The Governor of Waria in the Early New Order

The concern shown by Sadikin toward gender nonconformity unfolded against the tumultuous backdrop of the early years of the New Order. The military general Suharto, who swept into power during the opaque events surrounding a 1965 coup and paroxysmic violence against real and imagined members of the Indonesian Communist Party, was sworn in as acting president in 1967 (for an account of the coup and its effects, see Wieringa Reference Wieringa2002). Suharto was elected president the following year, a position in which he remained until his downfall amid the mass protests and economic turmoil of May 1998.

A critical aspect of the early New Order was the central role that gender played in shaping Suharto's claims to political legitimacy. The founding myth of the regime incorporated a fanciful account—reinforced repeatedly in official sources, ranging from propaganda films to public monuments—in which members of the women's organization of the Indonesian Communist Party committed gruesome forms of sexual violence against the generals murdered in 1965. Although little is known about the treatment of gender nonconformity in this context, the military state portrayed women as capable of vengeful and politically motivated acts of sexual violence, and thus a force that needed to be controlled. The repetition of this discourse reduced femininity to a caricature, one in which women had both the “symbolic power … to save (give birth to) and devour (or castrate) men” (Wieringa Reference Wieringa2002, 338). During the thirty-year period of Suharto's presidency, the subordination of women remained a key component of the New Order state, defining the gendered basis for the narrow concept of “development” (pembangunan) that served as its guiding principle and justification for rule.

The gendered symbolism of the New Order not only operated at a political level but also established the contours along which state citizenship and national belonging were lived and experienced on an everyday basis. In this context, citizenship was mediated through the demand that citizens participate in the nuclear family and the gendered and sexual arrangements that it was predicated upon (see Boellstorff Reference Boellstorff2005). Centralized state organizations for the wives of civil servants and military officers were key institutions through which women were transformed into mothers and housewives, responsible for the domestic sphere but accountable ultimately to men (see Suryakusuma Reference Suryakusuma and Sears1996). In this context, and especially given the overall denigration and narrowing definition of femininity in the years leading up to 1968, it is noteworthy that Sadikin granted gender nonconformity a platform for increased visibility by lending support for the new term wadam. To understand how it was that those who eventually came to identify and be identified as waria accomplished new forms of visibility at the precise moment that the state was establishing an entire mode of governing premised on a narrow heteronormative definition of gender, I turn not to politics on the national stage but the arcane workings of municipal regulations in Jakarta.

Although Jakarta was an important theater for national politics in the wake of the 1965 coup, efforts to regulate gender nonconformity were not driven primarily by national concerns. Rather, they emerged as one part of a piecemeal strategy deployed by the city to regulate public space. Analyzing gender nonconformity as a spatial concern in the city and considering the city as a vantage point on the nation helps reconsider the governmental style of the developmentalist state, moving beyond the notion that it was only a top-down effort engineered through ideological or administrative means. The city's efforts to regulate gender nonconformity along spatial lines ultimately required addressing waria in terms that paralleled other aspects of city governance. Attempts to discipline gender nonconformity rested on defining subjective and aesthetic standards that were fast-changing and thus difficult to regulate in New Order Jakarta. The adequate performance of masculinity and femininity was far from settled at that time, shaped both by shifting definitions of class status defined through consumption and rapid transformations that altered the city's urban fabric. The heterogeneous meanings associated with the competent performance of “femininity” and “masculinity” in turn ultimately made gender presentation a vehicle for cultivating alternate audiences and envisioning horizons for establishing belonging at the scale of the city. And all of this rested, along with concern with how one appeared to one's neighbors, on the idiosyncratic relationship that waria developed with the city's governor.

Appointed in 1966, Sadikin was the first New Order governor of Jakarta, holding the post until he was forced into retirement in 1977 (Abeyasekere Reference Abeyasekere1990). Although the position of the Jakarta governor was close to that of a city mayor in some respects, it was also a relatively important political post that held the status of a government minister who reported directly to the president (Nas and Malo Reference Nas, Malo, Grijns and Nas2000). Sadikin was appointed on the basis of his reputation as a charismatic reformer, one who used his military experience to tackle problems in the city. The reforms implemented by Sadikin included regulating migration flows from the countryside, modernizing the city's appearance, and implementing various administrative changes to aid government efficiency (Kusno Reference Kusno2014). More controversially, Sadikin applied his modernizing zeal to the regulation of gender and sexuality, including pushing to convert informal red-light districts for female sex workers into state-sanctioned complexes offering access to health care and other support services (Abeyasekere Reference Abeyasekere1990). Sadikin also oversaw a pilot birth control project premised on “total community mobilization” (Hull and Hull Reference Hull, Hull and Hull2005, 20–21), an approach that would later serve as a template for cities, towns, and villages throughout Indonesia. Such innovations were double-edged, offering both fragile forms of recognition and pernicious surveillance.

