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Heteronormativity, Passionate Aesthetics and Symbolic Subversion in Asia
By Saskia E. Wieringa Sussex Academic Press
Copyright © 2015 Saskia E. Wieringa
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84519-550-2
CHAPTER 1
Researching Heteronormativity
Listening to her story produced mixed feelings in me, both angry and sad. Particularly when she related how ... the way religion has been taught her leaves her no other option than to perceive herself as sinful and dirty, as a sick person, and this robs her [of] the possibility of enjoying her life. This demonstrates how society snatches away the rights of a lesbian to live like any other human being. (Bernadeth Sinta Situmorang)
How to live like 'any other human being' – indeed. But how do humans live? Do they always live the same lives everywhere? As this is clearly not the case, how do humans learn what is 'normal' in their particular context? And what happens to those who, for whatever reason, the straightjacket of 'normalcy' does not fit? Do they feel disoriented in the ongoing process of the imposition of 'normalcy'?
This book features the lives of women living non-normative lives. Their reflections on their lives also hold up a mirror to the outside, 'normal' world – a mirror that does not unproblematically reflect 'normalcy' but 'diffracts' that contextualised 'normalcy' into the many ways that marginalised 'others' live certain parts of their lives, while transforming others. Do all humans have the same rights to enjoy their lives? Why are some excluded from rights that others find it 'normal' to be entitled to? This book is about gender and sexuality in two major Asian countries – India and Indonesia – but has wider ramifications because processes of marginalisation – and of expulsion from the boundaries of the 'normal' – take place everywhere. It provides glimpses of the private lives of people who have been driven outside the bounds of normalcy – heteronormativity – widows and divorced women, sex workers, and women in same-sex relations.
This book crosses many boundaries, primarily the porous boundary between private and public spheres of life. The state and powerful institutions such as religion (as reflected in the opening quotation above) impact heavily on people's private lives. Therefore, sexual orientation, status as a widow, or occupation as a sex worker fall under intense surveillance. I will explore other binaries as well: between 'normal' and 'abnormal', between rebellion and submission, or between ostensible adaptation and the struggle for sexual rights. Throughout the text, I emphasise that understanding processes of normalisation and transgression requires exploration of the intermediary spaces and shifting boundaries, and an understanding and conceptualisation more of sliding scales and fluidity than binaries.
Below, I give three vignettes drawn from experiences of this project's three coordinators: Saskia Wieringa, Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, and Abha Bhaiya. Each, in our different contexts, was confronted with the 'common' knowledge of the boundaries between genders and sexes, and the enforcement of abusive practices. Saskia Wieringa, growing up in the Netherlands in the 1950s, remembers being puzzled by gender stereotypes:
I must have been around four years old when I discovered civil engineering. With great zeal, I attempted to construct major waterworks in the muddy ditch behind our house. As my birthday neared, I had spotted the perfect vehicle to transport the stones to fortify my dams: a shining, yellow, plastic truck with a contraption to lift the boot and dump its contents. This way it would be easy to transport the gravel from our front yard to the building site. I had repeatedly indicated the necessity of this purchase to my mother when we passed the toy shop. On my birthday, I was indeed presented with a vehicle: a wicker doll's pram with lovingly-embroidered lace curtains. A pram, when I hated playing with dolls! When I got over my shock and had dried my tears (for which I was strongly reprimanded – how dare I reject such a beautiful present when my mother had spent all those hard hours embroidering), I set about assessing the utility of this means of transportation for the ends I had intended. I removed the curtains, blanket, mattress, and pillow, and set to work at the construction site. However, on the fifth trip to the planned dam, one of its wheels broke and I had to shelve my idea of building the largest dam of all the kids on the block.
Nursyahbani Katjasungkana grew up in a small village in eastern Java. Arranged marriages were common in those days (the 1960s), much to her shock:
I had a classmate called Patria, who was just 14 years old. She was forced to get married when she was in grade four of the elementary school, to a man she had never met. Patria suffered from dyslexia, an inability to synchronise her mind and the letters she wanted to write, so she often failed to go to the next grade. Perhaps her parents considered her a stupid student, so they compelled her to marry as this would free them from the obligation to send their daughter to school. Her wedding was celebrated with merry music from a lute and tambourine, and the one-and-only family-owned cow was slaughtered to be served to the guests. She was the first daughter in the family to be married off. This, it was believed, would open the matchmaking for her sisters later. The husband looked strong, with a dark skin, and was expected to replace her father to take care of the farm. But the marriage only lasted for three days. Patria abhorred her husband. On the first night, Patria refused to be approached or touched by him. She tied up her body from toe to chest with a stagen [woman's waist sash] that normally is used to tie a woman's stomach after giving birth. Any time her husband came to her, she pushed him away until he fell from the bed. On the third day, her husband returned to his parents' house in another village, without having been able to touch his wife. The same thing was repeated a few weeks later. Only then was the marriage dissolved.
