On 16 December at 12.15 Terje Toomistu will defend her doctoral thesis „Embodied lives, imagined reaches: Gendered subjectivity and aspirations for belonging among waria in Indonesia“.
Supervisor:
Professor Art Leete, University of Tartu
Consultant:
Dr. Benjamin Hegarty, University of Melbourne
Oponents:
Professor Niko Besnier, University of Amsterdam
Senior Research Fellow Aet Annist, University of Tartu
Summary:
Similar to other Southeast Asian societies, Indonesia has a long history of practices and identities that exceed gender-normative behaviour. This dissertation focuses on waria – malebodied individuals who feel themselves as women in a country that is also home to the world's largest Muslim population. Although waria form a visible social group in Indonesia, their basic human rights along with other gender and sexual minorities have been exceedingly challenged for the past few decades. Sexuality has become a political playground, against which the question of waria belonging, to the nation or otherwise, is of utmost significance.
Since waria often go through migration, in which they cut relationships to their families, longing to belong is a widely shared sentiment among waria. As a result of and in response to their social exclusion, waria actively seek self-expression, pleasure and a sense of belonging at places and at times that are available for them.
Following extended ethnographic fieldwork in the regions of Java and Papua – the central and the peripheral within the national imaginary–, this thesis describes the lifeways and spaces of waria, and the practice of beauty as related to national belonging and narratives of modernization. Namely, waria aspire a sense of national and transnational belonging in order to claim communal belonging. Through these imagined reaches waria make their lives more liveable. Hence, the dissertation asserts that bodily forms and transformations hold significant capacity to provide or withdraw access to categories of belonging, which in turn influence the feelings of worthiness. Additionally, the thesis underscores the interrelated and embodied nature of gender, highlighting desire in the waria understandings of gender. Therefor, the dissertation contributes to the contemporary debates of (trans)gender, sexuality and embodiment.