Each of these efforts attracted strident criticism from conservative Islamic groups and those aligned with them, who considered Sadikin's toleration of these modern vices to represent a broader problem of moral decay. One magazine editorial responding to a 1969 constitutional court review of pornography listed wadam alongside several behaviors, such as sex work and dancing in dance halls, condemning them as “pornographic” (Varia 1970). The influential Islamic scholar Buya Hamka (Reference Hamka1981, 275), writing in the mid-1960s in his famous Tafsir commentary on the Qur'an, criticized those whom he called banci for flaunting themselves, brazenly “facing the public” in the middle of the city. The governor's controversial if ambiguous support for waria, and criticism of it, should therefore be understood in the context of various efforts to control the visibility of gender-nonconforming bodies in the early years of the New Order. In some accounts—and the memories of waria who remember him—Sadikin couched his interest in waria in terms of a desire to encourage greater social acceptance of them by the city's residents.Footnote ⁶ Yet his support was hardly unequivocal. Rather, in stressing the need to rehabilitate waria into respectable society, Sadikin incorporated gender nonconformity into a more general vision of a society founded on public order. In this respect, Sadikin's invitation to waria to participate in their own process of development both mirrored his attitude toward managing other unruly aspects of the city and echoed a broader emphasis on the governance of morality through self-regulation characteristic of modern forms of governance.

Details of the governor's support for waria surfaced again in September 1968, when the tabloid magazine Selecta printed an account of Sadikin and his wife attending a performance. Accompanying the article was a photograph that showed Sadikin seated alongside Sonny Sudarma, who would later win first place in Jakarta's inaugural beauty contest for waria (Kompas 1969b). The same account also reported that Sadikin had dispatched his representative Haji Sapi'ie to a secret meeting with waria held at city hall (Selecta 1968; see also Sadikin Reference Sadikin1992, 484). Reports of this secret meeting were the first public declaration of municipal support for waria by the governor. The publication of a photograph of Sadikin with a group of glamorous waria amounted to a bold show of official support for a group that was more frequently condemned as an aberration.

A vision of Sadikin as a kindly father figure concerned with improving waria's social position, rather than a harsh disciplinarian, was widely shared among waria. Although more than fifty years had elapsed since 1968, the waria I met who had been in Jakarta during the period he was governor frequently referred to Sadikin using terms of endearment such as “Uncle Ali” (Bang Ali) and “The Governor of Waria” (Gubernur Waria). Drawing on a powerful shared narrative of 1968 Jakarta as the beginning of a “golden age” (zaman emas), waria remembered the governor as playing a pivotal role in assisting waria to become “accepted by society.” Many waria credited Sadikin's support for a new suite of policies introduced by the city that they glossed as “guidance” (pembinaan), using the official term used in legal regulations and policy documents. The guidance provided to waria took the form of training in vocational skills, such as salon work and bridal makeup, which waria frequently claimed had enabled them to demonstrate their use to society (see also Boellstorff Reference Boellstorff2007). Over time, older, more senior waria became responsible for providing this vocational training on behalf of the city. Yet despite a common refrain of admiration for Sadikin, this was by no means an entirely benevolent effort. After all, the desired aim of the municipal government was to ensure that waria's visibility could be managed in a way that did not cause offense to respectable society.

Sadikin's concern for the spatial management of gender nonconformity, as part of a broader effort to govern Jakarta, can be understood in relation to the city's historical role in shaping Indonesian governance since the colonial period (for a historical account of the development of municipal governance in Jakarta, see Malo and Nas Reference Malo, Nas and Rüland1997). John Legge's (Reference Legge1961) pioneering account of the history of decentralization in Indonesia identifies the key role that “lower”-level forms of government played in shaping the early national administration, a dynamic that has remained a problem in national political and social life. Hildred Geertz (Reference Geertz1963, 34–35) described Indonesian cities as “integrating centers of economic, political, and intellectual life,” which together form no less than a “metropolitan superculture” of the nation. And many of the spatial grounds for governing gender nonconformity share a similar logic of earlier municipal sumptuary laws that governed race through dress, introduced in cities in the Dutch East Indies from the seventeenth century onward (van Dijk Reference van Dijk and Nordholt1997). Considered in light of these historical patterns of city-level governance in Indonesia, the spatial management of gender nonconformity reveals the “municipal” as a scale defined by more than administrative or political boundaries alone. Rather, the spatial governance of gender nonconformity illuminates new insights into the everyday ways that national belonging was adjudicated, in turn setting the stage for morality to become a prominent feature in Indonesian political life.

