SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
THINKING THROUGH THE S(K)IN
INDONESIAN WARIA AND BODILY NEGOTIATIONS OF BELONGING ACROSS RELIGIOUS SENSITIVITIES
2022, Indonesia and the Malay World
Indonesian male-bodied and feminine identified subjects, locally and internationally known as waria, commonly claim to have the heart and soul of a woman. While waria form a visible social category, they suffer from various prevailing stigmas, of which a significant share is tied to some cultural assumptions embedded in the mainstream understanding of Islamic morality. While most waria do not feel comfortable practising their religion in public, many describe their subjectivity along the distinction between their bodies and their inner sense of gender as God’s will. Consequently, permanent bodily modifications are associated with the notion of sin. These conceptions have enabled a specific form of Indonesian transgender embodiment. This article addresses the bodily negotiations of waria against the background of their religious sensitivities and aspirations for belonging. The spiritually grounded sentiments in relation to their bodies and the sense of gender on one hand, and the signs of increased focus on embodied expression of religiosity among waria on the other, signal the desire for reimagining belonging to Indonesian (Muslim) society. Religious sensitivity, while being the major cause of anxieties on both personal and societal levels, has provided waria with important frameworks which enhance their own relative acceptance of their embodied subjectivity.
Image: Ibu Mariyani and Ibu Shinta, the founders of Pondok Pesantren Waria, photography by Terje Toomistu, 2012.
2019, Asian Studies Review
This article was awarded the Asian Studies Association of Australia's Wang Gungwu prize for the best article in Asian Studies Review in 2019.
Compared to the rest of Indonesia, the emergence of a waria (transgender women) community in West Papua is recent. Since the 1970s, waria from other islands have moved to Papua, seeking better economic prospects. These circumstances, along with wider social change, have attracted indigenous Papuan waria to the community. Against the backdrop of the salon work and the exuberant nightlife that is typically part of their lives, waria can be regarded as agents of beauty in their milieu. The practices of beauty that waria embody and produce reflect the history of internal colonisation, the available imagined communities, and transnational beauty culture, all of which foster categories of belonging. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in coastal Papua, with an emphasis on the wariabeauty pageant, I demonstrate how, in response to social exclusion, waria strive for recognition by enacting strategies of belonging. In their beauty practices, waria aspire to belonging on the transnational and national scales in order to pursue communal belonging. The article underlines how the accomplishment of beauty in Papua is tied to the nation as much as to local aspirations for modernisation, which in turn positions indigenous Papuan waria under intersectional circumstances of gender and racialised ideals of beauty.
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TRANSFORMATION THROUGH CONNECTION? INSIGHTS FROM A PILOT STUDY OF STORY SHARING CUBES AT BURNING MAN EVENTS
2020, Dancecult, Co-written with Jukka-Pekka Heikkilä (Aalto University)
Since its inception with a handful of participants in San Francisco in 1986, Burning Man has grown into an annual gathering of 80,000 participants in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and evolved into a worldwide network of regional events, such as The Borderland. Previous research on this fast growing community has typically applied the methods of participant observation, interviews and post-event online surveys.
We searched for ways to reach a wide spectrum of random respondents, while at the same time trying to understand Burning Man events on a phenomenological level. In an attempt to investigate the diversity of experiences, our aim was to explore: What are the most meaningful event experiences that participants consider worthy of sharing? But the challenge was to collect the data in an environment where traditional surveys and interviews are usually difficult to conduct. For this, a team of scholars, artists and tech-experts from the Burning Stories research collective co-created a device called the Story Sharing Cube (SSC).
Encountering these cubes in Black Rock City (BRC) 2019 and Burning Man regional events, The Borderland 2019 in Denmark, and Burning Bär 2020 in Berlin, participants who opened the box, found simple instructions along with the consent request to participate in the research, and a single button. Upon pressing the button, the recording begins.
