The Perfect Woman: Transgender Femininity and National Modernity in New Order Indonesia, 1968–1978 (original) (raw)

The decade between 1968 and 1978 was a period of remarkable activity in the state's use of scientific knowledge about sex, gender, and sexuality to define individual bodies in Indonesia.

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The Biopolitical Birth of Gender: Social Control, Hermaphroditism, and the New Sexual Apparatus

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 2013

This article argues that gender was invented in the 1950s as a new sexual apparatus of biopower. Through a reading of mid-century sexological studies against the background of structural-functionalist and behaviorist theories of social order, it shows how gender was born in the clinic to discipline the reproduction of life in new ways. The truth of sex was no longer found in the genitals or mind, but in the contingent cognitive processes of a behavioral control system. The gender apparatus produced systematized protocols for sex reassignment surgeries for infants with ambiguous genitalia and rendered the family a panoptic institution, all to ensure that children were socialized into normative gender roles guaranteeing the continued reproduction of the life of the species. The violence of this new lifeadministering technology was crystallized in the pedagogical techniques employed by physicians designed to persuade their child patients to submit themselves to the normalizing care of surgeons and psychiatrists. Downloaded from possessed not only a sex but also learned a gender, expanding and multiplying the access points of power to the body, rendering it more elastic and malleable and hence, more governable.

Contesting the Female Body, Modernity and Globalization

Masyarakat, Kebudayaan dan Politik, 2010

This article takes a look back in the 2006 when the Indonesian House of Representatives proposes a bill against pornography and porn action. It further examines the contested position of female body in Indonesia in the light of globalization. The article particularly argues that female body has become a symbolic contested site of globalization and modernity. In the era of the very rapid changes it seemed Indonesian government was struck by moral panic due to modernization and globalization which obviously have brought about changes in the fabrication of the society. They are worried of the decreasing belief of the society in the tradition as argued to be manifested in the changing of bodily presentation. However, such perception is gendered as they emphasize on the presentation of female body

(Trans) Gendering History and Anthropology:Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History. Gilbert Herdt

Current Anthropology, 1995

Gil Herdt has built his career as an ethnographic iconoclast of accepted sex/gender ideologies. Whether writing about the Sambia or teen-aged lesbians and gays in Chicago or introducing the Zone collection Third Sex, Third Gender, he challenges us to question our categories, to dismantle the "easy to think" dualisms that provide such a strong foundation for our bifurcated and limited conceptual frameworks. We have reified sex/gender ideas to the point that perpetuation of systems of inequality is inevitable (p.81).

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