Waria's ability to articulate a desire for acceptance during the early New Order was built on a clever negotiation with regulations concerning spatial governance. In interviews and conversations in the course of everyday life, many waria recalled the 1950s and early 1960s as an era of exclusion. Many expressed that they dared not leave the house during the day in women's clothing out of fear of violent retribution. In this respect, waria's deft navigation of municipal regulations brings to mind Nikolas Rose's (Reference Rose1999, 176) description of “government through community.” Rather than being only an object of power, however, waria's engagement with Sadikin around issues of their public appearance was a means to advocate for inclusion and to negotiate new ways of seeing and being seen. In this respect, waria accomplished a degree of recognition unthinkable in the United States, where the regulation of cross-dressing—also at the municipal level—became a misdemeanor offense in the late nineteenth century. As Clare Sears (Reference Sears2015, 138) writes about San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, rather than putatively local concerns, such legal regulations established “gender normativity as a precondition for full belonging, denying access to the city and nation to those who fell outside its bounds.” In Indonesia, the regulation of public performances of gender also played a pivotal role in shaping the relationship between citizenship and belonging. But rather than push gender nonconformity into the private sphere—as was the case in the United States—in Sadikin's Jakarta, the terms wadam and waria and policies directed at them facilitated an enhanced visibility, even as the city sought to extend spatial and temporal control with greater precision.

The Spatial Regulation of Gender

Even as the city addressed gender nonconformity as a problem to be solved, by the time Sadikin retired in 1977, waria occupied a far more reputable social position than had been the case in 1968. Sadikin took pride in this achievement, writing in one biographical account, “When I began to guide waria, who in the past would be showered with stones and abuse on the street, I was criticized. But I guided them (membina mereka), and now they are accepted by society” (quoted in Roem Reference Roem1977, 2:230). Thanks to Sadikin's interest, waria developed a national reputation as skilled workers in beauty salons and as hairdressers, finding in this work a level of recognition that provided conditional acceptance. The fact that this reputation was scaled up to the level of the nation is no doubt in part because Jakarta, as the capital and a region with the legal status of a province, has an outsized degree of influence in Indonesian political and social life. Indeed, it appears that legal innovations in the city facilitated waria's increased acceptance at the national level, rather than the other way around.

The legal regulations that targeted waria on the basis of their unwanted appearance in public, before and after 1968, were the twin concepts of “public order” (ketertiban umum) and “public morality” (kesusilaan umum). Although the concept preceded the New Order, “public order” was a key component of military rule, serving as the initial justification for Suharto's ascendancy and key to his claims to ongoing legitimacy (Barker Reference Barker and Anderson2001). The regulation of “public morality,” on the other hand, was central to what Evelyn Blackwood (Reference Blackwood2007, 296) calls the “deployment of gender,” referring to the central role of reproductive heterosexuality as an organizing principle for much of New Order social and political life. Although its origins lay in Dutch colonial law, a legal charge akin to public indecency was gradually incorporated into debates and the eventual criminalization of pornography, which emphasized the effects of images on a seeing public rather than being limited to a concern for pornographic images (Lindsay Reference Lindsay, Sen and Hill2010). The twin disciplinary norms of public morality and public order overlapped on city streets, where attempts to define what public behavior was “moral” on categorical terms was thwarted by the ambiguity characteristic of urban life. In 1972, a regulation on public order issued by the Jakarta government stated, “Any person whose performance of moral acts (berbuat susila) disturbs public order (ketertiban umum) is banned from being on the street, the park, and in public places.”Footnote ⁷ Listed among such banned behaviors were kissing and congregating in city parks at night. In line with this understanding, gender and sexual nonconformity was not subject to specific codes related to individualized forms of pathology. Rather, municipal police mostly sought to discipline gender nonconformity through periodic police raids on the more encompassing yet flexible basis that they formed a disturbance to public order.

