Vicissitudes of Vision: Piety, Pornography, and Shaming the State in Indonesia

Abstract

When the inaugural Indonesian edition of Playboy magazine was published in 2006, Muslim celebrity televangelist Abdullah Gymnastiar admonished Indonesians that the unbridled sexual gaze could tarnish a pure heart, leaving it blind to the perils of passion. Averting the gaze, he told his followers, would cultivate a sense of shame and thus steer the heart from vice to virtue. Whereas scholars have offered important insights into the study of religion and visual culture, decidedly less attention has been devoted to the faculty of looking as an ethical and political project. In this article, I bring together literatures on affect, subjectivity, and the state to describe how Gymnastiar deploys a moral psychology of vision to discipline state actors and to endow the post-authoritarian state with a political affect of shame. [Islam, politics, sensory ethnography, state, visual culture]

Self‐Lowering as Power and Trap: Wawa, ‘White’, and Peripheral Embrace of State Formation in Indonesian Papua

“…This construal was embodied, for example, in certain Papuan university students' mobilization to take possession of Puti when he landed at Jayapura's airport, managing his hospital transfer and many aspects of his family's accommodation across their two months in town. Here Puti was an instrument of ‘shaming the state’, within a wider pattern of Papuans cannily perceiving that bodily illness and health are pivotal, cloaked channels of Indonesian colonial domination and Papuan indigenous counter‐power (Hoesterey 2016; Munro 2020). 7 But across late 2017 there was a wider swirl of news stories, social media posts, online fundraising campaigns, and roadside humanitarian aid‐gathering campaigns all focused on Puti, often cutting across lines of Papuan versus Indonesian (Fig.…”

Moralising Rhetoric and Imperfect Realities: Breastfeeding Promotions and the Experiences of Recently Delivered Mothers in Urban Yogyakarta, Indonesia

“…Although women who do not cover their breasts can be seen publicly breastfeeding in Yogyakarta, breasts in Indonesian culture are increasingly being codified as sexual. Indonesian censors have taken to blurring and pixelating women's bare chests and cleavage in talent contests, foreign music videos, films and other visual media (see, for example, Hoesterey, 2016;Pausacker, 2015;Sapiie, 2016), and this may have the effect of making women more uncertain about the propriety of breastfeeding in public. As Wall (2001) and Campo (2010) argue, the body of the breastfeeding woman transgresses the boundaries and ideals between the maternal body and the sexual body, and to simply assert that the breastfeeding breast is different from the sexual breast is problematic.…”