ABSTRACT
From a western viewpoint, sexuality constitutes an essential or core attribute of identity; individuals are said to have fixed sexual identities or orientations. Sexuality as it is understood in the USA and western Europe, however, often bears little resemblance to sexual relationships and practices across cultures. Theorists such as Michel Foucault (1978) and Judith Butler (1990) argue that sexuality itself is a social product. According to this view, sexual acts, or what appear to be sexual acts, take their meaning from particular cultures, norms and beliefs about the self and the world. Social processes do not act as constraints on a ‘natural’ sexuality, but actually produce sexualities through discourses of desire, religion, gender and so on. In this chapter, I draw on feminist and queer theories, particularly those that constellate around social construction theory, in order to understand the meanings of sexualities among females in Indonesia. Many academics now attend to the ways in which sexual acts are culturally produced, but since the early 1990s growing attention has been focused on the intersection of global and local processes. Plummer (1992) pointed out that same-sex experiences are increasingly fashioned through the interconnectedness of the world. He argued that lesbian and gay studies should pay close attention to the ‘international connectedness yet local uniqueness’ of diverse practices (1992: 18), thereby giving both global and local processes and practices a distinct role. In contrast, Altman (2001) initially spoke confidently about the ‘apparent globalisation of postmodern, gay identities’, arguing that new ‘globalised’ queer identities would replace older indigenous identities, resulting in a homogeneous global gay identity. Feminist theorists Grewal and Kaplan (2001) move beyond the limited and simplistic dichotomy of local-global by using the term ‘transnational sexualities’, which refers to the way in which genders and sexualities are produced through and intersect with a large number of processes implicated in globalisation. The term ‘transnational’ points to the lines that crosscut binaries of local/global; it suggests that the global and local thoroughly infiltrate one another (Grewal and Kaplan 2001). At the same time that global interconnections among emerging gay and lesbian communities and networks create new visions of and spaces for women’s and men’s same-sex relations, some significant oversights persist. Global gay discourse tends toward an effacement of sexualities that do not have the appearance of same-sex identities emblematic of the lesbian and gay liberation movements of western Europe and North America (Bacchetta 2002). Activist lesbian discourse, in particular, holds the expectation that modern lesbian subjects will express a consciousness or self-awareness of sexual identity as ‘lesbians’ and as ‘women’. The traditional/
modern dichotomy of western thought is perpetuated in this discourse; those individuals who do not reflect modern identities are marginalised because they appear to lack the grammar of fully liberated modern queers (Grewal and Kaplan 2001). Queer discourses rely on this dichotomy to create a developmental teleology that situates other sexualities as premodern, that is, not yet lesbian or gay, while placing western sexualities at the pinnacle of modern, autonomous sexuality (see also CruzMalavé and Manalansan 2002; Gopinath 2002). In this universalising turn, transnational queer discourses bypass the historicity and specificity of queer subjects outside the west, relegating their stories to the margins of queer movements. The effacement of postcolonial, non-western queer subjects is particularly disabling for lesbians, who are less visible in global gay (male) movements and narrowly defined in global lesbian feminist organising (Bacchetta 2002; King 2002). The fixity of identities promoted by such terms as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender needs to be reconsidered in light of the tombois, lesbian men and other masculine females whose lives blur the boundaries of lesbian and transgender (see also Blackwood and Wieringa 1999; Morgan and Wieringa 2005). Evident throughout Asia in both cities and rural areas are masculine females whose own identities are firmly located in localised gender regimes as well as in global signifiers apparent in the proliferating forms of the English term ‘tomboy’ that they use to identify themselves (see Wieringa et al. 2007). These individuals, like their activist peers in major urban centres in southeast Asia, are influenced by global feminist and queer organising as well as by localised processes, which they negotiate to construct the particular forms of sexuality and gender evident in Asia today. Although seemingly divergent, these gendered and sexual subjectivities are part of and responsive to global queer discourse. In Padang, West Sumatra, tombois and their girlfriends, who identify themselves as masculine and feminine respectively, access global circuits of queer knowledge and see themselves as part of a global community, but maintain subject positions that are distinct from the identities promoted and encouraged by activist lesbian organisations in Indonesia. In this chapter, I offer insights into the asymmetries of queer knowledge and the consequent multiplicity of desires and subjectivities as a way to challenge fixed identity categories and incorporate the diversity of queer subjectivities within a global gay ecumene. In the particular case discussed here, I use the terms that individuals in Padang use to make sense of their lives, mainly lesbi and tomboi. Despite being cognates of English terms (lesbi/lesbian, tomboi/tomboy), these two Indonesian terms do not share the same meanings and resonances as their English counterparts. Also, by using terms such as ‘queer knowledge’ and ‘queer discourses’ in relation to Indonesia, I mean to suggest that these discourses are inflected by and participate in the globalised discourses of sexualities.
