Organizer: SOAS University of London

Description:

During reformasi , the hope that visibility will transform into recognition is by no means equally assured for all citizens. As fierce contestation over LGBT belonging in Indonesia has shown, gender and sexuality remain central to how the boundaries of Indonesian citizenship are drawn. Against this backdrop, the transgender feminine populations known as waria and transpuan have continued to successfully leverage their historical visibility to seek access to citizenship rights at the national and regional level. This paper contextualises transgender belonging as a minority form of citizenship that articulates why gender poses a problem for national belonging. It looks to two moments to do so. The first introduces the emergence of the first organised waria organisations in Jakarta in the late 1960s. Although framed as a public nuisance generated by their lower-class status and public sexuality, warias used this visibility to assert belonging as a kind of “legal but nonconforming status.” That is, it was understood that they did not fit the state’s model of binary gender, but nevertheless received special concessions to be visible under certain conditions. The second describes recent mobilisation among transpuan and waria to access state-issued identity cards (KTP), underway since the mid-2010s. Transpuan and waria were deeply invested in cards, both for the reason that they would grant access to state services, but also because accessing them would grant their nonconforming status further legitimacy. The state’s definition of binary gender is not fixed but a struggle to impose order on the meanings of various signs and the individuals that they are supposed to index. Both during and after the New Order, gender remains a problem so long as it serves as a way to determine the boundaries of belonging in “public,” a concept that is not necessarily coterminous with the nation or the state.

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