Description

Tom Boellstorff is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, and Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist, the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association. He is the author of The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton University Press, 2005); A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Duke University Press, 2007); and Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton University Press, 2008).

Abstract:

Since it was apparently first coined in 1994, the term MSM (men who have sex with men) has enjoyed enormous success as a term that ostensibly separates behavior from identity and is thereby more inclusive than the term “gay.” In this talk, I draw upon ethnographic and historical data from Indonesia and Western contexts to both critique the MSM concept and trace ways in which it has been taken up as a subject position.

I undertake this critique through four interlinked lines of analysis and one ethnographic case study. In the first line of analysis, I explore the culturally specific notions of behavior, identity, and sex that have shaped notions of MSM since the concept’s inception. Second, I address the varied conceptions of masculinity and maleness presupposed by the MSM category. Third, I examine the unlexicalized assumptions about race built into the MSM category, focusing on how one unexpected consequence of the term has been the attempted (but failed) exclusion of nonwhite men from categories of gayness. Fourth, I discuss how discourses of HIV prevention have been central to the formulation, dissemination, and reinterpretation of the MSM category worldwide.

I then build upon these four lines of analysis to address the ethnographic case study of the MSM category in Indonesia. In particular, I discuss how the reterritorialization of the MSM category in Indonesia as LSL (lelaki suka lelaki) has conceptually conflated gay-identified men and warias (male transvestites) in a historically unprecedented manner, leading to new configurations of these subject positions in the context of ongoing postcolonial transformations of the Indonesian nation-state a decade since the fall of Soeharto’s “New Order” government.