I am an invited plenary speaker in the ‘Trans Lives in the Pandemic Age’ session at the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference held virtually at the National University of Singapore, 28-30 July 2021.
http://culturalstudies.asia/iacs-conference/main-iacss-conference-2021/
With colleagues from the University of Melbourne, Priyanka Pillai and Kristal Spreadborough, I’ll be presenting at the AusSTS workshop in Melbourne held on 24 and 25 June. Details of the workshop are available here: https://scienceandsocietynetwork.deakin.edu.au/call-for-applications-aussts-2021-situated-practice-a-multi-sited-workshop/
The paper is based on some recent work that I’ve been doing as part of an interdisciplinary team about HIV data and its uses in global health, looking at one manifestation - the “cascade of care” (a.k.a. and sometimes overlapping with what is called the continuum of care). I am hoping the workshop can offer an opportunity some emergent themes on governmentality through data in global health regimes, building on my completed book manuscript on the globalisation of concepts for gender and sexual diversity in Indonesia.
The title and abstract is below - if you are in Melbourne, I hope to see you at this fantastic workshop!
Title: Seeing like a cascade - global HIV data and public health governance in Indonesia
Keywords: data, public health, HIV, cascade, Indonesia
Abstract: The “cascade of care” is a widely used tool in measuring national and international progress towards HIV testing and treatment goals. Since 2014, these goals have been to achieve 90% of HIV+ people know their status, 90% of people who know their status on treatment, and 90% of people on treatment are virally suppressed. Thus, these targets serve as a catalyst to rapidly and as widely as possible roll out anti-retroviral treatment with the ultimate aim being to end AIDS in the near future. The “cascade” individualises “treatment” and “prevention,” and simplifies the complexities of accessing life-long treatment into a biomedical and pharmaceutical model. Yet a less widely acknowledged aspect of the “cascade” in international HIV programs is the fact that it is accompanied by and indeed necessitates the expansion of systems of collecting, storing and analysing data. We argue that the cascade is not only a method concerned with clinical treatment but has led to the prioritisation of data-driven models which draw “surveillance” (data about the state of the epidemic) together with “monitoring and evaluation” (data about programs). Focusing on SIHA, the Indonesian Ministry of Health Information System for HIV/AIDS developed in 2012, this paper analyses various visualisations of the “cascade” and the data infrastructures that underpin it. We use these visualisations to understand both flows of data in and between actors and the categories that they use in the process. In contextualising how national Indonesian data infrastructures “see like a cascade” we seek to clarify what public health governance does and for whom.
Authors:
Benjamin Hegarty is an interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies scholar and McKenzie Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Priyanka Pillai has a background in bioinformatics and computer science and works as an academic specialist at the University of Melbourne.
Kristal Spreadborough is a Research Data Specialist at the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform. Kristal’s research interests cut across the fields of data, digital and data ethics, music, psychology and semiotics.
I am presenting at the Cultural Studies Association (USA) on Saturday 12:00-1:00pm CST, 12 June 2021.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/18HEW_27VDtM16T-CtSQkqi6ZSH8nTQ_nRAT15qp1G8c/edit#
The Force of Images: Digital Media, Bodies, and Data in Southeast Asia
Chair: Benjamin Hegarty, The University of Melbourne
Respondent: Tom Boellstorff, University of California Irvine
Indonesian Youth Protesting for/with Social Media
Annisa Beta, The University of Melbourne
Violent Visibilities: Campus Sexual Misconduct Facilitated by Technology in Singapore
Michelle H. S. Ho, National University of Singapore
The Biosocial Body: Data and Visibility Among MSM in Indonesian HIV Programs
Benjamin Hegarty, The University of Melbourne
This panel considers the force of images in shaping the meanings attached to bodies and embodiment in contemporary Southeast Asia. Throughout the region, political upheaval, contestation and technological developments related to the digital are producing new relationships between bodies and the meanings attached to their representation. In this environment, moral harms are transformed into physiological risk in new ways, resulting in emergent forms of exclusion and claims for inclusion. This is transforming both the possibilities and the modes through which claims to autonomy and representation unfold. In an era of new appropriation and force of images what kinds of political mobilisation are possible? What “boundary objects” act as an interface between them? What new models for critical engagement with “data” as and with visual culture can we consider? And how do these operate in and between Asian contexts with specific political cultures rooted in visual culture and appearances, frequently tied to the body and its appearances?
This panel addresses these questions across two intersecting domains through which to consider the force of images: “social media” and “data.” Investigating the way that images are generating new forms of political investment and engagement tied to the body, each paper offers insights into emergent political investments in Southeast Asia. Michelle Ho’s paper addresses the generative role that “violent visibilities” — encompassing data gathering and their life in social media — have had in creating new possibilities for mobilizing against sexual harassment on Singaporean campuses. Annisa Beta’s paper reflects on the “jocular” use of images on social media by young people — in the form of memes and photographs — as an influential political vocabulary in Indonesia’s fraught postauthoritarian political landscape. Benjamin Hegarty considers the way that data-driven cultures of transparency in global programs for HIV targeting “men wo have sex with men” intersect with extant cultural meanings tied to the body, requiring new forms of discipline.
