About the photograph
About the photograph
Ibu Maryani founded the Pondok Pesantren Khusus Waria Senin-Kamis. She was an important figure in the LGTB movement of Jogjakarta, known nation-wide for her kindness and efforts to support and promote the integration of waria within Indonesian society. She was considered wealthy among other waria, and they would often receive from her money, protection, shelter and employment. Her death, after several months of sickness, shocked waria and the LGBT community. At her funeral, depicted here, more than two hundred fifty people, including waria, Ibu Maryani's relatives, NGO staff, LGBT activists, journalists, neighbors, and other people turned out to pay their respects, cramming into the narrow street where Ibu Maryani lived. The farewell was visceral, her mourners wailing the loss of such an influential leader and loved friend.
Sexuality and Technology
Sexuality and Technology
'Gender' and 'sexuality' are elusive terms, commonly used as if self-evident yet as problematic in their definitions as in their politics. The simplest distinctions are between sex and gender, in order to differentiate biology and social and behavioral traits, but these distinctions are not made and do not make sense in all cultures; anthropologists studying sexuality, as well as queer theorists and activists, have made the insensitivity of this demarcation clear. 'Gender' references broader configurations of social life, encompassing ideologies and practices of kinship; sex, in contrast, is generally seen to be a biological classification of living things as male or female according to their external and internal genitalia, their chromosomes, endocrine systems and reproductive organs. But as controversies illustrate, such as that over the gold medal for the eight hundred meter race of the South African woman, Caster Semenya, definitions of male and female are not straightforward. Semenya was found to have an intersex condition, leaving her with no uterus or ovaries and high levels of androgens. Defining one's sex is complex-there is not one biological marker that allows for a simple categorization of people as male or female. Moreover, gendered life experiences impact endocrinological processes, and thereby affect biologically defined sex differences between men and women.
Together sex and gender as an intertwined concept contributes to the meanings given to sexuality, and to how it is understood in social, political, and cultural life. 'Sexuality' can refer to sexual feelings, sexual desire, and pleasure; to identity and its implications; and to social arenas where moral discourses on 'good' sexual behavior are played out. In this chapter, we use the term 'sexuality' as a relational concept within a medical anthropological framework, and reflect on the ways that different strands of sexuality research, involving historians, sexologists, and queer and feminist scholars, have contributed to our understanding of these issues. We focus on how sexuality is affected by and how it shapes medical technologies. We approach sexual behavior not as a biologically determined drive, but as a socially and culturally constructed practice shaped by power relations. Using four case studies, we show how sexuality has been shaped by access to medical technology, and how medical technologies can be experienced and analyzed as liberating and oppressive, reflecting and shaping cultural notions of appropriate sexual identities, practices, and gender roles.