Abha Bhaiya grew up in an extended family in India in the 1950s. She got in trouble when she tried to ignore the boundaries between the sexes:
When I was around six years old, the entire family decided to go for a picnic to a beautiful lake an hour's distance away. We were all very excited. I was being brought up by my father's elder brother and his wife, who were father and mother to me. I loved them both deeply; my uncle always made me laugh. I hung around him all the time. His friends loved his loud laughter as well – and they were equally fond of me. A big truck and two jeeps appeared in front of our house. Who was going to sit where? Men started climbing into the truck. It became clear that the women were going to sit in the jeeps. I asked one of my uncle's friends, who used to take me for a bicycle ride every morning, to help me to get in the truck. Suddenly, my aunt called out for me. I moved a little deeper inside the truck, as I wanted to go with my uncle and his friends. My aunt peeped in the truck and angrily ordered me to get down. I refused, clinging to the leg of my uncle. "I am not a girl!" I shouted. My aunt was furious, and all the men laughed loudly. What could I do to convince them I was a boy?
These three stories indicate the helplessness of those young girls in the face of the formidable power of the heteronormative families in which they grew up. They became disoriented when their own sense of what was natural for them was ignored so ruthlessly. What good is a wicker pram to carry heavy loads of stone, when that is obviously the most important task at hand? Why cannot a girl sit with the uncle she loves? Who decides she is a girl anyway? Why is a girl who wants to play and go to school forced to marry a man she does not love? At such a young age, girls learn that the tools they play with are gendered, location and space are governed by alien norms, and their body is possessed by others. At the same time, the stories testify to the embodiment of resistance – the frustrated fury of Saskia and Abha, and the desperate resistance of Patria, which made Katjasungkana decide that she wanted to be a lawyer. In the end, Patria succeeded in fending off the marriage but her reputation as wilful and disobedient did not earn her praise. This book is about both phenomena: the formidable power of heteronormativity and its embodied subversion by those expelled from its core or who choose to stay at its margins.
Socialisation and normalisation
All over the world, children are moulded into what is expected of them: the particular games they are supposed to play, the pleasures they are allowed to derive from them, the clothes they are supposed to wear, the customs to which they are subjected, the behaviours they are expected to exhibit, the sentiments instilled in them, and their bodily expressions – all differ according to historical, religious, cultural, ethnic, caste and class contexts. Rewards are bestowed upon them when they manage to fit the expectations of their elders, and punishments follow when they rebel. To different degrees, the majority of children adapt themselves to the hegemonic gender regime they are subjected to, but a minority refuses to do so. Again, some children creatively use the 'master's tools' to try to build their own new house (after Lorde 1984), others demonstrate transgression or subversion later in life, while others somehow drop out (or are forced out) of what is expected of them as adult persons. As I use the term in this book, heteronormativity refers to the dominant pattern of partnership in a specific context and the model upon which a so-called 'stable' family life and, by extension, social life is built. I elaborate upon this concept in the next chapter.
Studies of those processes abound, mainly situated in the 'Global West', all pointing to the learned, constructed character of the type of behaviour that is seen as 'natural' in essentialist thinking. Bourdieu (1990; 1991) maintained that those who suffer from its oppressions may not always realise the violence in which they live, which he calls 'symbolic violence'. Butler analysed the way people perform their gender, iteratively citing the patterns they grew up with (1990; 1991; 1993). Foucault pointed to the way that discursive practices inform 'practices of the self' (1978; 1986). Focusing on sexuality, Rich (1980) emphasised the compulsory character of heterosexuality, while Butler (1993) stressed how gender and sex are aligned in the 'heterosexual matrix'. Rubin (1989) alerted us to the fact that, even within the realm of heterosexuality, a pecking order operates. Those studies all dealt with power relations and hierarchies: the 'natural' clearly needs a whole apparatus of discursive power to produce and reproduce itself. In their focus on surveillance, those studies tend to over-determine cultural, discursive factors and underemphasise the embodied agency of those who resist the pressures or are marginalised by the normalising forces around them. This may lead to a circularity of power relations in which conformity is stressed, deviancy ignored, and embodiment made invisible. As Barad formulated it, how did "language seem to be more trustworthy than matter?" (Barad 2006: 11).
