Becoming Incomplete: The Transgender Body and National Modernity in New Order Indonesia (1967–1998) Benjamin Daniel Hegarty September 2017 A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University © Copyright by Benjamin Daniel Hegarty 2017 All Rights Reserved This thesis is entirely the original work of the author except where otherwise cited or acknowledged. Benjamin Daniel Hegarty School of Archaeology and Anthropology College of Arts and Social Sciences Australian National University Acknowledgements This thesis has involved a tremendous amount of collective work which cannot be adequately conveyed here. I dedicate this thesis to Eka and Tuti, two waria who did not live to see its completion. I acknowledge their creativity, humour and interest in this project by dedicating this thesis to them. My engagement with Indonesia comes from a range of sources. However, most notable are my early recollection of listening to stories told by my mother. With her talent for richly textured ethnographic observation and story-telling far greater than my own, she described the kinds of people that she observed there and the conditions in which they found themselves. It was really her interest that prompted my initial stay in Jakarta in 2010 and subsequently enrol in postgraduate studies at Monash University as a way to commence research. Matt Tomlinson and Julian Millie have offered guidance and interest since this time. It was chiefly the friends that I met in Indonesia and their encouragement for my own interest in Indonesia’s culture, history and politics, that made a lasting impression. Nova Ruth and Roy Thaniago deserve special mention. Later on, when both of my parents travelled and later on moved to Indonesia, their depth of interest meant that they became the best interlocutors that I could have hoped for. They will see themselves on every page. The academic environment at the ANU, and of anthropology in particular, fundamentally shaped the direction of this thesis. I am grateful for the generous institutional and financial support offered by both an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, a Prime Minister’s Australia Asia Endeavour Scholarship and the ANU. Michelle Antoinette provided early support and interest. My cohort of students threw up new lines of flight for the research, and particular thanks goes to the patience and loyalty of Charlotte van Tongeren and Shiori Shakuto. Annie McCarthy’s combination of warm generosity and intellect serves as a guiding influence from the day I started my thesis to present. At ANU I was fortunate to have sources of intellectual stimulation beyond my own school and academic panel. Peter Jackson, Margaret Jolly, Phillip Taylor, Ariel Heryanto and Gavin Smith have each provided inspiration and support in their own way. The advisors on my panel, Ken George and Kirin Narayan, offered inspiration above and beyond their engagement with this research. My greatest gratitude and source of inspiration goes to my thesis supervisor, Christine Helliwell. Her formidable intellect, straightforward questions, humour, and ability to teach are qualities that I aspire to. I look forward to many more years working together. I finished this thesis in Melbourne. At the University of Melbourne, Ana Dragojlovic has provided her unwavering support and interest, and seeing her each week helped my ideas to breath. Martha McIntyre and Kalissa Alexeyeff’s ethnographic acumen helped me in the final phase of editing. My students in various courses at the ANU and the University of Melbourne remind me to communicate myself better. I have been lucky to have engaged with academic and activist sources of inspiration in a number of places at different moments in the research. There are more sources of academic inspiration in this thesis than I can list here. In the study of gender and sexuality, I would especially i like to acknowledge Tom Boellstorff, Dédé Oetomo, Ed Green, Sharyn Davies, Aren Aizura, Dredge Käng and Hoang Nguyen. Initial institutional support in Indonesia was provided by Samsul Maarif at the Centre for Cross- Cultural and Religious Studies, and later on by Prof. Sunarto and Wika Hartanti at the Centre for Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Faculty of Medicine at Gadjah Madah University. I learned enormous amounts about the complexities at the intersection of class, gender, sexuality and health from my discussions with Gambit and Dr Yanri Subranto. Sandeep Nanwani lives his principles through an unwavering commitment to social justice and has become one of my closest friends and steadfast collaborators. Ferdiansyah Thajib’s incisive intellect and keen ethnographic eye always suggests better perspectives on my work. In