2019, Culture, Health & Sexuality
Indonesian transgender women, locally and internationally recognised as waria, share some lifestyle patterns that have emerged under conditions of limited social acceptance. These patterns include involvement in sex work. The high number of waria who are sex workers is usually explained in economic terms. However, their presence in certain locations around the city known for waria sex work is not only for work, and quite often not even for sex. Waria street nightlife fosters waria agency, which emerges from self-affirmation through pleasurable bodily practices involving intimate (sexual partners) and both proximate (other waria and men nearby) and distant others (structuring ideals). Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2015 in Java and West Papua, this paper describes the political and economic organisation of sex work among waria, then highlights the social and sensorial qualities of waria street nightlife.
2019, Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics
The lives of Indonesian waria (transgender women) are substantially shaped by spatial dynamics. As a result of social and spatial exclusion, subsequent migration and economic needs, a lifestyle pattern around daily work in beauty salons and street nightlife tied to transactional sex has evolved in many parts of urban Indonesia. Drawing on ethnographic research in the Indonesian regions of Java and West Papua, I demonstrate that despite tremendous spatial abjection, salons and street nightlife are also productive, transformative and conjoining spatialities that foster waria subjectivity in affective relations with their intimate partners, the community, the phantasmic promise of the transnational mediascape and Indonesia as a nation. The places that waria occupy may spark moral prejudice and targeted violence, but simultaneously they are sites of agency at which waria experience self-affirmation and a sense of belonging while embodying through gendered performance the envisioned mobility at both national and transnational scales. The paper thus foregrounds how spaces and subjectivities are mutually constitutive, forging one another, as well as how certain spatialities hold potential to disrupt the sense of marginality.
2018, Res Musica
While Timothy Leary was preaching “Turn on, tune in, drop out” in the late 1960s in the United States, young people in the Soviet Union were practising another kind of tuning in. Radio Luxembourg and other foreign radio signals leaked through the Iron Curtain, bringing with them “the strange vibration” that sparked new social arenas and aff ective engagements. Iconic hippie-era albums were illicitly distributed, copied on reel-to-reel tapes, and exchanged within the networks of music lovers. In Soviet Estonia a distinctive rock music scene evolved. Rock music was the key source and the means of divergence for the nonconformist youth of Soviet Estonia, many of whom identifi ed as or were connected to the hippies. Theradically different sound of psychedelic rock prompted ecstatic states of mind and triggered new imaginaries. The aff ective engagements with music created a sense of connection with the global pop culture and youth movements
and, ultimately, fostered the sense of an imaginary elsewhere. Since these engagements diverged from the predominant discourses, and the Soviet authorities often regarded them as dangerous for societal well-being, the aff ectively loaded practices and experiences of music guided the youth to redefi ne their relationship to the daily reality and ideology of Soviet life. Hence, the rock music milieu became the site in which certain aff ects (interest in rock music), aff ective states of mind (kaif) and expressions (practices of style, artistic languages) fostered the agency of the nonconformist youth by creating a space of sensory divergence.
Image by Tõnu Tormis.
THE IMAGINARY ELSEWHERE OF THE HIPPIES IN SOVIET ESTONIA
2016, In: Fürst, Juliane; McLellan, Josie (Ed.). Dropping out of Socialism: The Creation of Alternative Spheres in the Soviet Bloc (41−62). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield
While the hippie movement in Soviet Estonia manifested a global cultural flow of transnational origin, the socio-cultural appropriations embedded in the context of their appearance generated distinctive enactments. By using their bodies as the sites of affect and performative agency, the hippies opposed the normative assumptions on bodies and behavior and created common grounds for communication with kindred spirits across the urban Soviet Union.
Drawing substantially from affect theory, I argue that Soviet hippie subjectivity was deeply ingrained with resonances of what I have come to regard as the ‘imaginary elsewhere.’ The imaginary elsewhere encompasses both, the perceived West and the transcendent experiences hippies pursued through spiritual practices, mind-altering drugs and sensory experiences generated by distorted sounds of rock music. The realms achieved through these practices formed an elsewhere, catering to a sense of ‘dropping out’ of Soviet daily life. By turning on and tuning in, the hippies in Soviet Estonia chose to be in constant motion towards the affective promises of the imaginary elsewhere.
Image courtesy of Vladimir Wiedemann.