Performing Waria/Performing Care

Abstract

Based on fieldwork conducted with waria in the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Paige M. Johnson’s ‘Performing Waria/Performing Care: Defining Care in Waria Contexts’ explores identity-based performance as a praxis for self and community care and looks to how waria ultimately expand the notion of self into an apparatus of relational responsibility through ensemble performances. Performing Waria/Performing Care focuses on two waria led non-governmental organizations (NGOs) located in Yogyakarta – Kebaya and the Pondok Pesantren Khusus Waria Al-Fattah. These two organizations foster distinct performance landscapes, one that uses practices most often seen in queer nightlife spaces brought into the daylight and the other that offers minoritarian subjects engaging in historically and culturally grounded majoritarian performance practices. This article argues that waria ultimately expand the notion of self into an apparatus of ‘relational responsibility’ through these performance spaces and practices. Waria do so by tapping into culturally specific understandings of the affective implications of public performance practices on the self and others, so that relational responsibility thus names a mode of reciprocal care assumed within the matrix of the performing body, genre and community creating a dialectic between self and community care. Through a critical engagement with the practices of waria artists performing across temporal and gendered boundaries, this article addresses how waria engage their pasts through the transmission of knowledge concerning the depth through which queer and transgender bodies shape, and are shaped by, performance broadly and genre more specifically to manifest new modes of legibility for contemporary waria communities.