Document Type
Review Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Fluidity of gender construction is often apparent in media and popular culture analysis, and Ben Murtagh's volume on Indonesian cinema poses the notion against a very interesting backdrop. The volume entitled Gender and Sexualities in Indonesian Cinema: Constructing Gay, Lesbi and Waria Identities on Screen is part of a series "Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia." In this volume Murtagh offers his analysis of popular films in Indonesia, interesting not just because Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world, but also because in 1998 the country and its people were freed from an authoritarian regime who had proliferated order and enforced ideological conformity of developmentalism during its reign (1966-1998). Murtagh's examination spans the period from the decade of the 1970s into the 2000s, providing powerful yet sympathetic insights into the construction of gender and sexualities against changing social and political backdrops. He focuses on the subject position that is generated by gender construction rather than merely affirming the "positive" or "negative" constructions of non-normative genders and sexualities, even as he argues that following the "negative" construction of female homosexuality the empowerment of lesbian viewers might ensues.
Repository Citation
Sasono, Eric. "Review of Gender and Sexualities in Indonesian Cinema: Constructing Gay, Lesbi and Waria Identities on Screen, by Ben Murtagh." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 2, 2016, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss2/37