Although the granularity of this definition of gender nonconformity was new, concern for the visibility of gender nonconformity in urban public settings was not. As early as 1951, the discovery of gender nonconformity among female sex workers on the streets of the city had been a subject of interest and concern (Hegarty Reference Hegarty2018). But Sadikin's governorship appears to have been the first time that gender nonconformity was specifically listed in regulations governing space. Spurred by reports of unprecedented numbers of waria in Jakarta, in April 1969, the government commission responsible for “public order” adopted a resolution to establish measures to solve the “problem of wadam” (Item no. 2, April 19, Komisi A Reference Komisi1969). In adopting this resolution, the commission drew on the work of what was called the “Banci Research Project,” a series of medical and psychiatric evaluations of gender nonconformity by researchers at the University of Indonesia that had taken place in the preceding years (see Ling Reference Ling1968). Thus, although waria welcomed forms of recognition offered by the city government, the regulation of gender nonconformity in terms of “public order” did not lead to unequivocal acceptance of the moral status of waria but shifted concern to how its visibility could best be managed.

The project of regulating gender nonconformity on public order grounds relied on the recruitment of waria themselves. Senior waria leader Maya Puspa explained to me that the city asked waria to create local organizations in each district in the city (interview, Jakarta, June 12, 2015). These local waria organizations mirrored Jakarta's administrative districts, with one organization and corresponding leader in the north, south, east, west, and central areas of the city (on Jakarta's administrative structure, see Kusno Reference Kusno2014). Each leader was responsible for maintaining control over the waria living in her area, which meant dealing with petty crime undertaken by members of the group, regulating sex work on the streets, and mobilizing waria to participate in other municipal activities such as dance performances. The city also recognized a single waria leader for the whole of Jakarta who served as a community representative accountable to the government. Maya explained that this system enabled waria to forge personal relationships with individuals in various organizations and the New Order state apparatus, connections that enabled them to advocate for greater social inclusion.

The loose integration of waria into city governance in the interests of public order was not necessarily exceptional; in fact, it mirrored the ubiquitous presence of the military at the local level during the New Order. As Joshua Barker (Reference Barker and Anderson2001) writes, criminal gangs frequently collaborated directly with state security forces and local governments. In a parallel manner, the city did not condone waria, but rather approached them as nonconforming individuals who could be entrusted to enforce discipline on their own group members. This system of state security emerged in dialogue with exceptional forms of violence meted out to other nonconforming groups, the most well-known example of which was the “mysterious killings” of the early 1980s, in which military and paramilitary groups murdered an estimated five thousand petty criminals (Bourchier Reference Bourchier and Budiman1990). Although waria largely escaped this more violent register of New Order governmentality, they did gain recognition in parallel to it: their visibility and responses to it were shaped by broader concerns over who could occupy public space and under what conditions.

The city sought to manage waria's visibility in part through integrating them into the “guidance” (pembinaan) programs that were representative of the paternalistic forms of social welfare that characterized the New Order. “Guidance,” also referred to in the passive form of “being guided” (di bina) and as the verb “to guide” (membina), was premised on a hierarchical chain of command (see Li Reference Li2007).Footnote ⁸ In the eyes of many waria, the governor occupied the highest rung, with senior waria representatives acting as intermediaries between themselves and the city administration. In this respect, waria encountered a regime that paralleled New Order forms of regulation and discipline that targeted the wives of civil servants (Suryakusuma Reference Suryakusuma and Sears1996). But while guidance for women was predicated on their relationship to the family and the domestic sphere, guidance for waria was premised on encouraging their participation in the public realm of work. Waria's guidance therefore took the form of programs in skills associated with feminine beauty that could be translated into vocations, including tailoring, bridal makeup, and hairdressing. In interviews, many senior waria shared the city's assessment that vocational training would allow waria to escape street-based forms of sex work and hence avoid disrepute. Waria stressed that guidance—both of one another and by the city—could improve individuals’ appearances through the cultivation of a more polished femininity. These individual efforts could in turn play a role in elevating the presentation, and thus the status, of waria as a group.

The formal adoption of guidance policies toward gender nonconformity had been foreshadowed publicly at the city level in October 1968 in a series of articles titled “the problem of banci” published in the weekly municipal government magazine Mingguan Djaja (Jakarta Municipal Government 1968d). Suggesting that the impetus for this series originated at the highest levels of city hall, the anonymous authors presented dozens of didactic essays that conveyed to Jakarta's residents the steps being taken to address the increasing visibility of gender nonconformity on the streets of the city. Amid firsthand and relatively sympathetic accounts of waria living in the city, the series also included translations of well-known Western theories borrowed from sexology and psychology. Most likely an action that grew from Sadikin's first meeting with Lidya in April 1968, this information campaign reflected an unprecedented public effort by the city to communicate and redefine the “problem” of gender nonconformity to the city's residents.

