The Made-Up State: A Trans History of Technology in Indonesia (Benjamin Hegarty)

This presentation is based on Benjamin Hegarty’s forthcoming book, (Cornell University Press), which will be published in November 2022.

Indonesia’s trans women have achieved hypervisibility in the postcolonial nation. Yet this has not translated into complete acceptance or legal recognition. They undertake projects of self-making which demonstrate the power and fragility of state-sanctioned citizenship: a process of making up and being made-up that is as much an aesthetic as a technological experience. A chief means through which technological knowledge has been deployed in modern Indonesia has been on the gendered body and the binary of “male” and “female.” The primary brokers for navigating the gendered modernity of the Indonesian nation-state has been trans women, who have shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned nonconforming within it. For example, trans women in the mid-1960s coined a new term, “waria,” which reconfigured modern binary gender as a powerful claim to an improved presentation and expanded participation in public life. Drawing on a collection of photographs collected during ethnographic research focused on the New Order period (1965-1998), this paper attends to the aesthetic conventions, production and circulation of photography in shaping the aesthetic conventions of gender. I describe trans women as part of a socio-technological imaginary which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in the postcolonial state.

Biography

I am an anthropologist of gender and sexuality, with a geographical specialisation in Southeast Asia. My research interests lie in transgender studies and medical anthropology, broadly speaking. Before taking up a McKenzie Fellowship at the University of Melbourne, I was Visiting Assistant Researcher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am also a Research Fellow at the AIDS Research Center for Health Policy and Social Innovation at the Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia. With colleagues from the Center I am continuing to research the implications of categories and metrics for managing the HIV epidemic on gender and sexual minorities. My research has been published in journals such as: The Journal of Asian Studies, Medicine Anthropology Theory, The Journal of the History of Sexuality and Global Public Health. My first book, The Made-Up State, is in press with Cornell University Press.

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