In person at Deakin Downtown 727 Collins Street Tower 2 Level 12 Melbourne, VIC 3008 and online.
To watch the recording access the link here - Friday 22nd of September, 3.30pm.
The SSN is delighted to launch Benjamin Hegarty's new book, published by Cornell University Press. Join us for an introductory talk by Ben. The discussion will include reflections from Carla Jones, (Associate Professor in Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder), Alegra Wolter (Transgender Activist and Medical Doctor, Suara Kita, Indonesia), and Chris Hanssmann (Assistant Professor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at University of California, Davis).
Whilst we encourage attendance at Deakin Downtown, it will also be livestreamed for our regional and global audience.
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.
Benjamin Hegarty is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of queer and transgender studies, science and technology studies, and global health. His research is based on research with transgender communities in Indonesia. Before joining the Global Health Program at the the Kirby Institute at UNSW, Benjamin was a McKenzie Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne (2019-2022). His ethnographic and historical research appears in Visual Anthropology Review, Ethos, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Journal of Asian Studies. Benjamin is a member of the Editorial Board of American Ethnologist.
You can learn more about Ben, and download his free e-book, on his website
A limited number of books will be for sale on the day at $20 each; all proceeds will go to the Waria Crisis Centre in Yogyakarta for projects related to trans health and housing.
