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the deep ambivalence of “ethnography-at-home” scholarship. This reviewer
wonders, however, if further analyses of the visceral, embodied dilemmas of
the ethnographic experience housed within the body of the “unruly spectator”
might have served to parse this commentarial persona further, rendering it
more accessible to ethnographers and theorists contemplating ongoing debates
about ethnographic subjectivity and reflexivity.
The immense detail, the careful deployment of scholarly and personal narrative,
and the dexterity of weaving history and ethnography together in Sweating Saris
results in a beautiful and critical piece of scholarship for those interested in Asian
American embodied practices. Srinivasan’s adept interdisciplinary study is an essential read for those exploring transnational embodied practices across historical
periods and ideologies. Its most important contribution, perhaps, is its framing of
Bharata Natyam and other dance forms not as staged events subject to the gaze
of spectators, but rather as continuous forms of physical, intellectual, interpretive,
and performative labor that contribute to the honing of (personal, national, and cultural) identity, both in the public domain and within practitioners’ bodies. Here, the
author continues ongoing efforts in the fields of dance and performance studies to
attend to kinesthesia as a quintessential aspect of human experience, and demonstrates the intellectual opportunities of this analytic perspective for South Asian
studies, Asian-American studies, and other humanistic disciplines.
ARTHI DEVARAJAN
Northeastern University
arthi.devarajan@gmail.com
SOUTHEAST ASIA
Gender Diversity in Indonesia: Sexuality, Islam, and Queer Selves. By
SHARYN GRAHAM DAVIES. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. xvii,
257 pp. $148.00 (cloth); $42.95 (paper).
Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia. By
EVELYN BLACKWOOD. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010. xi,
251 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $24.00 (paper).
doi:10.1017/S002191181200109X
In the last twenty years, the explosion of research on gender and sexuality in
Southeast Asia has brought new attention to the region and revitalized discussions in disciplines such as gender studies, anthropology, and sociology. These
ethnographies by Evelyn Blackwood and Sharyn Graham Davies build on intensive research in different regions of Indonesia to extend the study of gender and
sexuality in productive new directions. One of the contributions of feminist
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843
theory has been a critique of the gender binary—the widespread social
system that splits people into two opposite and unequal genders based on differences in their reproductive anatomy. Blackwood and Davies reveal how the
gender binary in Indonesia both shapes and is challenged by people’s
self-definitions.
Blackwood’s beautifully detailed and captivating ethnography, Falling into the
Lesbi World, explores the lives of West Sumatran tombois, masculine females who
identify as men, and their partners (femmes), who identify as “normal” women who
desire men. Although such couples consider themselves to be “lesbi,” there are
important differences between them and the more affluent, urban lesbians who
participate in the small LGBT rights movement in Jakarta and other major Indonesian cities. Not the least of these differences is that West Sumatran lesbi couples
adhere strictly to the gender binary in their relationships. This is troubling for the
Indonesian LGBT movement, which has been influenced by a lesbian feminist critique of heterosexual relationships as unequal.
Tombois come to identify as boys during childhood, and as adults they enact
masculinity through clothing, bodily comportment, and relationships with
women. Many are fairly successful in this enactment—they “pass” enough to
gain mobility in public spaces, to socialize with men, and even to achieve some
measure of tolerance in their communities. Femmes generally follow the rules
of heterosexual femininity, except for their choice of a tomboi as partner
(although some also have male partners). In daily life, the couples often
perform conventionally masculine and feminine roles, with the tomboi as the
breadwinner, and the femme responsible for domestic life. As Saskia Wieringa
has pointed out, such conformity to the gender binary seems to mollify kin and
neighbors more than if the couple were to openly proclaim themselves the
same sex.1 Blackwood observes that by drawing on hegemonic ideologies of
gender difference, tomboi-femme couples reproduce state and Islamic discourses
that contribute to gender inequalities in Indonesia.
Nevertheless, there is far more going on here than simple reproduction of
gender ideologies. Blackwood demonstrates that tombois’ gender presentations
are often contextual—when at home with their kin, they may take on more conventionally feminine roles in order to avert conflicts and to express their commitment to the family. Moreover, tombois are aware of their female bodies and rarely
seek to change them, even though such technologies have become more available
in recent years. Blackwood builds on the work of theorist Judith Halberstam’s
Female Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998) to argue
that tombois are performing a female masculinity. They act in ways that are conventionally understood as masculine, defining themselves as men in line with
Indonesian state ideology, but they are also cognizant and accepting of their
female bodies. And many tombois and femmes call themselves lesbi, indicating
1
Saskia Wieringa, “‘If There Is No Feeling’: The Dilemma between Silence and Coming Out in a
Working-Class Butch/Femme Community in Jakarta.” In Love and Globalization: Transformations
of Intimacy in the Contemporary World, eds. Mark Padilla and Jennifer Hirsch (Nashville, Tenn.:
Vanderbilt University Press, 2008), 70–92.
