The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia

"The Gay Archipelago is a landmark work. Boellstorff applies an acute ethnographic intelligence to the lives of Indonesians with same-gender desires, raising unsettling questions about the ways in which anthropology remains invested in "difference." Boellstorff's compelling analysis greatly enriches our sense of how images circulate, and communities are re-imagined, at the point where the global meets the postcolonial."--Jean Comaroff, University of Chicago

"The Gay Archipelago is an important work that inaugurates a new stage in critical comparative queer studies and Southeast Asian anthropology. Far from offering a typical ethnography of gay and lesbian people in a nonwestern 'elsewhere,' Tom Boellstorff provides a richly woven and vigorously argued theoretical and empirical treatise on emerging subjectivities in the nonwest, including Indonesia. His book is admirably ambitious in scale and scope by trying to understand not only Indonesian lesbi and gay peoples but also other sexual/gender systems and formations. While most anthropologists focus either on 'men' or 'women,' he valiantly and successfully pulls together the multiple strands of analysis and data on queer 'men' and 'women' as part of the national imaginary. Through trenchant yet nuanced arguments, he argues for a framework that does not fetishize difference or depend on Western self-awareness and modes of agency."--Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

"This exciting book represents an original and path-breaking contribution to the contemporary cross-cultural literature on sexuality and gender: first, in the subtle and searching way it conceives the relation between Western and Indonesian sexualities and genders; and, second, in its outstanding approach to perennial problems in theorizing gender and sexuality and their contested relation."--Margaret Jolly, Australian National University, coeditor of Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific

Tom Boellstorff examines the history of homosexuality in Indonesia, and then turns to how gay and lesbian identities are lived in everyday Indonesian life, from questions of love, desire, and romance to the places where gay men and lesbian women meet. He also explores the roles of mass media, the state, and marriage in gay and lesbian identities.

The Gay Archipelago is unusual in taking the whole nation-state of Indonesia as its subject, rather than the ethnic groups usually studied by anthropologists. It is by looking at the nation in cultural terms, not just political terms, that identities like those of gay and lesbian Indonesians become visible and understandable. In doing so, this book addresses questions of sexuality, mass media, nationalism, and modernity with implications throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Note on Indonesian Terms and Italicization xv

PART ONE: The Indonesian Subject 1

CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 3

CHAPTER TWO: Historical Temptations 35

CHAPTER THREE: Dubbing Culture 58

PART TWO: Opening to Gay and Lesbi Worlds 89

CHAPTER FOUR: Islands of Desire 91

CHAPTER FIVE: Geographies of Belonging 126

CHAPTER SIX: Practices of Self, Tests of Faith 157

PART THREE: Sexuality and Nation 185

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Postcolonial State and Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities 187

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Gay Archipelago 216

Notes 233

Works Cited 243

Index 267