The Perfect Woman: Transgender Femininity and National Modernity in New Order Indonesia, 1968–1978

The decade between 1968 and 1978 was a period of remarkable activity in the state’s use of scientific knowledge about sex, gender, and sexuality to define individual bodies in Indonesia. In this article, I analyze a particular locus for the deployment of expert knowledge about the body that emerged during this decade, the process through which Indonesian state experts incorporated, defined, and debated transnational knowledge about transgender femininity. I argue that the very means through which the state sought to transfer knowledge about transgender femininity—an obsessive bureaucratic culture of documentation—generated the possibility for contradictory and ambivalent discourses about the relationship between gender and the self.

Following a military coup in 1965, General Suharto officially became president of the Republic of Indonesia in 1968, marking the beginning of the thirty-year period of authoritarian and developmentalist rule known as the New Order.¹ While Suharto subjected those who posed a threat to his power to varying degrees of coercion and terror, this was also a period marked by the growth of the mass media, economic growth, and dreams of a transparent modernity. From the very beginning, the regime defined itself by and justified its rule through a commitment to seeking out solutions to everyday problems through an apparently transparent transfer of expert knowledge into the realm of the everyday.

Reflecting the state’s commitment to intensive documentation and recourse to expert knowledge, writers with and without explicit endorsement took to writing in a range of official and popular publications. State experts expended considerable effort in their definitional work, drawing on a wide range of psychological, medical, and biological theories circulating transnationally at the time. A tacit yet ambiguous state endorsement of transgender femininity rested on the transport of knowledge between the expert and popular domain contained, for example, in didactic explanations from medical experts in films and magazines targeting a general audience. Yet each of these intensive efforts to demonstrate the mastery of technical knowledge over the body ultimately served to undermine the all-powerful and distinctively national ideology to which the state aspired.

Rather than merely furthering the state’s ideological aims, then, doctors and scientists also oriented themselves toward what they saw as universal and therefore definitive scientific knowledge.² The contradictions opened up by these state-sanctioned efforts to demonstrate the mastery of expertise made possible divergent forms of popular opinion. As a result, the relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality—as well as the specific form of personhood it was meant to index—was to remain inconclusive. The meanings of expert knowledge about transgender femininity thus escaped the singular ideological ends that it was introduced to achieve.

As is the case in other parts of the world, the relationship between an appropriate performance of femininity and women’s bodies more broadly during this period was an active site for state experts who attempted to reconcile national modernity with the everyday presentation of the self. By invoking what anthropologist Carla Jones calls “seemingly universal technical facts,” the state invested immense resources in defining and disciplining femininity while simultaneously asserting that it was describing “natural” embodied differences.³ Armed with this expertise, the state represented the men and women as linked to oppositional and binary roles, with women belonging to the domestic sphere and men to the public sphere. While women’s bodies were of course not entirely under the control of state experts, they were subject to an extraordinary degree of surveillance and scrutiny. This took place through an enormous family planning program and the compulsion to join state-endorsed associations at the local level that tutored women in acceptable practices of femininity. Through a process that Evelyn Blackwood refers to as the “deployment of gender,” the state normalized definitions of acceptable sexuality around an ideal of heteronormative reproduction.⁴ Such discourse saturated the national mass media, which generated forms of “public intimacy” through representations of family life and women’s bodies as profoundly implicated in national progress.⁵ In this context, gender emerged as an especially dense—and fraught—biopolitical...