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that they consider themselves to be in a same-sex, if not same-gender, relationship. Although Indonesian gay activists have recently included the category of
transgender in their movement, they often define this identity as inherently
different from lesbian, and it thus sits uneasily with how tombois and femmes
understand themselves. Nevertheless, Blackwood suggests that these new discourses on what it means to be a lesbian may eventually become influential for
West Sumatran tombois and femmes. The concept of female masculinity has provoked much scholarly debate, and Blackwood concludes that the tombois’ female
masculinity simultaneously reproduces and transgresses norms of gender and
sexuality, and that it also contests the ways lesbian and transgender identities
have been presented in Indonesian LGBT discourse.
Davies similarly explores sexuality in relation to gender in her fascinating
study of Bugis calalai (female-bodied individuals who desire heterosexual
women and may or may not identify as men), calabai (male-bodied individuals
who desire heterosexual men and may or may not identify as women), and androgynous bissu shamans in South Sulawesi. While Blackwood explores the meaning
of female masculinities and how the messy realities of sexual and gender minorities may not match with the identities promoted by global progressive movements, Davies seeks to understand the mutually constitutive relationships
between gender, sex, and sexuality.
Gender Diversity in Indonesia is a follow-up to Davies’s more specialized
2007 ethnography, Challenging Gender Norms: Five Genders among Bugis in
Indonesia (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth). It is structured so that the
first five chapters include a very detailed discussion of gender and sexuality in
the context of the Indonesian nation-state, Islam, and Bugis society, which is
interwoven with ethnographic data. In these chapters, Davies also lays out the
basis of her argument that gender is a pervasive category of difference and
inequality in Indonesia. More specifically, building on much recent literature,
she demonstrates how gender difference and inequality are systematically promoted by culture, state, and Islam in Indonesia. The next three chapters are
devoted to her case studies of calalai, calabai, and bissu.
Davies’ examination of calalai is especially noteworthy, as there are actually
few calalai in South Sulawesi, and those who become calalai are pushing up
against very strong norms of what it means to be born female. Intriguingly,
Davies suggests that for many calalai and calabai, sexuality informs gender. In
particular, because the pressure on females to marry heterosexually and bear children is pervasive, Davies proposes that calalai become persuaded of their masculinity because there are no available cultural models for being a masculine
woman. Remarkably, calalai do not face much overt harassment, but they live
within far stronger constraints than calabai. Similarly, calabai also explore the
opposite gender—in this case taking on femininity. Davies says that calabai
notice the discordance between themselves and masculine ideals at an early
age, and they shift toward femininity as an alternative. Like waria in other
parts of Indonesia, calabai emulate conventional Indonesian womanhood and
seek out relationships with heterosexual men, yet their playful gender performances also contest masculine and feminine norms. Some calabai are comfortable
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with the idea that their sexed bodies do not match their gender presentations,
while others attempt to resolve this dilemma by feminizing their bodies
through medical interventions. Calabai have recently achieved a degree of tolerance through performances in cultural festivals and beauty pageants; indeed, they
seem to have become symbols of Bugis cultural uniqueness. Nevertheless,
Davies is rightly concerned about the potential impact of recent legislation
against pornography, which may pose difficulties for calabai performances.
Davies proposes that the relative acceptance of calabai and even calalai
derives from the cultural precedent of bissu shamans. She maintains that bissu
shamans are a remnant of older Southeast Asian ritual practices that involve
the incorporation of both male and female within a single entity, but that like
other ritual specialists, bissu experienced a steep decline in prestige after the
seventeenth century. Recently, bissu have experienced a revival, partly due to
artistic works such as theater director Robert Wilson’s 2004 production of I La
Galigo, which used bissu in an avant-garde exploration of the Bugis creation
myth. While bissu have a complex relationship with Islam, Davies argues that
bissu activities are finding new forms of legitimacy through participation in cultural performances, and that they will continue to be a respected part of Bugis
life. As such, they also help to provide a crucial precedent for differently gendered people.
Blackwood and Davies portray rather different possible futures for tombois,
femmes, calalai, calabai, and bissu. Blackwood suggests that the Indonesian gay
rights movement may ultimately compel tombois to identify either as lesbian
women or as transgender, similar to how butch lesbians were marginalized by
the American LGBT movement. While Davies does not seem to think that
calalai are disappearing, she emphasizes the difficulties they face compared to
calabai, who seem to have found a social niche. Nevertheless, she acknowledges
that the calabai identity may also be shifting as more calabai gain access to the
means to feminize their bodies.
In Indonesian, as in Western society, there is a common-sense assumption
that sex difference determines gender. Both of these ethnographies offer evidence against this presumption. While Blackwood shows how the Indonesian discourse that insists on attaching female bodies to feminine gender identity and
desire for men (and vice versa) perpetuates the gender binary, she also eloquently
illustrates how tombois and femmes disrupt the tidy links between these categories. Similarly, Davies demonstrates that even within the gender binary,
there may be multiple gendered subjectivities. In the last decade, many scholars
have explored the experiences of transgendered people—that is, those who cut
across socially constructed sex/gender binaries. Blackwood and Davies contribute
a crucial regional Indonesian perspective to this literature, examining how such
hybrid subjectivities are produced within binary sex/gender systems, and how
they simultaneously strengthen and challenge such systems.
RACHEL RINALDO
University of Virginia
rar8y@virginia.edu
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.