Readers of Tom Boellstorff's noteworthy earlier book, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005) will find much that is familiar here: Boellstorff suggests that this book can be read as a “companion volume” to the earlier one (p. 11). Once again, Boellstorff underlines how non-normative sexual desire in Indonesia provides the basis for a truly national, rather than ethnically particularized, identity, and that Indonesians who identify themselves as gay, lesbian, or transvestite seek recognition in a society that often treats them as either invisible or contemptible. What makes this volume valuable, however, is the new terrain on which Boellstorff pursues some of the same topics, namely, with reference (each in a different chapter) to zines, transvestites, language, religion, and political homophobia.
As a way to bind these topics together, Boellstorff suggests substituting “coincidence” for “straight time” as a model for scholarly activity. By this, he means to foster exchanges among anthropological and queer studies approaches to the lived experience of actual people, exchanges that need not take either discipline as conceptually superior to the other. Coincidences imply unexpected convergences, not progressive developments: If intellectual methods are eclectic and open-ended, then they no longer need to have teleological aspirations (or pretensions), much as sexual desires that do not presume neat categories and reproductive ends need not fetishize male climax in heterosexual intercourse. This is an intriguing analogy. But when Boellstorff claims in his concluding chapter that each essay in the book has addressed “but in a largely implicit manner” (p. 181) the (somewhat dense) discussion of disciplinarity and temporality that he lays out in the introduction, he is being disingenuous. The book, as he acknowledges, consists of five previously published essays, and his efforts to tie them together by means of a “largely implicit” theme that he labels coincidence seems forced.
Fortunately, however, the essays in themselves are consistently interesting and worthwhile. The chapter on transvestites is especially important, as this is a topic that comes up in much of the literature on gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia, and it is one that Boellstorff did not take up in his earlier book. But the other topics are all significant, and Boellstorff handles them with a deft combination of theoretical acuity and ethnographic sensitivity.
Rather than summarize his arguments on each topic, however, I wish to point out a curious lacuna in Boellstorff's understanding of the Indonesian material he works through: an inattentiveness to his informants' concern with social status. To point out that Indonesians, no matter what their sexuality, care deeply about their social status may seem too obvious to deserve mention or too similar to everyone else on the planet to be interesting. Yet at a great many points, status concerns would appear to clarify much of the data Boellstorff reports. So, for example, when Boellstorff's informants emphasize their sense of an Indonesian (as opposed to a regionally specific ethnic) identity, they represent themselves as participating in a middle-class, modern, and so higher-status milieu than the ordinary and local masses (whatever their sexual impulses). As for language, although a shared code can foster feelings of solidarity within an in-group in its difference from an out-group, it can at the same time, within that group, provide the means to differentiate among participants. To display one's mastery of a gay vocabulary is to assert one's special knowledge; even if the list of lexical items is relatively short, more experienced speakers will still be in a position to distinguish themselves from, or even lord it over, newcomers on the scene.
When zines' contributors emphasize love over sex as homosexuals' true desire, they promote a meliorizing, normalizing discourse, not necessarily a complete representation of their own inclinations. This discourse is intended to win the “recognition” that Boellstorff makes much of. But just what sort of “recognition” is at issue here? Boellstorff seems to think that people are seeking a kind of existential acceptance, whereas it looks more like a straightforward claim for permission to enter into the usual forms of status competition—only without being stigmatized because of a non-normative sexual orientation. How else to read the remarks of the editors of a zine that Boellstorff quotes: “Is it right that we [gay people] be ‘goat-class’ citizens, that only have sex? Of course not! There are many gay people who have reached the heights of status” (p. 68). To fulfill pejorative stereotypes of homosexual males as obsessed with sex would, the comment implies, not make them morally reprehensible but rather indistinguishable from the hoi polloi (which is what the Indonesian phrase “goat-class” refers to).
That recognition should consist of the right to compete as an equal in a game in which equality is never the goal helps explain the absence—noted by Boellstorff—of political activism among homosexual Indonesians. Elsewhere, such activism is predicated on the understanding that all citizens should be equal before the law. But prestige is not something the law concerns itself with, let alone guarantees; sameness of the legal sort may matter but what really matters is the ability to stand out. So it is no wonder that gay groups in Indonesia devote considerable energy to such events as drag shows (p. 201), events in which individuals get to display themselves and even compete for prizes. If outsiders find that frivolous, then they simply do not appreciate the spirit, or the importance, of the game.
Boellstorff provides evidence in both of his books of his Indonesian friends' heartfelt desire for intimacy, a kind of longing that he labels a desire for “the same.” He is translating an Indonesian phrase here, one that neatly epitomizes the quandary of same-sex desire in a heteronormative world. Yet it is important not to conflate this “illegible” desire for the same gender with a more generalized desire for sameness understood as a human right to equality. When Boellstorff fails to make that distinction clear, he teeters on attributing to his informants preoccupations (with jural, political, as well as social rights) that are ours, not theirs.
I offer this critique as a gesture of respect. Boellstorff's new book, like his earlier one, constitutes a remarkably thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to the anthropological literature on non-normative sexuality.
