A watchful eye: Surveillance and the sculpting of sexuality in Indonesia

Key information

Date
Time
5:00 PM to 6:20 PM
Venue
Russell Square: College Buildings
Room
Kamran Djam Lecture Theatre (DLT)

About this event

Sharyn Graham Davies (University of Cambridge)

In this talk I draw on ethnographic material collected in Indonesia over the last decade to explore various understandings of surveillance and show how surveillance works to shape sexuality in Indonesia. I draw particularly on two cases. The first case looks at how a provincial newspaper in Indonesia collaborated with police to expose people caught having sex outside the confines of heterosexual marriage. The second case looks at how police and an extremist Islamist group combined to surveil a queer event. The cases respectively show a local/private and national/public response to 'deviant' sexuality and reveal how surveillance techniques are deployed to shame subjects into compliance with normative models of sexuality. I draw on two theoretical frameworks, performative regulation and village biopower, to show concurrent constraining and productive influence of sexual surveillance and share s ways in which people respond and negotiate surveillance in their sexual lives.

Sharyn Graham Davies is currently Leverhulme Visiting Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is also Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. Sharyn is author of Gender Diversity in Indonesia , Challenging Gender Norms , and co-editor of Sex and Sexuality in Indonesia .

Organiser: Dr Ben Murtagh

Contact email: bm10@soas.ac.uk

Contact Tel: 020 7898 4248