Vicissitudes of Vision: Piety, Pornography, and Shaming the State in Indonesia

Abstract

When the inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine was published in 2006, Muslim celebrity televangelist Abdullah Gymnastiar admonished Indonesians that the unbridled sexual gaze could tarnish a pure heart, leaving it blind to the perils of passion. Averting the gaze, he told his followers, would cultivate a sense of shame and thus steer the heart from vice to virtue. Whereas scholars have offered important insights into the study of religion and visual culture, decidedly less attention has been devoted to the faculty of looking as an ethical and political project. In this article, I bring together literatures on affect, subjectivity, and the state to describe how Gymnastiar deploys a moral psychology of vision to discipline state actors and to endow the post‐authoritarian state with a political affect of shame.