The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia

by Benjamin Hegarty

In The Made-Up State , Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, who compose one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty.

The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.

294 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2022

Reviews

[Jakub Štefan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some notes taken from the book:

Waria
Waria, an Indonesian word that combines the first syllable of one Indonesian word for woman (wanita) and the last syllable of one word for man (pria). The narrative accounts of becoming waria lie in the shared narrative of having a jiwa perempuan, an interior sense of being a woman, which compels a person to transform their body through practices of dandan, or making up. Waria is a term that is in many respects indistinguishable from wadam, a neologism crafted in 1968 that combined the words for the figures Adam and Eve from the story of human creation, common to Islam and Christianity, but which fell out of use from the late 1970s onward. Scholars and activists have translated warias as trans—transgender and trans women—in both Indonesian and English-language media and research. At the same time, it also would not be accurate to call all warias trans women, although some warias may also describe themselves on those terms. Transpuan and queer activists in Indonesia sometimes actively distance themselves from the term waria and warn against its use, because of its relationship to transactional and public sexuality. The fact remains that warias are often poor and are subject to economic marginalization, state violence, and health disparities, which have resulted in increased exposure to HIV. Both as it appears in the historical record and as the author encountered it during fieldwork, the narrative of having a woman’s soul was so commonplace that it cannot be dismissed as a Euro-American imposition. Many warias explained to me that it was only during the 1980s that a clear distinction between themselves and gay-identified men became increasingly evident. This is perhaps because the term gay—signifying a man who desires a person of the same gender—was itself not in wide circulation until the early 1980s. Waria who spoke with the author commonly explained the chief difference marking them as distinct from gay men as their comfort in feminine attire across all settings, as well as the degree of skill in the adoption of knowledge and technologies of enacting a feminine appearance through dandan most of the time and in most situations.
Banci/Bantji
The category was first used to refer to banci, a term referring to a wide array of gender ambiguity that dates from the nineteenth century and which was used well into the 90's. In 1942, one dictionary listed the Dutch translations of banci (classified as a Javanese Batavian term) as “tweeslachtig, hermaphrodite, kwee (Orango bantji),” that is, “ambiguity, hermaphrodite, queen (banci)”. Onward from 1600 the ascendance of monotheistic religious and secular laws and regulations that held binary sex and gender as innate, natural aspects of the self was reflected in the gradual reduction of spaces for individuals who, as part of diverse indigenous cosmologies, played an important role in communal and ritual life by expressing ambiguity and combination through their bodies and appearances.
Transpuan
Indonesian trans activists created a new term to speak of themselves: transpuan, a neologism that combines the first syllable of the global category transgender and the second syllable from one Indonesian word for woman (perempuan). A contested politics of sorting, affiliation, and disaffiliation based on the differences and similarities between waria and transgender is now widespread throughout Indonesia in ways that often overlook longer histories of connection between trans and various Indonesian terms since the colonial period.

[FluffyNyctea]

What was the kind of recognition waria sought after? Hegarty describes dandan as ‘a form of bodily cultivation that enabled public participation in the modern life of the city and the nation (pp. 107),’ which helps us understand ‘trans femininity … shaped within a specific experience of postcolonial modernity characterized by authoritarian rule (pp. 107).’ In this case, modernity was dictated by the authoritarian rule of the New Order, or put differently, modernity was a way of recognising, of seeing by the state, bolstered by the tool of citizenship – to be modern was to be seen, to be seen was to be included as a citizen.

Was state recognition all there was? When waria performed dandan, they were mediating ‘between visual forms of representation at the level of the nation and everyday affective registers of navigating public space (pp. 108);’ they were offering ‘a way of seeing and being seen that was in dialogue with the affective intensity of mass publics (pp. 107).’ Namely, modernity was no longer just the state’s gaze, but also the gaze of waria, and the gaze of mass publics. The state was not the only one seeing. If anything, the state’s gaze was relatively invisible, for all its self-concealment and disembodiment. Instead, the gaze circulating between waria and mass publics was embodied, full of affective intensity, and at the very level of everyday interface. Waria, more than anything, sought the recognition of mass publics, of ontologically (relatively) stable citizens, who conformed better to modernity.

Modernity, or a heteronormative modern femininity, conjured up linear time, a teleological marching-forward. I was struck by how one forty-year-old waria described her ‘becoming waria.’ She thought of herself as ‘an empty vessel that could be filled up over time (pp. 116).’ Becoming was temporal, was over time, which lead her to ‘appearing in dandan on a consistent if not daily basis (pp. 116.),’ to a teleological end-point. But just as she imagined herself in time, she also imagined herself in space, as a vessel to be filled. She imagined herself to go from being ‘canned’ (‘empty’) to gaining substance, and her substantiation was only achieved when she moved in specific spaces, when she ‘[met] other waria in salons, participate[d] in nyébong … and perform[ed] dandan (pp. 116).’ Just think about the textures of such spaces, about how they felt like and how they enabled forms of movement so different from, say, a heteronormative household, even though temporally speaking both waria and mass publics sought after citizenship, after the teleology of modernity.

Here, I find it helpful to imagine that time is as much spatial as space is temporal. To metaphorically separate space from time, while also insisting on their co-existence and inter-relation, does something very different from the single metaphor of spacetime. Spatial time points to how linear time can be with proliferating spaces. Modernity in a salon and modernity in a heteronormative household were similar in their temporal aspirations, yet very different in their spatial conditions. Then, while waria desired the recognition of mass publics at one scale and state recognition at another, they also created something beside those. That is, while modernity marched forward, it also became more roomy, more airy. Could this be why recognition was so desirable – the struggle it was, but also the breathing space it was?

[Mateo Dk]

Dnfing 60% this is very history without a lot of gender theory backing and the lack of transfeminism informing the book is noticeable at times so i just decided im good