Transnational Discourses and Circuits of Queer Knowledge in Indonesia

Global lesbian and gay liberation discourse contains within it progressive narratives of the development of modern sexual identities. Activist lesbian discourse in particular holds the expectation that modern lesbian subjects will express a self-consciousness or awareness of sexual identity as “lesbians” and “women.” The intersections of global, activist discourses and individual subjectivities, however, are much more complex and layered than such a narrative suggests. In Padang, West Sumatra, tombois and their girlfriends, who identify themselves as masculine and feminine, respectively, access global circuits of queer knowledge and see themselves as part of a global community, but maintain subject positions that are distinct from the identities promoted and encouraged by activist lesbian organizations in Indonesia. In this article I examine the ways activists and individuals in Padang selectively appropriate circuits of queer knowledge as they make sense of their own subjectivities and negotiate their places in the “lesbian” world. I offer insights into the asymmetries of reception and the consequent multiplicity of desires and subjectivities as a way to challenge fixed identity categories and incorporate the diversity of queer subjectivities within a “global gay” ecumene.

The queer discourses that I interrogate here are those promoted by international lesbian and gay, or more recently LGBT, organizations, which are oriented to Western queer knowledge and the queer political movements of the United States or Europe, and queer discourses that circulate in the global ecumene among activist networks and identity-based communities and organizations. These discourses are not separate and distinct but intersect in many intriguing and contradictory ways to produce a transnational queer discourse that is multiple and disparate, shaped by asymmetries of race, class, and gender, and reconstituted into particular subjectivities that do not fit neatly into Western-defined identity categories.¹ Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV note that global queer discourses seem to follow “a unidirectional path” in which the West or Western cultures are seen as the origin of lesbian and gay consciousness and identity.² Paola Bacchetta argues that the Western neocolonial version of queer discourse tends toward an effacement of sexualities that do not have the appearance of modern same-sex identity emblematic of the lesbian and gay liberation movement of Europe and North America.³ The traditional/modern dichotomy of Western thought perpetuates the assumption that individuals who do not reflect “modern” sexual identities are somehow marginalized, left behind, or in need of education to become fully liberated modern queers.⁴ Western queer discourse to a certain extent relies on this dichotomy to create a developmental teleology that situates other sexualities as premodern, that is, not yet lesbian or gay, while placing Western sexualities at the pinnacle of modern, autonomous sexuality.⁵ Similarly, as Bacchetta notes, the “from-Stonewall-diffusion-fantasy” situates the origin and foundation of the modern queer movement at a particularly U.S. American moment in time.⁶ In this universalizing turn, Western queer discourses bypass the historicity and specificity of gendered and sexual subjects within and outside the “West,” relegating their stories to the margins of queer movements.

In addition, the ubiquitous LGBT of Western gay discourse provides a fixed set of categories and the assurance of familiar definitions in which, if slippage within categories is recognized, slippage across them is not. In these more expansive versions of lesbian and gay, the T in LGBT works to resolve the messy categories of identity politics, creating a distinct boundary between lesbian/gay and transgender.⁷ T refers to and incorporates masculine females and transgender men, who are thereby not considered women or lesbians (in the sense of butch lesbians, although transgender individuals express a range of sexual orientations, including lesbian). LGBT circulates globally, particularly in the activities and Web sites of international sexual rights organizations and conferences.⁸ The use of the term LGBT by these organizations in their literature and on their Web sites is not necessarily meant to promote or claim particular identities. In regionally focused pages of these Web sites, more-specific or “local” terms may be used, as well as such phrases as “gender and sexual diversity.”⁹ In fact the...