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Session 82: Discourses of Desire: Sexualities, Morality, and Globalization in Southeast Asia
Organizer and Chair: Nancy J. Smith-Hefner, Boston University
Discussant: Michael Peletz, Colgate University
Keywords: sexuality, globalization, Southeast Asia.
Throughout contemporary Southeast Asia, a growing anxiety about the demise of moral constraint is fueled by discourses linking blatant expression of sexual promiscuity to a Westernized media and the vicissitudes of a globalized economy. In many cases, conservative religious leaders or a pious press seeking control over the public imagination blame decadent Western values for the purported moral degeneration of Southeast Asian societies. Likewise, private narratives explain their globalized world in terms that link sexual desire, control, and morality.
This paper examines "talk about sex" in a variety of Southeast Asian contexts. It addresses the interplay of public and private discourses about sexual practices and the impact that the popular media, unstable global economies, and religious conservatism have in negotiating these moral narratives. Papers examine the moral discourses of homosexuality in Thailand, sex talk, and the state in Central Sulawesi, moralizing narratives of sexual liaisons among Western expatriates in Jakarta, and the increasing sexualization of public discourses in Singapore and Malaysia. Each considers the complex links between the ways in which Southeast Asian sexualities are constructed, global changes continue to bombard the senses, and local members of communities perceive and reconfigure—and talk about—their experiences. In examining cultural, political, and religious responses to perceived Western hegemonic discourses of sexuality, these papers indicate that globalized discourses are negotiated by local actors resulting in both greater homogenization as well as diversification and increasing class differentiation.
Toms and Dees: Moral Discourse about Transgendered, Female, Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand
Megan Sinnott, Yale University
This paper discusses the use of moral discourses within female same-sex relationships in Thailand. Thailand is the site of a highly visible and dynamic transgender community. These transgendered women are called toms and their feminine partners are called dees. I show how toms and dees construct their identities out of local meaning systems in which women are encouraged to engage in homosocial activities (such as all female schools, dormitories or work environments) in order to avoid intensely stigmatized heterosexual promiscuity. The cultural context for these Thai women is significantly different from the sexual culture of Thai men, and thus their constructions of self and identity differ greatly. Thai homosexual men look to transnational discourses of gender normative "gay" identity because these transnational discourses identify male homosexuality with hegemonic notions of masculine sexual prerogatives, rather than with transgenderism. Thai women, on the other hand, strongly resist transnational discourses of "lesbian" identity, which they feel imply an improper emphasis on sexual desire, and choose instead to engage in local gendering patterns of masculine women (toms) who have sexual and romantic relations with gender normative Thai women (dees). The socioeconomic context of Thailand, with its increasing rates of urbanization and industrialization, provide new opportunities for Thai women to form sexual subcultures based on longstanding local transgendered practices, and thus toms and dees have emerged as highly visible, cross-class (university students to factory workers) identities that both engage with local gender meaning systems and transnational economic and political forces.
Talk about Sex: Globalization, Morality, and State Discourse in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia
Jennifer W. Nourse, University of Richmond
In this paper I examine Lauje discourses of sexuality over a twenty year period of sporadic, yet intensive, fieldwork in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. I reflexively ask whether talk about sex, using explicit English-language terms, signifies that a global sexualized Western worldview has penetrated even remote corners of Indonesia and transformed local morality. I argue that locals’ requests that I describe for them how Western males reach orgasm and/or reveal my preferences for various sexual positions has less to do with locals’ desire to mimic Western sexual promiscuity and more to do with Lauje cosmology and reactions to state and religious ideology as well as to me as a married, Western, woman.
Contemporary Lauje sexual discourse is inflected with a sexual leitmotif derived from pre-Islamic cosmology. Rain, fertile crops, and general health ensue if both male and female spirits mutually pleasure one another. Reference to these spirits could be analyzed as anachronistic remnants of traditional Lauje ideology. I argue, however, that such talk reflects local defiance of their co-Muslim national leaders who are seen by many Lauje as hypocritical. I conclude that explanations as to why so many people persistently asked me seemingly suggestive questions about orgasm and sexual pleasure are as myriad as the interlocutors themselves. Complex local, regional, and nationalist issues regarding politics, identity, and power all play a role in the form Lauje sexual discourse takes, revealing that explanations about a globalized sees seeping into traditional culture are too simplistic for this context.
Expatriate Ethnoscapes: Transnational Sexuality and the Colonial Imagination
William H. Leggett, Sewanee, The University of the South
In this paper I focus on the moral discursive practices of Indonesian national employees at BCB, a fictional name for a transnational manufacturing firm in Jakarta, Indonesia. Stories told by Indonesian employees often focus on rumors of sexual (mis)conduct by expatriate coworkers and superiors that effectively locate expatriates outside of and prior to the modern spaces of the transnational economy. I take these stories as attempts to cope with the uncertainty inherent in the global flows of transnational employees into and out of the workspace. From the perspective of Indonesian workers in these transnational corporate offices, the movement of expatriate workers into and out of Jakarta has little to do with the economic exigencies of the global economy and much to do with the sexual desires and inevitable transgressions of expatriate employees.
I analyze these moralizing narratives through the literature on colonial sexuality, modernity and its anxieties, and the power of the state. I call for a reversal of the sexualized lens often utilized in postcolonial theory, turning it instead upon the dominant social group, in this case a Western expatriate workforce, to better understand how global processes of mobility are understood within a local terrain historically subject to external sources of power and domination.
Inventing Sex in Malaysia and Singapore
Maila Stivens, University of Melbourne
This paper explores the spectacular sexualisation of some areas of public discourse in Malaysia and Singapore in the last decade, relating this to reconfigurations of "public," "private," masculinities and femininities during the same period. Dramatic economic and political transformations across the Southeast Asian region have produced new contexts for the interplay between consumer capitalist culture, economy, polity and religious practice, which have had profound implications both for women’s and men’s everyday lived experiences and for wider processes of identity and subjectivity formation—especially the constructions of sexualities. In Malaysia, for example, public discussion of sexuality/ies was formerly very limited, but today major sites of popular cultural production regularly instruct readers on the many intricacies of successful (hetero)sexual relationships, while pornography downloads proceed apace.
This paper looks at a number of key events, including in the Malaysian case the trial of former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim for sodomy, which have worked both to construct new public discourses about sexualities, and to bring about active cultural contests debating the meaning and significance of new sexualisations of the public. The specific ‘local’ and regional developments bringing about these changes, especially developments within popular culture, are discussed against a background of wider discussions of the sexualisation of public cultures and shifting divides between "public" and "private" globally.