Evelyn Blackwood

Through detailed studies, this collection of writings by academics and activists explores the emergence of contemporary lesbian and butch/femme relationships and communities throughout Asia and their location within the context of nationalist struggles, religious fundamentalism, state gender regimes and global queer movements.

This groundbreaking book examines the diverse manifestations of homosexuality in various historical periods and non-Western cultures. The distinguished authors examine Kimam male ritualized homosexual behavior, Mexican homosexual interaction in public contexts, male homosexuality and spirit possession in Brazil, among others.

"Since her arrest and five-day jail stay during the Seattle anti-WTO protests in November 1999, Starhawk has poured her energy into the global justice movement, participating in direct actions, leading nonviolence training workshops, and writing, always writing. Webs of Power is the outcome: an account from the front lines of that movement as it migrated from Seattle to Prague, then Brazil, Quebec City, and Genoa. As well as reporting the actions on the street, it includes a privileged glimpse behind the scenes, too, at the fierce discussion of the issues, strategies, and tactics of an always-evolving social movement. The book is also a personal vision of what an alternative future might look and feel like beyond the version offered up to us by the promoters of corporate globalization. Webs of Power is a unique contribution to our understanding of one of the most pivotal struggles of our time."--BOOK JACKET.

Falling into the Lesbi World offers a compelling view of sexual and gender difference through the everyday lives of tombois and their girlfriends (femmes) in the city of Padang, West Sumatra. While likening themselves to heterosexual couples, tombois and femmes contest and blur dominant constructions of gender and heterosexuality. Tombois are masculine females who identify as men and desire women; their girlfriends view themselves as normal women who desire men. Through rich, in-depth, and provocative stories, author Evelyn Blackwood shows how these same-sex Indonesian couples negotiate transgressive identities and desires and how their experiences speak to the struggles and desires of sexual and gender minorities everywhere. Blackwood analyzes the complex and seemingly contradictory practices of tombois and their partners, demonstrating how they make sense of Islamic, transnational, and modern state discourses in ways that seem to align with normative gender and sexual categories while at the same time subverting them. The childhood and adolescent narratives of tombois and femmes offer bold new insights into a social process that is rarely addressed in anthropological, lesbian, gay, or transgender studies. We see how tombois and femmes come to view themselves as boys and girls, respectively, through their interactions with family and community, and how as teenagers tombois learn that masculinity needs its opposite: feminine women. By contrast femmes notice shifts in their desires as they develop long-term relationships with tombois. The book reveals the complexity of tomboi masculinity, showing how tombois enact both masculine and feminine behaviors as they move between the anonymity and vulnerability of public spaces and the familiarity of family spaces. Falling into the Lesbi World demonstrates how nationally and globally circulating queer discourses are received and reinterpreted by tombois and femmes in a city in Indonesia. Though less educated than many internet-savvy activists in major urban centers, their identities are clearly both part of yet different than global gay models of sexuality. In contrast to the international LGBT model of modern sexualities, this work reveals a multiplicity of sexual and gender subjectivities in Indonesia, arguing for the importance of recognizing and validating this diversity in the global gay ecumene.

The winner of the 1999 Ruth Benedict Book Award in Anthropology, editors and feminist anthropologists, Blackwood and Wieringa, envisioned this anthology as a long due corrective in the arena of cross-cultural, female, same-sex sexuality research. Lack of legitimacy, invisibility, inadequate research questions, androcentric bias, and "blindness," have long been concerns for many feminist scholars. However, the authors argue that along with research stigma, the heterosexism of feminist scholarship and phallocentric scholarship of male-homosexual research have perpetuated and maintained deeper erasures in lesbian and female same-sex research. Lesbian-feminist work in the United States since the 1980s, the authors maintain, has influenced their work, but has also "analytically separated the study of female sexuality from male sexuality" and "is a primary motivation behind this volume" (48).