Yogyakarta, Paige, Malcolm, Jimmy, Mulyana, Ardi, Aditya, Edwina, Antariksa and Kunci offered me sustenance during fieldwork. The Makcik Project, by Jimmy Ong, Ferial Afiff and Grace Samboh offers a superb template for representing waria lives through artistic and ethnographic practice. Holy Rafika provided superb research assistance, locating many historical sources that I otherwise would not have been able to locate. Both waria and other Indonesians are the stars of this thesis. Although I cannot name all of them here, I hope that the finished product honours their tireless efforts and labour. The title of the thesis came out of a discussion with Ibu Lenni in Jakarta, whose suggestion of “The Moon That Never Shined (Bulan Yang Tidak Pernah Cahaya)” served as inspiration for the present title and overall conceptual direction. Also in Jakarta, Ibu Nancy, Catur, Jane, Hartoyo, Chenny Han and Erman deserve special thanks. In Yogyakarta, I thank Mami Vinolia and Kebaya in particular, and all of the waria in Badran and Kricak. I also thank my “wife,” who and kept me fed and entertained. For each and every waria in Indonesia, I hope that this thesis and the research that it contains serves as a form of prestasi: that it both demonstrates waria’s remarkable history of accomplishments and indicates how impoverished Indonesia would be without them. Those close to me offered endless patience and necessary distance from my research. Thank you to my brother Kieran and sister Frances, their partners, family and friends in Australia and around the world. Ben Wright’s curiosity inspires my own and I am forever grateful for his generosity. I gain inspiration for doing this work from my boyfriend and closest friend Jack. His courage and love means that in the course of my research I have subjected him to discomfort and placed him in peculiar predicaments which he has suffered with good humour. His unselfish commitment to approach human problems with the greatest care is the thread that weaves this thesis, and our relationship, together. ii Abstract This PhD thesis describes the ways that the gendered body is experienced across the life course and within its historical context. It does so by describing, in dialogue with ethnographic and historical data, transformations in understandings and experiences of male-bodied femininity during New Order Indonesia (1967–1998). The main focus of this thesis are waria, and the closely related but separate term banci. Both waria and banci are Indonesian terms which refer to diverse forms of gendered embodiment and social practices. Waria practice a broad range of femininities depending on their audience, and challenge the universality of Western categories of gender and sexual diversity. Notably, both terms — but especially banci — have negative connotations of deviance through a relationship to transactional sex, public sexuality and flamboyant femininity. Given that embodiment and selfhood are understood by waria to be shaped by those with whom one interacts, a primary concern of this thesis is kin and social relations among waria. My chief finding is that waria of this generation see their gender presentation as a product of relationships of intimacy and dependency. Waria describe these understandings of intimacy and forms of self-making as a process they call “becoming (waria jadi).” Waria narrate their own subjectivity and that of other waria in terms of beginning as “banci kaléng (empty banci)” before becoming more visible over time. I highlight how waria’s gender performances are performed with specific audiences in mind, paying attention to various audiences and their relationship to the gender performance in question. This suggests that, while there is no stable embodiment to which waria ascribe, their gender performances are shaped by highly specific aesthetic and social scripts within their historical and cultural context. The thesis is based on long-term fieldwork conducted in 2014 and 2015 in the Indonesian cities of Yogyakarta and Jakarta. As such, this thesis offers an ethnographic account of everyday life among mostly elderly, lower class waria in the context of their social worlds. I also provide historical contextualisation of the globalisation of Western discourse, both through expert knowledge and the mass media. I do so to describe how this discourse interacts with regional understandings of personhood to produce specific forms of intelligible gendered embodiment in Indonesia. The thesis builds on a growing literature in transgender studies alongside feminist anthropology to develop theoretical innovations in how the body is implicated in projects of capitalist modernity, emphasising the voices of waria themselves in that process. The major theoretical contribution of the thesis