In the accounts presented in the magazine, the government conveyed its official position that gender nonconformity was best addressed by offering vocational rehabilitation to waria. This, they reasoned, would enable waria to cultivate the skills required to enact a more presentable modern femininity (Jakarta Municipal Government 1968b, 7). In one of the final articles to appear in the series, a waria pleaded directly to Sadikin, calling for concrete support in the provision of a location where they would be able to both train and work (Jakarta Municipal Government 1968c, 12). Although those subject to such training were most likely not in a position to refuse it, the desire to participate was most likely a widely held view among waria at the time.

Much of waria's official forms of organizing, past and present, tends to hinge on their relationship to various forms of employment tied to feminine beauty. Indeed, part of waria's claim was tied to the discrimination they faced in obtaining employment, and the group of waria who initially approached Sadikin in 1968 were most likely seeking a solution to their poor economic position by lobbying for access to better paid and more reliable work. In the account published in Selecta, waria asserted the claim that they had not been paid in full for work as entertainers in performance groups as a central platform of their claims for recognition (Selecta 1968). In some respects, this made waria's advocacy similar to that undertaken by unions or cooperatives, in that they tied collective labor rights to social advancement. However, the economic aspects of work were not all that mattered to waria. Rather, in these and other accounts, participation in certain fields of work are tied to the cultivation of an ethical self, bringing to mind what Tom Boellstorff (Reference Boellstorff2005, 209) characterizes as “a kind of personhood-as-career where ‘success’ carries momentous implications for recognition and belonging.” In some settings, such as beauty salons, the kinds of work undertaken by waria cannot be separated from the morally worthy good deeds that can advance claims to national belonging (see also Boellstorff Reference Boellstorff2007). It was these forms of activism and mobilization, emerging at the intersection of economic advancement and ethical cultivation, that led to the first formal organizations for waria and the intensification of their relationship with city governance.

Regardless of the motives of city leaders and bureaucrats, the efforts to discipline waria's nonconformity resulted in several shifts in the years that followed. In 1969, guidance programs for waria were officially adopted by the municipal department responsible for social welfare (Departemen Sosial Reference Sosial1969). In 1982, the Kompas newspaper reported that in one three-year period, 271 waria had graduated from training courses in fields related to beauty. The citywide representative of waria at that time, Myrna Bambang, together with Manihuruk, the head of the city department responsible for the “guidance of people with a disability” (urusan pembinaan penderita cacat), referred to the program in the following terms: “Upon completion, the waria received a number of beauty products and other tools, as well as enough money to start their own salon. Many of them already have experience working in salons and in showbusiness. As many as eighty participants returned to their region of origin and opened a business there” (Kompas 1982). In the years that followed, salon work became closely linked to waria identity, an occupation in which they directed their skills toward gendered improvements in the service of making up “better representatives of proper modern Indonesian womanhood and manhood” (Boellstorff Reference Boellstorff2007, 111). Thus, guidance policies developed and implemented at the municipal level played a profound role in shaping waria's position within national society.

Whatever benefits waria received through their participation in vocational guidance programs, it is important to bear in mind that such programs were often coercive on some level. Participation was frequently but not always punitive, often stemming from arrest in the course of police raids. The city thus framed such programs not necessarily as an embrace of nonconformity or as a reward, but as corrective mechanisms reserved for individuals who disrupted public order. Seen from the vantage point of protecting the public from moral disorder, and as a form of spatial discipline, encouraging waria to work in salons served to restrict their appearance to certain locations that heightened idealized standards in masculine and feminine presentation. Overall, therefore, it is difficult to evaluate the extent to which such programs benefited waria. Nevertheless, decades later, many waria understood “guidance” not as an intrusive form of state discipline but rather as an important vehicle for obtaining recognition and respect.

Contesting Public Exclusion, from Police Raids to the Jakarta Fair

The city's efforts to address gender nonconformity—from police raids to Lidya's official audience with Sadikin to vocational guidance programs—unfolded against the backdrop of a transforming metropolis. After the turmoil of 1965 and a period of austerity, Jakarta saw a rise in consumer capitalism and displays of wealth, and not only at the individual level. Urban studies scholar Abidin Kusno (Reference Kusno2014, 67) characterizes this time as a period of “market modernism,” in which the military regime enacted top-down reforms that drew upon easy access to foreign capital and the development of new spaces for consumption and leisure.

