Interrupting the Gender Narrative: In-between Masculinities

As a Cornell University graduate student studying gender in Java in the 1980s, I still recall an evening seminar on campus during which Ben Anderson peppered Barbara Hatley with questions following her analysis of gender roles in kethoprak theater.¹ After several rhetorical examples of how masculinity and femininity have shifted aesthetic conventions in Java, he asked her, quizzically: “How do you know you are a woman?” Although she attempted several times to respond, the answer seemed obvious to me: as she formulated an answer, he could not resist interrupting her. In that era when scholarship on gender focused on women and femininity, mythic narratives about masculinity made “asking the man question,” as Marshall Clark puts it, both redundant and unnecessary (p. 145). Patriarchal privilege was still embodied in dominating the discourse, whereas attending to the emotional valence of malu, or “masculine inferiority, humiliation, and indignation” had not yet been articulated as an interpretative project for understanding Indonesia, as Clark does (p. 95). Ironically, Anderson would do so himself in his analysis of political shame as “a progressive and emancipating” dynamic for nationalism, including Indonesia.²

Today, both Blackwood and Clark contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship on gender that, until recently, focused on women, and must now address the turbulent and compelling world of masculinities—alternative, artistic, and axiomatic of new political and cultural dynamics in the twenty-first century. Fortunately, both of these scintillating studies guide us to a more critical and nuanced discussion of civil rights for minorities and political discourse in archipelago societies, as well as transnational communities. Each author makes the case for political recognition, tolerance, and acknowledgment of previously censored intimate identities and relationships, on the one hand, and of greater appreciation for artistic works that challenge repressive political discourse of New Order and post-New Order authoritarianism, on the other. Each author does so by focusing on masculinities. Evelyn Blackwood’s ethnography of the contradictory female masculinity of “tombois” (women who identify as men) among female couples in Padang, Sumatra; and Marshall Clark’s deft tour of the equally understudied heterosexual masculine characters in fiction, poetry, and film since the 1960s, both demonstrate that gender is still, after all, central to the understanding of Southeast Asian society and polities.³ To what degree did the Reformasi era after 1998 allow for more expression of emergent identities? Was it the transnational multilingualism Blackwood astutely highlights in her final chapter that has catapulted researchers and Indonesianists into a new conversation about gender identities?. Comparative historical scholarship has demonstrated premodern roots of plural gender and sexual identities in Asian civilizations.⁴ Clark is clear that the new generation of scholars should not rush too quickly to study alternative masculinities, when the heterosexual and normative versions still deserve close attention, particularly as they intersect with the enduring renovation of patriarchal ideologies and institutions post-New Order. It is a pleasure to recommend these books for reading, teaching, and debate.

Evelyn Blackwood, known for her central, defining work integrating Indonesian ethnology and queer studies, gives a thorough and compelling ethnographic portrait of “tomboi” and their partners (femme, or girlfriend) in Padang, primarily through personal narratives on the work of what Judith Butler has called “performing gender.”⁵ The ethnography spans the life cycle, from early childhood socialization to the “spaces of everyday life” (p. 92), and publicized topics in national media and transnational activism. Her elegant study is a personal quest to overcome her own misapprehension of female masculinity among Indonesians in the 1990s. The ambitious argument asks how gender is imbricated in (racial) hierarchies and colonial contexts in Southeast Asia, and why tombois have had ambivalent reception in “the lesbi world.” Blackwood’s first chapters reach beyond the stereotypes of conventional gender dichotomies in New Order Indonesia to acknowledge how the figure of tomboi ironically reaffirmed government ideologies and Islamic scholars’ conceptions of complementary male and...