociality.

Zines and Zones of Desire: Mass mediated love, national romance, and sexual citizenship in gay Indonesia

IT IS NIGHT; IN THE BACK OF A HOUSE in the city of Surabaya at the eastern end of Java is a room where two gay men complete a new edition of the zine GA Ya Nusantara (GN). At a table, Joko, one of the men, bends down over a ledger; with pen and ruler, he extends inked lines horizontally from a list of about 250 subscribers from across Indonesia, tabulating who has paid for the upcoming issue. Indra, the other man, sits before an old computer adding final touches to the new issue of the zine before sending it to a local print shop. He looks down, then up again, entering a handwritten story sent from a gay man from a small Sumatran town. All that remains is the short stack of letters from men who wish to be included in the personals section. Next to the letters lies the glossy photograph of a gay man from Bali; as this months cover boy, his smoldering eyes will greet those who take GA Ya Nusantara into their hands. On the eastern coast of the island of Borneo, in the city of Samarinda, is a network of gay men: some hail from local Dayak and Banjar ethnic groups, and others are migrants from elsewhere in Indonesia. On this day, I am sitting in the windowless, rented room of Haru, a man from Java, when he removes a worn copy of GA Ya Nusantara from a small locked cupboard. He shares each new edition with gay friends, including Awi, an ethnic Banjar from Samarinda who lives with his sister and her husband and children. None of these family members know Awi is gay, but Awi tells

For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real

A diverse body of work known as the “ontological turn” has made important contributions to anthropological theory. In this article, I build on this work to address one of the most important theoretical and political issues haunting contemporary theories of technology: the opposition of the “digital” to the “real.” This fundamentally misrepresents the relationship between the online and offline, in both directions. First, it flies in the face of the myriad ways that the online is real. Second (and just as problematically), it implies that everything physical is real. Work in the ontological turn can help correct this misrepresentation regarding the reality of the digital. However, this potential contribution is limited by conceptions of difference the ontological turn shares with the interpretive frameworks it turns against. Drawing on ontological-turn scholarship, my own research, and a range of thinkers, including Tarde, I work to show how an ontological approach that problematizes both similitude and difference provides valuable resources for understanding digital culture as well as for culture theory more generally.

Health care experiences and perceptions among people with and without disabilities

BACKGROUND Little is known about health care experiences among people with and without disabilities. OBJECTIVE We sought to explore perceptions of people with and without disabilities related to their health care experiences. METHODS Nineteen persons with and without disabilities participated in one of four focus groups. Focus groups were conducted in the physical world in Milwaukee, WI and in the virtual world in Second Life(®) with Virtual Ability, a well-established community designed by and for people with a wide range of disabilities. A grounded theory methodology was employed to analyze focus group data. Inclusion of physical and virtual world focus groups enabled people with a wide range of disabilities to participate. RESULTS While some participants described instances of receiving good care, many discussed numerous barriers. The main themes that emerged in focus groups among both persons with and without disabilities related to their health care experiences including poor coordination among providers; difficulties with insurance, finances, transportation and facilities; short duration of visits with physicians; inadequate information provision; feelings of being diminished and deflated; and self-advocacy as a tool. Transportation was a major concern for persons with disabilities influencing mobility. Persons with disabilities described particularly poignant experiences wherein they felt invisible or were viewed as incompetent. CONCLUSIONS Both persons with and without disabilities experienced challenges in obtaining high quality health care. However, persons with disabilities experienced specific challenges often related to their type of disability. Participants stressed the need for improving health care coordination and the importance of self-advocacy.