ABSTRACT
Long-term cultural-political developments bearing on transgender practices, same-sex relations, and gender pluralism in Southeast Asia have not been uniform or all-encompassing but the overall trends, like the dynamics that helped bring them about, are clear. The latter dynamics include forces of political centralization (involving, inter alia, the consolidation and expansion of state power at the expense of local polities); the development of nationalist/modernist discourses emphasizing rationalized religion, science, technology, economic progress, secular education, and mass literacy; processes of urbanization, bureaucratization, and industrialization; and the rise of (mostly capitalist) market economies. These dynamics not only entailed widely ramifying institutional and cultural rationalization that undercut the moral bases of agrarian communities and the cosmologies in which they were embedded; they also contributed to increased social differentiation and stratification and new forms of surveillance, discipline, and control geared toward producing heightened normativity in domains of kinship, gender, and sexuality, and, indeed, in all areas of social life. In the process, many local “priesthoods,” however gendered, have been largely discredited, just as many rituals associated with androgynous spirits and deities have fallen by the wayside. In addition, in many (perhaps most) contexts transgendering and the sexual variability linked with it has been stripped of its positive associations with religion and the sacred. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., the Bugis) the long-standing centrality of gender and sexual variability in state cults, royal courts, and the reproduction of local polities exists primarily in scattered memories and archives. In places like contemporary Malaysia, such variability tends to be most visible in secular venues of fashion and entertainment, in the increasingly scrutinized and disciplined private domain, and on the notoriously ungovernable Internet. When viewed from a long-term perspective, we see that many variants of transgendering and same-sex relations have been subject to processes of secularization and stigmatization, and that some of them have been heavily criminalized as well; and that most transgendered individuals have been redefined as contaminating rather than sacred mediators who are perversely muddling and enmiring the increasingly dichotomous terms of sex/gender systems long characterized by pluralism. Southeast Asia thus has much in common with other parts of the world that
have been or are currently involved in transitions to (late) modernity, for generally speaking these transitions entail processes whereby once sacred mediating and liminal figures come to be redefined as contaminating, perverse, pathological, and categorically criminal if not explicitly treasonous.
