Tom Boellstorff

The Gay Archipelago is the first book-length exploration of the lives of gay men in Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation and home to more Muslims than any other country. Based on a range of field methods, it explores how Indonesian gay and lesbian identities are shaped by nationalism and globalization. Yet the case of gay and lesbian Indonesians also compels us to ask more fundamental questions about how we decide when two things are "the same" or "different." The book thus examines the possibilities of an "archipelagic" perspective on sameness and difference. Tom Boellstorff examines the history of homosexuality in Indonesia, and then turns to how gay and lesbian identities are lived in everyday Indonesian life, from questions of love, desire, and romance to the places where gay men and lesbian women meet. He also explores the roles of mass media, the state, and marriage in gay and lesbian identities. The Gay Archipelago is unusual in taking the whole nation-state of Indonesia as its subject, rather than the ethnic groups usually studied by anthropologists. It is by looking at the nation in cultural terms, not just political terms, that identities like those of gay and lesbian Indonesians become visible and understandable. In doing so, this book addresses questions of sexuality, mass media, nationalism, and modernity with implications throughout Southeast Asia and beyond.

Language is a fundamental tool for shaping identity and community, including the expression (or repression) of sexual desire. Speaking in Queer Tongues investigates the tensions and adaptations that occur when processes of globalization bring one system of gay or lesbian language into contact with another. Western constructions of gay culture are now circulating widely beyond the boundaries of Western nations due to influences as diverse as Internet communication, global dissemination of entertainment and other media, increased travel and tourism, migration, displacement, and transnational citizenship. The authority claimed by these constructions, and by the linguistic codes embedded in them, is causing them to have a profound impact on public and private expressions of homosexuality in locations as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia and Israel. Examining a wide range of global cultures, Speaking in Queer Tongues presents essays on topics that include old versus new sexual vocabularies, the rhetoric of gay-oriented magazines and news media, verbal and nonverbalized sexual imagery in poetry and popular culture, and the linguistic consequences of the globalized gay rights movement.

"Data is too big to be left to the data analysts! Here, Prickly Paradigm brings together five researchers whose work is deeply informed by anthropology, understood as more than a basket of ethnographic methods like participant observation and interviewing. The value of anthropology lies also in its conceptual frameworks, frameworks that are comparative as well as field-based. Kinship! Gifts! Everything old is new when the anthropological archive washes over 'big data'. Bringing together anthropology's classic debates and contemporary interventions, this book counters the future-oriented hype and speculation so characteristic of discussions regarding big data. By drawing as well on long experience in industry contexts, the contributors provide analytical provocations that can help reframe what may prove to be some of the most important shifts in technology and society in the first half of the twenty-first century"--Back cover.

What is it about “the homosexual” that incites vitriolic rhetoric and violence around the world? How and why do some people hate queers? Does homophobia operate differently across social, political, and economic terrains? What are the ambivalences in homophobic discourses that can be exploited to undermine its hegemonic privilege? This volume addresses these questions through critical interrogations of sites where homophobic discourses are produced. It provides innovative analytical insights that expose the complex and intersecting cultural, political, and economic forces contributing to the development of new forms of homophobia. And it is a call to action for anthropologists and other social scientists to examine more carefully the politics, histories, and contexts of places and people who profess hatred for queerness. The contributors to this volume open up the scope of inquiry into processes of homophobia, moving the analysis of a particular form of “hate” into new, wider sociocultural and political fields. The ongoing production of homophobic discourses is carefully analyzed in diverse sites including New York City, Australia, the Caribbean, Greece, India, and Indonesia, as well as American Christian churches, in order to uncover the complex operational processes of homophobias and their intimate relationships to nationalism, sexism, racism, class, and colonialism. The contributors also critically inquire into the limitations of the term homophobia and interrogate its utility as a cross-cultural designation.

'Mobile Cultures' provides much needed, empirically grounded studies of the connections between new media technologies, the globalization of sexual cultures and the rise of queer Asia.

"Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He applied the methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group."-- Original book jacket.