In each case, digital media and data do not live “outside” of culture or of the realm of the body, but emerges from and through it. By drawing on data that illustrates examples of the “force of images” against broader patterns of social and political change in Southeast Asia, this panel will offer insights into the intersections between digital media, data and the body. Remaining attuned to the cultural meanings of images not as a representation but a force in the world refuses a teleological view of cultures of data and the digital, instead opening new horizons for political mobilization and critique.
I convened a series - Conversations in Transgender Studies - held for four weeks (virtually) at the University of Melbourne between 23 April and 14 May 2021.
‘Conversations in Transgender Studies’ is a mini-series of panels held online hosted and supported by the Faculty of Arts Gender Studies Program and the School of Social and Political Sciences. Held across four weeks, the series places academic, community and practitioner voices in dialogue as a way to consider some cross-cutting issues within transgender studies now. Across four weeks the series will address a series of topics and their intersections – work, the law, sport, health – as an opportunity to highlight how social scientific inquiry responds to and engages with voices from the community. The panel series takes advantage of an online format to bring together people in conversation from both around Australia and globally. The series is one part in an ongoing conversation, which will be followed by panels on a range of other critical topics in future.
I presented at the ANU Indonesia Study Group at the Australian National University on the history of HIV in Indonesia on 21 April 2021.
Twenty-five years of HIV/AIDS responses in Indonesia
This project draws on material from a National Library of Australia Asia Study Grant-funded project on community memory and epidemiological histories of HIV. It addresses the period from the first official health responses to early cases identified in the 1990s to the present day, when an estimated 640,000 people are living with HIV. It draws on Indonesian-language policy documents, activist accounts, medical surveys, media sources and development archives into conversation with ongoing research on community memories of HIV/AIDS in Indonesia. In particular, I elaborate the political entanglement between HIV/AIDS and political organising among some of the gender and sexual minorities most affected by the epidemic. I argue that the history of HIV/AIDS offers an important lens on broader processes of a discourse of transparency that permeates the era of democratic reform since 1998. In particular, it helps to track the emergence of discourses of morality and their transformation into surveillance from the end of the New Order. Perhaps more importantly, the history of HIV/AIDS in Indonesia – as is the case in other parts of the world – highlights impressive forms of community/government/expert engagement mobilised at the intersection of a concern for public health and human rights.
https://crawford.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/18721/twenty-five-years-hivaids-responses-indonesia
I spoke as part of the Metaphors seminar series, held by the Institute for Postcolonial Studies and the Center for Law, Arts and Humanities at the Australian National University.
A recording is available here: https://ipcs.org.au/recording/pandemic-metaphors/
The mask and the face it covers
During the pandemic, 'the mask' became an accessory (for DIY types), a necessity (for healthcare workers), a hard fought commodity (for well-off countries), and in some parts of the world (the US), the decision to wear it or not, a political statement. Yet the focus on debates as to whether the mask is in fact effective or not in slowing pandemics such as those now upon us miss a vital question. What are the broader meanings of the 'mask'? How does the act of 'masking' reflect or present possibilities for collective action? This presentation considers these questions of the mask as metaphor and as political concept via anthropological engagement with the meanings of ‘the mask’ and related concept of the 'face.' I do so by drawing on fieldwork in Indonesia (2008 to present), a context where, in the words of Benedict Anderson, the face itself might be considered a 'built in mask.' The paper thus investigates the meaning of the face/mask during the pandemic ethnographically. I first define the ethnographic concept of 'dandan' — especially as used by Indonesian trans- women — a category for 'making up' through the repeated, daily effort to improve the appearance of the body through application of feminine makeup and clothing. I draw on these sources to consider how we might imagine masks less as signifier of citizenship premised on individual responsibility in the name of life as an absolute value, and more as a means of collective envisioning. Against a backdrop of securitization and intensification of punitive state surveillance, reconsidering the mask anthropologically might help to transform it into a more hopeful metaphor.
I presented on Queer Visibility in Indonesia at the Deakin University Gender and Sexuality Studies seminar series in August 2018.
The recording is available here: https://blogs.deakin.edu.au/gender-and-sexuality-studies-research-network/2018/08/30/ben-hegarty-on-queer-visibility-in-indonesia/
Desiring modernity: Historical perspectives on contemporary queer visibility and national belonging in Indonesia
The past two years have seen the term LGBT shift from an unknown acronym to household term in Indonesia, overwhelmingly framed in pejorative terms. Many commentators have labelled these transformations as both unprecedented and a break with a long tradition of tolerance for gender and sexual diversity grounded in moderate Islam. While sympathetic to these concerns, queer visibility in Indonesia has long been met with a broad range of responses: from outright hostility, to begrudging tolerance, to open celebration. This paper, based on historical and ethnographic research undertake in 2014-2015 in Indonesia, places the events related to the term LGBT in Indonesia over past two years within the history of Indonesian national modernity. Starting from the 1960s, I sketch out a chronology that demonstrates how transgender femininity developed a profile as a form of visibility that was at once popularly enjoyed and officially denigrated. I then present how a historical reading of queer visibility in contemporary Indonesia calls for attention in three areas: 1) the media and mediation; 2) the relationship between private and public; 3) the currents and effects of globalised knowledge. In conclusion, I tease out why historical and/or cross-cultural perspectives continue to offer a vital vantage point for scholars of gender and sexuality studies; a way to resist the temptation of reductionist and universalising notions of rights grounded in identity as a one-way movement towards modernity.