Abstract
Thousands of Indonesian men now identify as both “gay” and “Muslim.” How do these men understand the relationship between religion and sexuality? How do these understandings reflect the fact that they live in the nation that is home to more Muslims than any other? In this article, I address questions such as these through an ethnographic study of gay Muslims. I argue that dominant social norms render being gay and being Muslim “ungrammatical” with each other in the public sphere that is crucial to Muslim life in Indonesia. Through examining doctrine, interpretation, and community, I explore how gay Muslim subjectivity takes form in this incommensurability between religion and desire.
Highlights
Work in the anthropology of religion has long concerned itself with the relationship between orthodoxy and practice as well as the problem of making intelligible widely divergent religious beliefs (Tambiah 1990)
Such problems of “cultural translation” (Asad 1986) within and across religious traditions have been important to anthropology from its beginnings (Frazer 1915; Tylor 1958) and through many key moments of consolidation and innovation—for instance, in the work of Clifford Geertz, to whom I return at the end of this article
In examining gay Muslims’ sense of inhabiting incommensurability, I do not imply that other religions are more tolerant than Islam, as the enthusiasm for banning same-sex marriage amongst certain Christian groups in the United States clearly indicates
Summary
The incommensurability between Islam and male homosexuality in Indonesia is shaped by local and national spatial scales. From the earliest sustained Western scholarship on Islam in the archipelago by colonial officials like Snouck Hurgronje to mid–20th century writing (e.g., Siegel 1969) to more recent work (e.g., Beatty 1999; Bowen 1993, 2003; Hefner 1985, 2000; Siapno 2002), there has been great interest in how Islam shapes social relations, law, and governance—even if, as noted earlier, homosexuality is virtually absent in this scholarship Another common question I am asked is “how are there Indonesians calling themselves gay at all?” it is only in the last 30 years that some Indonesians have started calling themselves gay, and only in particular, limited circumstances—a significant difference from the much longer history of gay identification in much of the West, including the United States (Chauncey 1994). Because gay Muslims find little information on sex between men beyond silence or denunciation, it is primarily through interpretation that they inhabit these incommensurate spaces of religion and desire
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