By 1968, Jakarta had witnessed the completion of several large-scale projects that had been planned by the first president Sukarno in the 1950s as a means to inculcate the city's residents with a sense of national pride. This included the city's first hotel that met international standards, as well as a network of highways that would gave Jakarta the appearance of a modern metropolis (Abeyasekere Reference Abeyasekere1990). Accompanying these architectural transformations were new approaches to governing space, which incorporated efforts to apply methods for adjudicating the distinction between conforming and nonconforming bodies. In the case of Jakarta, this included defining waria not only as a nuisance but as a moral problem assessed against the backdrop of the spaces under construction that they appeared around, which included new hotels, highways, and forms of nightlife. Emerging as a locus of pleasure and display, the bodies of waria acquired a certain communicative density under the specific conditions of state-supported consumer capitalism. A focus on the connection between morality and the governance of space helps to consider the body on terms that feminist theorist Sandra Lee Bartky (Reference Bartky1990, 75) refers to as “institutionally unbound” forms of discipline, rather than proceeding through a logic of rationalization. Considering gender not as a product of the city but rather as a constitutive force emerging within its spatial modalities of governance illustrates the exclusionary mechanisms that gave shape to a morally defined notion of “the public.” In turn, considering the ways that the city's gender-nonconforming residents engaged actively with spatial governance—linked closely to the act of seeing and being seen—as an opportunity to obtain recognition reveals a concept of public decency that was not fixed but lay in the eye of the beholder.

This perspective is clearly seen in the events surrounding the first Jakarta Fair, held between June and July 1968. The fair combined the trappings of a trade exposition with modern forms of entertainment, and it was later remembered by the governor as an opportunity for the city's residents to come together around a shared cultural imaginary (Sadikin Reference Sadikin1992). Among waria, the fair was remembered as a watershed moment when they asserted their association with modern norms of feminine beauty. It offered them a stage on which to perform a more polished presentation to an urban public. Indeed, given the timing of the fair, it may have served as the catalyst for the initial meeting between Lidya and Sadikin in August 1968. The idea that vocational training was key to the advancement of waria similarly appears to have its roots in the role that they played in the fair. One waria named Camelia said the fair was memorable because it hosted the very first professional waria performance groups at two venues, called Sasana Andrawina and Paradise Hall (Jakarta Municipal Government 1968b, 36). Although these venues offered a new opportunity for waria's economic advancement and collective identification, they also provided a template for a new suite of policies aimed at managing the visibility of gender nonconformity in the city.

Waria's presence at the Jakarta Fair—a theatrical combination of consumer capitalism and state-led development—shines a light on the role of spatial governance in shaping, and undermining, normative conceptions of citizenship. After all, it was at the level of the city that waria's gender presentation was recognized as legal but nonconforming, giving rise to the possibility that “man” and “woman” were not the only gendered categories that defined modern citizenship. The adoption of waria as a replacement for banci certainly facilitated the city's efforts to cast gender nonconformity as a practice that was an affront to public decency. Yet both the adoption of a new term and the vocational training programs that accompanied it also offered a means for waria to contest their classification as disorder. Waria's partial integration into municipal governance facilitated a set of practices through which they could adjust their visibility. In particular, the city's recognition offered waria a way to assert that their improved public appearance made them deserving of acceptance from Indonesian society. Waria's manipulation of this legal but nonconforming status is equally reflected in the way that their capacity to improve their appearances exceeded the narrow purview of city-run guidance programs. Indeed, rather than framing vocational rehabilitation in terms of discipline, waria asserted that it helped them satisfy their own desires to become experts in the application of technologies required to achieve a modern femininity.

For waria, these new norms of feminine beauty served as both the grounds for their increased recognition and a form of discipline. More than this, however, waria found that their improved appearances helped them convene an audience. Waria's participation in the Jakarta Fair, for example, was met with an evaluation of their visibility as potentially compatible with modern Indonesian national identity. In this respect, waria's ascendance to a source of inspiration for feminine beauty bears parallels with changes that took place in other parts of Southeast Asia at the time. Similar to what Peter Jackson (Reference Jackson2003) has argued about the Thai context, the pleasure and discipline tied to altering appearances, as facilitated by the consumer capitalist market, allowed waria to stake new claims to recognition. The meanings attached to expertise in feminine comportment were also influenced by a specific understanding of gendered subjectivity in Indonesia, in which a appearances are seen as critical to articulating a “woman's soul” (jiwa perempuan). For waria, the performance of femininity thus emerged as a distinctive source of pleasure, one that subverted the disciplinary logics that defined their visibility in relation to the maintenance of public order.

