A Political Biography of the Indonesian Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Movement

Here, the history of the Indonesian LBT movement is charted, from invisibility, to visibility and now as it moves again into hiding. In the early 1980s, during the oppressive military dictatorship called the New Order in Indonesia, the first organizations of Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans persons were established. They were short-lived, but prepared the ground for a more comprehensive LBT rights movement after the democratic opening of society in 1998. From 2000 to 2015 the visibility of the movement grew, until a vicious state-sponsored backlash set in, driven by majoritarian, fundamentalist Islamist groups.
Saskia Wieringa tracks the movement's progress and explores the persistence of the butch/femme model of relationships; the proliferations of identities; family violence and conversion therapy; religion; and the anti-LGBT campaign. In its insistence on the local dynamics of this movement, the book aims to debunk the idea that homosexuality is a Western import. Chapters deal with the many religious and secular phenomena that are linked with gender diversity and same-sex relations traditionally, and the erasure of many of these traditions is explained using the concept of postcolonial amnesia. A Political Biography of the Indonesian Lesbian, Bisexual and Trans Movement is also a contribution to the growing literature on decolonization studies, pointing out that its dynamics, its historical course and its present condition, different as they are from the dominant Western view on a global LGBT movement, needs to be considered as valuable as accounts of Western LGBT histories are.

Saskia E. Wieringa is honorary professor at the University of Amsterdam, holding the chair on Gender and Women's Same-Sex Relations Crossculturally. She has a long experience of activism in both the women's and Third World solidarity movements. Since the late 1970s she has done research on women's movements and same-sex relations in many parts of the world, particularly in Indonesia. Her latest books include: Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures; Sexual Politics in Indonesia; Lubang Buaya, a novel; Tommy Boys, Lesbian Men and Ancestral Wives: Women's Same-Sex Experiences in Southern Africa; Engendering Human Security (co-edited with Thanh-Dam Truong and Amrita Chhachhi); Women's Sexualities and Masculinities in a Globalizing Asia (co-edited with Evelyn Blackwood and Abha Bhaiya); Traveling Heritages and the Future of Asian Feminisms (with Nursyahbani Katjasungkana). She has received various awards for her scholarly work, most recently the 2011 award for Best Paper from the Journal of Contemporary Asia.
Horacio Federico Sívori, PhD, is an Argentinean anthropologist, a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Social Medicine, State University of Rio de Janeiro, and the regional coordinator for the Latin American Center on Sexuality and Human Rights. He trained in Argentina, the USA, and Brazil and taught in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. He is the author of Locas, chogos y gays, as well as journal articles, book chapters, and collective volumes on gay sociability, sexual rights, and AIDS activism. He is co-editor of Sexualities, a working paper series by CLAGS/CUNY's International Resource Network, and has acted as co-chair for Sexuality Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association. His current research looks at LGBT rights activism in Argentina and Brazil.