Below is a pre-published version of a commentary I was invited to write for Current Anthropology:
One of the bees that inhabit uneasily in every anthropologist’s bonnet is the question of representation. Viola Thimm’s article, ‘Queer Muslim Subjectivity: LGBTQIA+ identity in Malaysia between transnational self-awareness, pilgrimage politics and Islamic repression’ [in Current Anthropology], is perhaps no different here. This time, the usability of ‘queer’ by both self-identifying subjects and not in a global Southeast Asian context is interrogated, this time with an emerging recognition that a change in subjectivities is underfoot in the self-conceptualisation, along with what Thimm calls ‘self-confidence’, of gender non-conforming Muslims in Malaysia.
The prospect of increased confidence in ‘queer’ as self-identification in Malaysia may have been years-long in the making for several plausible reasons. One, the de-stigmatisation and mainstreaming of global queer material have de-coupled the previous associations of gender non-conforming appearances and practices with invisibility and stigma. Two, the trans-local awareness of anti-gender rhetoric, a stance that rejects the construction of gender, LGBTQ inclusivity and equality among other things, in the west and parts of Asia. The result of the two trends, particularly the latter, is either an affirmative identification with ‘queer’ or outright distancing from it.
But the story of ‘queer’ in Malaysia began more tentatively and inadvertently with the conviction in 1998 of the now-Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim for sodomy under 377A of the colonial penal code. On an almost daily basis, the Malaysian public were confronted with sensationalist front page headlines on the trial that described homosexual male sex acts. Thus, a new sexualised consciousness developed, one that contended with sexual practices and identities and their association with morality and power. From that point onward, the public consciousness became primed for naming non-heterosexual practices and subjects, building on a limited local taxonomy that pre-existed. In Southeast Asia, localised terms for non-normative genders and sexualities have tended to be pejorative in their meaning and affective charge.
In the past decade or so, a new wave of knowledge about queerness – global insofar as it is largely western hegemonic – has gradually reshaped local understandings of non-heteronormative subjects in Malaysia. The state guardians of morality – Islamic and federal authorities – stand at the ready of each wave of queer knowledge, with techniques to discipline and marginalise populations and invest them with the Islamic biopolitical interest to ‘rehabilitate’ them. One such technique is funding their pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the pillars of Islam.
When JAKIM, the federal body empowered to regulate Islamic practice in Malaysia, began its mission to rehabilitate transgender, lesbian, and gay Muslims in 2011, it has drawn criticism from transgender rights organisations for their dehumanising treatment. The local scales of Islamic administration and enforcement, however, means that there is relative autonomy of jurisdiction, especially at the state level. For example, the state departments of Islamic affairs in Pahang, Selangor, and Negeri Sembilan have been reported to soften their attitude and engagement (menyantuni) with Muslim trans women, non-binary, and gay men. One notable shift has been the Selangor department of Islamic affairs (JAIS) ‘rebranding’ exercise of the LGBTQ population as the ‘beloved community’ (komuniti disayangi), while eschewing the label ‘LGBT’ in their engagements. It is a strategy to entice, even cajole, the targets deemed as being under their auspices back into the Islamic fold, albeit ones that are restricted to normative and ‘normal’ categories of being. As a strategy, it has borne fruit: transwomen, or ‘TG’ as some may call themselves, have embraced the rebrand for themselves.
For the subjects interviewed by Thimm in her article, pilgrimage to Mecca poses a direct challenge to the binary heteronormativity of institutional Islam and those who subscribe to it. Belonging to an emerging repertoire of performative piety by transwomen, including wearing the hijab in public (also raising the ire of some), the necessary mobility to Mecca for the hajj transfigures pious transgender personhood into mobile, aspirational Muslim womanhood coveted by cis-heteronormative women and men. Conversely, individuals who volunteer themselves to be ‘rehabilitated’ by state authorities with the express intention of returning to a state as God intended (fitrah), even while their soul (jiwa) remains inconsistent with Islamic binary heteronormativity, may be unintelligible to progressive and scholarly observers. Although it is the purpose of queer ethnography to call ‘into question any assumed isomorphic connection between categories and lived experience of sexual difference’ (Boyce, Gonzalez-Polledo, and Posocco 2019: 7).
The ostensibly non-binary subjects who accede to the self-confident affirmation of their fitrah and jiwa have themselves engaged Islamic authorities who court them, in turn charting a moral and ontological temporality that appears truly their own. Theirs defy the straightforward de-transition to binary ‘normality’ envisioned by authorities. Moreover, the assertion of one’s fitrah, say, to be feminine in one’s original essence, while turning masculine-presenting after going through the mukhayyam, is the embodiment of heterochrony, of simultaneously being past, present, and future selves.
Reference:
Boyce, Paul, E.J. Gonzalez-Polledo, Silvia Posocco. 2019. Queering Knowledge: Analytics, Devices, and Investments after Marilyn Strathern. London: Routledge.
Alicia Izharuddin 