The Politics of Local versus Global of Sexuality and Gender Debates in the Post-Soeharto Era of Indonesia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Sexuality and Sexual Politics in Contemporary Indonesia
2008
The post-Suharto period was expected to establish Indonesia as a democracy, committed to equality between citizens and human rights, but respect for women's equal rights, for example the freedom to terminate a pregnancy, freedom of expression, freedom from polygamy, has not occurred. Indonesia has enjoyed some expanded political liberties, but the civil liberties of the Indonesian people are not protected. Why has democracy failed to deliver civil liberties in Indonesia despite its success in opening up political liberties? Why has democracy strengthened the ties between the government and dominant religious institutions? These are the questions I address. In the case of Indonesia, the transition to democracy has not necessarily led to the liberalization concerning laws on gender and freedom of the individual. In fact it has led to the opposite. This is true in the case of women's sexual liberation, which is condemned and restricted both by the democratic elected government ...
Review of The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia
2006
Studies of the cultural expression and social enactments of nationhood in postcolonial Indonesia often find themselves, implicitly or otherwise, pitted against notions of the "inauthentic." Just as in the Western popular imagination there is a relentless search for "authentic" locales untouched by the co-evils of Westernization and globalization, so, too, in the anthropological literature on Indonesia an emphasis on difference has always served to deflect attention from forms of Indonesian culture that appear to derive from borrowing or appropriating Western sources. Writers whose concern is the nation and its culture often strive to articulate the "authenticity" of their material, knowing that apparently "Westernized" cultural expression inhabits a territory far removed from its presumed origins, but those writers often lack the theoretical means to underwrite what they instinctively know to be the case. In The Gay Archipelago, Tom Boellstorff describes his own response to this challenge, as he negotiated a way of conceptualizing the lives of the gay and lesbi Indonesians he came to know in the course of research in a number of different locations across Indonesia. His thinking on the problem, which shapes the conceptual understandings that structure this book, goes well beyond the subject matter of the book itself. It opens up a way of thinking about the Indonesian nation and its culture that ranks as a major contribution to studies in this field.
The Politics of Local Versus Global of Sexuality and Gender Debates in the Post-Soeharto Era
2014
Gender dan seksualitas adalah variabel penting dalam membentuk politikIndonesia baik di masa orde baru maupun era reformasi. Di masa orde barudi bawah kepemimpinan Presiden Soeharto, gender dan seksualitas terutamadikontrol oleh negara melalui peraturan seperti UU No. 1 Tahun 1974Tentang Perkawinan. Aturan tersebut mengatur tentang gender apa saja yangdiakui negara dan bagaimana peran gender yang harus dilakukan masingmasinggender, serta orientasi seksual apa dan perilaku seks apa yang diakuioleh negara. Sementara itu, di era reformasi, kelompok agama khususnyadari komunitas Muslim yang memainkan peran lebih banyak dalam politikgender dan seksualitas. Di bawah konteks politik tertentu baik di tingkatnasional terutama terkait gerakan reformasi maupun di tingkat globalterutama pasca 9/11, dan konteks perkembangan akademis dalam isyuseksualitas, saya menemui adanya kontestasi politik gender dan seksualitasdalam kerangka lokal versus global
TRANSNATIONAL SEXUALITIES IN ONE PLACE Indonesian Readings
Gender & Society, 2005
In studies of transnational sexualities, locality has remained a contentious but important site to disrupt the universalizing tendencies of queer academic and activist discourses. In this article, the author uses a feminist approach to transnational studies of sexualities that takes into account particular locales within the global movements of queer identities and discourses. She does so by examining the way individuals in West Sumatra, Indonesia, access and appropriate circuits of knowledge to produce their gendered and sexual subjectivities. The locality the author examines is Padang, West Sumatra, a part of the Indonesian state that is ethnically Minangkabau, devoutly Islamic, and matrilineal. Through stories of lesbi in Padang, the author demonstrates the way state and Islamic discourses shape gendered subjectivities that are not always explicitly resistant. At the same time, the circulation of queer knowledge creates an imagined space for a community of like-minded individuals.
Culture, Health and Sexuality, 2007
This paper examines changes in the regulation of sexuality in Indonesia in the period since 1980 as seen through state, religious and lesbian and gay activist discourses on sexuality. Three different eras during that period of Indonesian history are compared. Under the New Order regime of Suharto, the Indonesian state sought to control sexuality through a deployment of gender. During the 1990s, state Islamic discourses of sexuality shifted in response to international pressures to support same-sex marriage and sexual rights. During the third period following the end of the Suharto regime in 1998, a conservative Islamic minority pushed for more restrictive laws in the State Penal Code, initiating intense public debate on the role of the state in questions of sexuality and morality. Over this time period, the dominant discourse on sexuality moved from strategically linking normative gender with heterosexuality and marriage to direct attempts to legislate heterosexual marriage by criminalizing a wide range of sexual practices.
Jurnal Peradaban, 2022
This paper discusses the rising phenomenon of deploying sexuality and gender by Islamic fundamentalist groups in contemporary political situations. Rather than contextualizing the case as a form of patriarchal and heteronormative approaches in interpreting Islamic teachings, this article addresses a more systematic Islamic political agenda that roots in the history of sexuality in the Islamic context. This paper elaborates and traces the influential impacts of the construction and production of the discourse of marriage, homosexuality, controlling women's body and sexuality, and the authority of male clerics (ulama) in Islamic knowledge and law production to the revival of contemporary politics of gender and sexuality among Islamic fundamentalist groups both in Indonesia and beyond. Examining current social and political dynamics, both in Indonesia and at global level, this article offers a new analytical framework beyond academic interpretation (tafsir) in understanding the politics of gender and sexuality in the context of emerging Islamic fundamentalism.
Individualization and LGBTI -A New Topic for Political and Religious Discourse in Indonesia
Indonesia is a nation of diversity. Thus various traditions, cultures, religions, beliefs, ethnics, tribes and languages were united when the Republic was founded. Based on those facts, Indonesia’s founding fathers showed strong efforts in uniting the existing diversity and political currents under the national concensus ‘Bhinneka Tunggal Ika’, Hindu-Sankrit words meaning unity in diversity, and The Pancasila, five national basic principles. Consequently national law, mechanism of governance and political considerations followed the concept of Indonesia as a secular nation-state. It means that Indonesia also respects to the international law, human rights, and democracy, such as freedom of association and press, as well as the idea of individual human rights. From a perspective of human rights, the legitimacy of self determination for each human includes the aspect of sexual orientation and living in partnerships. Factually, people who perform their ‘coming out’ and those who advocate understanding or empathy on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) issues, so far experience little support, yet often harsh negative reactions, pressure, and harassment particularly from traditionalistic and religious communities that see a diversification of forms of partnership and sexual orientation as un-Indonesian or sinful. This article will show the emerging of LGBT movement and religious-society reactions relating to the government policies. (This is a Book Chapter of 'Diversity Concept, Diversity Politics' by Christoph Behrens (Ed.), Publish by Verlag DR. Kovac, Hamburg Germany 2016)