This transformation continued to unfold across the 1970s and early 1980s. Waria gradually obtained a widespread and esteemed reputation for their work in beauty salons and other related fields. In turn, this reputation enabled new forms of political engagement that contested the very terms of the “public” within waria had staked a fragile claim for inclusion. In this respect, waria's early organizing exceeded the remit issued to them by Sadikin, as their improved status facilitated newfound claims for belonging above and beyond what was intended. Despite this, waria continued to face threats of violence for simply walking down the street, given that the introduction of guidance programs did not eradicate older forms of discipline premised on the exclusion of gender-nonconforming bodies from public spaces. Similar to the harassment faced by transgender people by state security forces in the name of public order in many other parts of the world (see Valentine Reference Valentine2007), the waria who gathered on Jakarta's streets at night continued to face the likelihood that their presence would be met by overt forms of rejection.

Experiences of violence served as a catalyst for waria organizations to engage in official advocacy, particularly in response to the frequency and severity of police raids that took place from 1969 onward (see Kompas 1969a). In 1973, a waria organization named “Wadam of the Capital” (Para Wadam Ibukota) took the noteworthy step of issuing an official letter of complaint to Jakarta's municipal police force in response to its policy of raids (Kompas 1973). Reports of the letter suggest that it demanded that police immediately release the waria arrested and cease the policy of raids altogether, on the basis that those arrested had not committed a crime. Indeed, although city governments do have the legal authority to enforce public order through their own police forces (satuan polisi pramong praja), they cannot prosecute or punish individuals for criminal offences. In this case, the municipal police clarified that waria had not been arrested with the intention to prosecute them with criminal charges. However, the municipal police justified the arrests as a response to complaints that the presence of waria had “disturbed public order by being too visible in public places, especially along the sides of major roads” (Kompas 1973, 3). They further clarified that waria were not “arrested” during raids but rather detained for the purposes of rehabilitation, an ambiguous distinction that framed gender nonconformity not as illegal but nevertheless subject to regulation and discipline enforced at the level of the municipality. A decade later, in 1979, the drowning deaths of several waria in Jakarta while fleeing municipal police raids led to renewed protests by another organization, the Association of Wadam of Jakarta (Himpunan Wadam Jakarta). On this occasion, too, waria called for an end to the ineffective and violent tactic of municipal police raids (Kompas 1979; see also Atmojo Reference Atmojo1987, 11–12). Considering the context in which such vocal protests unfolded—a military state that had no qualms violently eradicating nuisance bodies from urban space—such early waria organizing was both tenacious and courageous. Such advocacy undertaken at the scale of the city, centered on the perils and promise of public visibility, highlights waria's success in leveraging their ambiguous recognition as a legal but nonconforming status.

These efforts, and the transformed public within which waria sought to negotiate belonging, present an opportunity to reconsider modern state governance during the New Order. More broadly, it helps complicate the imagined homogeneity characteristic of top-down, expert-driven governance (see Scott Reference Scott1998). In urban settings, as James Scott (Reference Scott1998, 55) observes of the emergence of modern cities, this logic is exemplified in forms of modernist planning which strived for “straight lines and visible order” that represent “a simple, repetitive logic … easiest to administer and police.” New Order Jakarta, a capital built along modernist lines, might be characterized in this way. However, the bodies of those subject to such disciplinary regimes are rarely as malleable as the spatial efforts to discipline them presume them to be. As the history of waria suggests, city-based forms of governance can also offer possibilities, however fragmented. Analyzing efforts to address gender nonconformity in Jakarta, similar to what Valverde (Reference Valverde2011, 277) calls “seeing like a city,” allows for consideration of alternate pathways for negotiating citizenship via everyday practices in public. The city's attempts to codify gender presentation—a necessarily subjective and aesthetic standard—reveals moral positions as not fixed to inner essence or unchanging state, but rather subject to change and appropriation over time.

Read in this way, Sadikin's efforts to address gender nonconformity by instilling in waria an ethical commitment to improve their own public presentation in order to earn a place in society unexpectedly brings to mind regional histories of personhood in Southeast Asia which tie bodily appearance to status. For example, a concern with improving the public presentation of gender nonconformity recalls and recasts what Michael Peletz (Reference Peletz2011, 666–67) identifies as a widespread pattern of gender pluralism in premodern Southeast Asian polities, chiefly those “grounded in sanctified cosmologies,” which “valorize gendered and sexual arrangements that are not reducible to cultural logics based on utilitarianism.” This movement of a non-utilitarian approach to regulating gender nonconformity within the grounds of municipal governance, in turn, resonates with Valverde's (Reference Valverde2011, 309) observation of the “unpredictable dynamic by which older knowledge formats and older legal forms appear to go underground only to suddenly revive as one or another modernist legal invention breaks down.” The growth of a concern for gender nonconformity in New Order Indonesia, I contend, was in part a product of this dynamic of city governance. The recognition of waria emerged out of the forms of modern knowledge tied to the modern gender binary and the possibilities opened by attempts to address what the city saw as the recalcitrant appearance of gender nonconformity through public order ordinances. It was by seeing like a city that waria could be addressed as a legal but nonconforming status, a status that allowed the state to admit their presence but ensure that their tenuous claims for recognition would remain incomplete.

