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Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Gay Language and Indonesia: Registering Belonging

Tom Boellstorff
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

Many homosexual men in Indonesia speak what they call bahasa gay ‘gay language’,
a linguistic phenomenon based upon bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian), Indonesia’s national
language. Bahasa gay involves derivational processes including unique suffixes
and word substitutions, and a pragmatics oriented around community rather than secrecy.
Although mainstream knowledge of gay men’s existence is limited, bahasa gay
is increasingly being appropriated by Indonesian popular culture. By examining bahasa
gay in terms of state power and register, the article asks how this form of speaking might
contribute to better understanding how gay subjectivity is bound up with conceptions
of national belonging. Gay Indonesians might seem to epitomize difference; they seem
to lie radically outside the norms of Indonesian societies. Within gay communities and
in popular culture, however, bahasa gay appears as a register of belonging, not one of
hierarchy or distance. [Indonesia, gay, nation, register, belonging]
Imagine, then, a linguistics that decentered community, that placed at its centre the operation
of language across lines of social differentiation, a linguistics that focused on modes and zones
of contact between dominant and dominated groups . . . that focused on how such speakers
constitute each other relationally and in difference, how they enact differences in language.
Mary Louise Pratt, “Linguistic Utopias”


source: http://www.anthro.uci.edu

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