Recent literature that focuses on the interconnection between constructivist, cultural, and essentialist material factors when addressing the relation between culture and embodiment seems to offer more creative ways to reflect on identities, subjectivities, and the effects of socialisation, and allows a theoretical space to understand deviant behaviours (for example, see Barad 2006; 2007; Braidotti 2011; Jordan-Young 2010). Those approaches inform this book's discussion of both embodied and engendered factors in relation to subversion, avoiding the traps of biological and cultural determinism but reflecting on the 'strategically reessentialised embodiment' that Braidotti proposes (2011: 164). Or, as Barad formulates it: "Neither discursive practices nor material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. ... Neither has privileged status in determining the other" (2006: 26). Diamond's (2008) longitudinal research on sexual orientation, which emphasises fluidity rather than the fixed nature of sexual relations, is another inspiration to think beyond binaries and fixed categories.
This book brings to the fore the deviancy of those who transgress the boundaries of the 'normal' in various ways. It analyses their subversion, demonstrating that a 'sliding scale' operates between ostensible adaptation and a full-blown struggle for sexual rights. It focuses on Asia, not as an exotic location but as a position in a globalising world from which it is possible to reflect on mechanisms that, in different forms, are also at work elsewhere. To do so, however, we must ignore the dominant 'Western gaze of theory building' and take up a theoretical position that takes the Global South seriously, not as a source of empirical facts but as an impulse to reflect on global processes (Wieringa and Sivori 2013).
Truly Asian?
Trans-national histories of sexuality in Asia tend to concentrate on the colonial encounters between Asian and Western states, and most deal with the relations between Western men and Asian women (Loos 2009: 1310). As such, those histories are usually framed by Western imperialism as they contextualise interracial unions and colonial encounters that transform local moral hierarchies (for example, see Hyam 1991; Stoler 1997; Taylor 1983). This book is located within the framework of feminist post-modern anthropological studies, and its focus is on an intra-Asian comparison of gender and sexual relations in which the colonial past serves mostly as an aspect of the historical context.
Thus this book differs in two important aspects from most trans-national studies on gender and sexuality: it takes two major Asian countries as its point of reference, not the East–West relationship, and does not focus on interracial, heterosexual unions but instead explores the dictates of heteronormativity on all unions, both normatively and nonnormatively sexual. As such, this study broaches topics that are both national and trans-national – local and global – without juxtaposing them. The international comparison is meant to bring each national context into relief – both the similarities and differences are enlightening in this respect. In its intra-Asian comparison, it avoids the exoticising view in which Asia is 'othered' as the 'non-West'.
As with most recent trans-national approaches to sexuality, this book views the local and global as inseparable, yet unevenly integrated (Povinelli and Chauncey 1999). Far from attempting to make sweeping generalisations, the many nuances of the experiences of a broad plethora of non-normative lives interest us here. Same-sex relations in Asia fall mostly under studies of globalisation (Altman 2001; Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002) or contain rich descriptions of particular situations (for examples of Asia, see Blackwood 2010; Sharma 2006; Sharma and Nath 2005; Sinnott 2004; Wieringa, Blackwood, and Bhaiya 2009). Historical studies on gender pluralism in Asia, such as those of Peletz (2012), provide another rich source of information on issues of gender and sexuality in the region. This book takes a different angle on gender and sexuality studies as it does not restrict itself to the world of same-sex relations – instead, it provides vivid glimpses of the lived subjectivities of various groups of women in their engagements with heteronormativity.
We compared the life trajectories of our narrators in Jakarta and Delhi – two major cities in widely-different parts of Asia. Delhi is the capital of a country with a large Hindu majority and a sizeable Muslim minority, among other religious and cultural pluralities. The Indian state is constitutionally committed to secularism and equal respect for all religions and regions. However, right-wing Hindu fundamentalists have repeatedly tried to impose the notion of a Hindu nation. Jakarta is the capital of a sprawling archipelago with a large variety of ethnic cultures. Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, as well as sizeable ethnic and religious minorities comprising of Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists as well as groups practicing other spiritual traditions. The Indonesian state is constitutionally secular, but religion plays an ever-more important role in public life and is embedded in several regulations that strongly impact upon people's private lives. Recently, there have been strong political currents to impose stricter Islamic codes on the lives of Indonesians.
This book analyses the patterns and mechanisms of heteronormativity and the passionate aesthetics that drive it. Although comparisons will be made between the two Asian cities in which the research took place, the data primarily yield illustrations of particular patterns discerned. On the basis of those data, it is not possible to discuss differences in prevalence as the research is qualitative, yet the trans-cultural dimension of this research provides meaningful insights that will become clear in the following chapters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Heteronormativity, Passionate Aesthetics and Symbolic Subversion in Asia by Saskia E. Wieringa. Copyright © 2015 Saskia E. Wieringa. Excerpted by permission of Sussex Academic Press.
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