Governing the City, Governing the Nation

The Jakarta municipal government's efforts to regulate gender nonconformity in public space during the New Order resulted in unlikely coalitions. Various actors, including charismatic waria leaders, the city governor, the municipal police, and municipal social welfare officers, made every effort to restrict gender nonconformity to certain settings under strict conditions. To waria, this was a new vehicle for obtaining recognition. But without an adequate set of legal and social frameworks in which waria could improve their position in society, such efforts to obtain belonging were fragile. The meanings of gender nonconformity remained ambiguous, representing an exemplar of feminine beauty in some contexts and posing a threat to public order in others. Living in the shadow of regulations designed to limit their visibility but which produced that visibility as one of its very effects, waria navigated their designation as a disturbance to public order by demanding recognition from a city governor. Similarly, even as guidance programs were intended to discipline them and produce a more presentable appearance, waria participated in training programs as a means to achieve respectability and belonging.

The paradox of recognizing waria by virtue of their nonconforming status demands reconsideration of gendered and sexual patterns of inclusion and exclusion. Of particular concern is the relationship between the acceptance of waria and understandings of the “public” (umum) that have become naturalized in Indonesian social life. Anxieties about gender nonconformity helped to buttress a definition of the public premised on exclusion as the necessary price for the maintenance of order. The concept of the public at work in national political life is, moreover, shaped by historical patterns of governing space at the scale of the city in Indonesia. Since the end of the New Order in 1998, a process of decentralization known as regional autonomy has granted increased legal authority to lower levels of government, resulting in the development of thousands of new law-making jurisdictions (see Butt Reference Butt2010). Many jurisdictions have introduced new laws on the grounds of protecting public order and morality, including those targeting gender nonconformity (Katjasungkana and Wieringa Reference Katjasungkana and Wieringa2016). But rather than a fragmented format of governance tied to a specific locality rooted in place-based traditions, the growth of regional- and municipal-level laws and regulations in Indonesia appears to have sprung from a desire for national conformity with its basis in the urban form. The regulation of gender nonconformity at the level of the city plays a central role in mediating the relationship between everyday practices of belonging and emergent definitions of citizenship in the modern state.

Just prior to and during the early New Order, gender nonconformity was subject to punitive forms of surveillance and informal forms of exclusion. In response, waria developed strategies to craft their appearances into something more acceptable to the public, and in doing so, they transformed their visibility into a claim for recognition. The strategies that waria developed during the New Order, and the audience that they managed to cultivate, become legible by placing gender and sexuality as central to theoretical consideration of the governance of space. Citizens of Jakarta were trained to see waria, and waria themselves were trained to manage their own visibility. As a vehicle to control how gender nonconformity was seen, the development of the very term waria reflects how cultural understandings linking bodily comportment to status were recruited into efforts at spatial discipline. But so, too, does the term waria gesture at the possible subversion of the limited forms of recognition offered to them. Waria used the social regulations concerned with managing their visibility to exercise greater control over how they were seen, a move that facilitated new possibilities for acceptance.

Waria's accomplishment of a fragile form of recognition in Sadikin's Jakarta reflects the results of meeting the challenges posed by a fickle seeing public. In transforming themselves, waria also reshaped the very boundaries of the public that would adjudicate their belonging. This has broader significance in Indonesia after the New Order, where some bodies more than others are an object of scrutiny. The intensification and evolution of patterns of “sexual surveillance” (Davies Reference Davies, Bennett and Davies2015, 29), particularly aimed at women as well as gender and sexual minorities, have transformed the Indonesian public sphere into a suffocating place. A simple walk through the streets of a village or town has become an activity subject to a range of regulations premised on overlapping forms of spatial and moral control. Waria's accomplishment of recognition by virtue of the very municipal regulations that sought to constrain their visibility suggests one alternate consequence of such policies. In a context where anybody might find themselves ensnared in invasive regimes of surveillance, the ability of waria to leverage their nonconformity to achieve a fragile form of recognition serves as a reminder of the possibilities and the dangers of seeing like a city in the modern nation-state.