Transnational Sexualities in One Place

Abstract

In studies of transnational sexualities, locality has remained a contentious but important site to disrupt the universalizing tendencies of queer academic and activist discourses. In this article, the author uses a feminist approach to transnational studies of sexualities that takes into account particular locales within the global movements of queer idsentities and discourses. She does so by examiningthe way individuals in West Sumatra, Indonesia, access and appropriate circuits of knowledge to produce their gendered and sexual subjectivities. The locality the author examines is Padang, West Sumatra, a part of the Indonesian state that is ethnically Minangkabau, devoutly Islamic, and matrilineal. Through stories of lesbi in Padang, the author demonstrates the way state and Islamic discourses shape gendered subjectivities that are not always explicitly resistant. At the same time, the circulation of queer knowledge creates an imagined space for a community of like-minded individuals.