ABSTRACT
This book has progressively built a picture of gender in Indonesia, exploring meanings of the concept and specifically asking what constitutes gender in this cultural milieu. Acknowledging that gender is never just about ‘gender’, the book revealed various conceptualizations of the concept ranging from gender being grounded in biology, to gender being performative, to gender being shaped by sexuality, to gender being constituted by all of these factors and more. While in many respects these components can be reverted to essentially non-gender attributes, collectively such components comprise a concept that can be labelled gender. Indeed, as Peter Jackson (pers. comm. 2003) noted in an early review of this work, developing a framework for conceptualizing gender in Indonesia is a difficult undertaking because there is no ‘cultural entity’ of gender but rather a collection of factors that take on the appearance of something like ‘gender’ when viewed from a particular perspective. In many ways, this book shows what feminist and queer theorists have long been arguing: gender cannot be conceptualized as one variable among others, instead gender is fundamental, not subordinate or corollary, to any social formation.
