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70 3 “If there is no feeling . . . ” The Dilemma between Silence and Coming Out in a Working-Class Butch/Femme Community in Jakarta Saskia E. Wieringa With a firm wish to find this treasure of love, I tied up [my boat] at the landing-place of the heavenly Ganges. A cross-current from the river of desire tore loose [my boat] from its moorings. What shall I say about love? Desire is a branch, a creeper of love; Without desire there is no awakening of love —Songs of Lalon Jakarta is a fast-growing metropolis of over 12 million people from all over Indonesia. The business center of the city boasts impressive glass towers of the hotels and banks from which the national and international corporate elite steers the economy of this vast archipelago of some 220 million inhabitants into the vortex of the global financial markets. The wealth, procured out of unbridled profits and unchecked graft and corruption, of the fast-growing middle-class areas of Southern Jakarta is demonstrated by the Mercedes and BMW cars that cause interminable traffic jams and consumed in the myriad shopping malls that dot the sprawling suburbs. The majority of the population, however, live in simple, crowded one- or two-story houses. The business high-rises and multistory luxury apartment blocks rise like towering coconut trees up out of a sea of red-tiled roofs. Despite the close proximity of capitalist opulence there is a deep economic and cultural gap with the inhabitants of the sprawling deprived urban poor neighborhoods. The modern world comes to the inhabitants of these kampung (neighborhoods) through the detours of national television and the windows of the shopping malls they are not allowed to enter. Yet though the poor are socially and economically marginal, they are engaged with various competing global discourses. This chapter discusses the dynamics of a group of lower- and lower middle-class female-bodied persons engaged in same-sex relations. Most of them live in the out- “If there is no feeling . . . ” 71 skirts of Jakarta; socially and economically they live marginal lives as well. Socially, emotionally, and erotically they ascribe to a butch-femme pattern1 modeled on the traditional Indonesian heterosexual gender regime. Yet globalization does not pass them by completely. Urbanization, democratization with its discourse of human and women’s rights, the competing discourses of growing fundamentalism on one hand and economic liberalism on the other hand are variously impacting on them. This discussion focuses on the dilemma between the relative safety that the culture of silence surrounding their identities and sexual preferences affords them and the dangers and attractions of the new rights discourse. The discourse of silence allows them a social space, provided they fulfill the expectations of their neighbors and family members with respect to established gender norms and accept the discrimination and marginalization that this position entails. The democratic opening of Indonesia after 1998, however, in the wake of an economic crisis that started in 1997, which was spurred on by groups advocating human and women’s rights, has led to a discourse of equality and individual rights and a delegitimization of various forms of discrimination. This discourse presupposes a self-ascribed gay or lesbian identity that means a visibility of the sexual aspects of their relationship, the recognition of which they so far have tried to prevent. This “coming out” may have severe social and economic repercussions for the individuals who are brave enough to risk it. At the national political level, the growing uneasiness with individual sexual rights that do not conform to conservative patterns of heteronormativity is felt in the drafting of laws that circumscribe same-sex relations (and penalize other forms of nonmonogamous heterosexual sex) by the self-proclaimed custodians of an invented “traditional” morality, in this case fundamentalist Muslims. These are not the only discourses the members of the Jakarta butch/femme (b/f) community are confronted with. The breakdown of the state has led to a wave of decentralization with new forms of disciplining and identity formation, in many instances based on religious affiliation. Global discourses on gay and lesbian rights are gaining some currency among middle-class persons with same-sex preferences. Groups of younger, better-educated middle-class lesbians are emerging who are making wide use of the Internet and other forms of information technology. They have more international contacts and are aware of lesbian communities in other parts of the world. Also, they espouse a feminist ideology of androgyny...

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