Recording of the January 2022 TransAsiaSTS monthly meeting, with presentations from:
1. Benjamin Hegarty, McKenzie Fellow, Anthropology at The University of Melbourne, on "Transgender and technology in Indonesia (1930-1980)".
2. Yuti Ariani, Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, on "How do we care about a handicapped land? (A study on Indonesian peatland)".
Access the video recording here:
https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/january-2022-transasiasts-monthly-meeting
I am delighted to be giving a keynote presentation at the 19th October Spring Encounters conference - on “Queer, feminist, and other critical theories: new lenses for urban spaces.”
Further details are available below. Thank you to APR for the kind invitation!
“Run by Alliance for Praxis Research (APR), one of our intentions is to nurture transdisciplinary collaborations across faculties, research programs and labs, as academics are often confronted with the challenges to break through disciplinary and institutional silos. That is significant for students and early careers, particularly when coming from overseas, who are not familiar with universities’ organisation of research centres and local networks of scholars - especially in Melbourne, where several leading universities are located but improvements on their interconnections are still much needed.
As a way to encourage more vibrant exchanges and collaborative knowledge production between fellows with related research interests, The Alliance (or APR) is organising and promoting the 2021 Spring Encounters, a space for HDRs and ECRs to network through a series of presentations led by a panel where HDRs can present and discuss their research with a broader audience. It is an HDR-led event for HDR candidates, hosted by Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) and facilitated by Monash Graduate Association (MGA).”
https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/2021-spring-encounters-tickets-163318246271
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/
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 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.