Queer Isles

Tom Boellstorff’s long-awaited ethnography, The Gay Archipelago, tackles core problems animating contemporary transnational queer studies: scale, location, and difference. An understanding of same-sex desire outside the West has been hindered by, among other ideologies, a powerful cartographic logic that relies on a familiar binary of local/global and ascribes culture and identity to fixed places. Such a logic carries specific weight in postcolonial contexts, where it is employed against hegemonic forces of the West and neoliberal capitalism. Indonesia further complicates geographies of local, global, and authenticity by being a post-colonial country formed across a disparate spread of islands, languages, and cultures — that is, as a nation self-consciously forging an Indonesian identity across distance and difference. Indonesians who self-identify as gay and lesbi — terms clearly derived from English and linked with a Western internationalism — seem to belong to the scale of the global or foreign. They do not register as “local” identities (the way the male-to-female waria does). Nor do they register as Indonesian in established nationalist or ethnographic modes of understanding Indonesian identity. Boellstorff’s work turns this problematic location of gay Indonesians into the object of investigation. Ricocheting through theoretical reflection and analytic ethnographic depictions, he rescales same-sex sexuality in Indonesia in ways that provide new coordinates for transnational queer studies.

The Gay Archipelago can be read for ethnography’s conventional reward, the documentation and explanation of cultural difference for a Western audience. Boellstorff’s long-term experience in Indonesia (which began through HIV/AIDS work before academic research) generates a rich rendering of Indonesian gay life that convincingly establishes both patterns and diversity. For example, Boellstorff explores why so many gay and lesbi Indonesians actively chose to marry, if only for a short time (because, inter alia, marriage is a crucial part of membership in Indonesian national culture; an integrated life may not be a requirement — although it may be desired — for a good life; and sexuality is not necessarily a core feature of selfhood). As always, Boellstorff excavates organizing concepts, here showing how the marital norm is not (only) an enduring local tradition but a modern, national mandate. The three chapters in part 2 provide thick descriptions of gay and lesbi worlds, including careful attention to the gay slang that has become an argot of Indonesian hip urbanity. Many of Boellstorff’s vignettes provide those illuminating contrasts with U.S. queer life that can be so useful in teaching sexuality. For example, the author’s discussion of the semantics of open-closed in Indonesian gay discourse, and its difference from “coming out of the closet,” complements the writing of Martin F. Manalansan IV and others that decenters the primacy of coming-out politics.

While this book offers many such ethnographic portrayals, The Gay Archipelago clearly is not content to stand as a case study of cross-cultural sexual diversity; indeed, it criticizes the assumptions of entrenched cultural alterity that underlie that approach. Rather, Boellstorff routes questions about the geography of gay transnationalism through ideas about similarity and difference, pivotal notions for understanding how modern queer subjects are located, evaluated, and formed. He delinks the chains of associations binding the temporal and spatial interpretation of gay worlds, such as, for example, Western associations of modern with mundane and familiar. His approach insists on the specificity of the Indonesian context while also disavowing the stifling binary of global versus local queer formations.

The focus on sameness and difference is connected to the context of Indonesia as a national unity (or sameness) that recognizes but subsumes the country’s ethnic diversity. Using the nature of the Indonesian nation as a model, Boellstorff is able to upend the presumed spatiality of sameness as proximity and difference as distance, which reframes the question of whether those who desire the same sex are the same. This sort of sameness in desiring same works best for gay Indonesians who are differentiated from waria because they desire “the same.” Lesbi, generally either masculine tombois or cewek/femmes, may not perceive...