The MAde-up state

The Made-Up State investigates the relationship between technology and the globalization of transgender knowledge from the mid-century onwards in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation but one that is often positioned as marginal to the world system. 

Drawing on a rich and varied archive of trans cultural life, the book argues that waria, one Indonesian term for trans femininity established via a novel engagement with the modern gender binary, transformed the relationship between gender, sexuality and technological modernity.

 

AWARDS AND PRIZES

  • 2023 Anne Bolin & Gil Herdt Book Prize in Human Sexuality (American Anthropological Association)

Reviews of The Made-Up State

“Scholars working in fields such as transgender studies, critical gender studies, and the anthropology of gender and sexuality have defined gender as a multifaceted concept that surpasses the binary model and seeks to resist modes of essentializing gender. Hegarty's findings enrich this approach by underlining how gender operates as a technological means for categorizing human differences, but with outcomes that necessarily remain incomplete, open-ended, and emergent.”

Ferdiansyah Thajib, American Ethnologist

“Benjamin Hegarty’s The Made-Up State is a sharp intervention into the ‘global’ and ‘local’ dimensions of what has become a near-universal concern with the politics of gender identification and recognition – many countries now grapple with the demands of legal change… The very mapping of gender as an effect of technology is itself remarkable, as is the articulation of the failures of a state to sanction cisgender normativity as the condition for full belonging.

Brian Curtin, Southeast Asia Research

“In his study of waria in modern Indonesia, Ben Hegarty contributes to a rich tradition of analyses that destabilise conventional understandings of the Western social and cultural categories of man and woman… This book is an important contribution to anthropological debates about transgender identities. In tracing the historical trajectory of waria recognition, Hegarty has demonstrated the mutability and instability of gender categories in different political contexts, and the ways in which participatory citizenship is often contingent upon conformity.”

Martha Mcintyre, The Australian Journal of Anthropology

Media and Presentations

I have introduced some of the material that I expand at length in the book in my other writing in addition to the following seminars: