I have another new publication out this year: a short essay on Garin Nugroho’s Memories of My Body (Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku, 2018) in a major 700-page Routledge volume, Screening Postmillennial Queer Film, edited by Cüneyt Çakırlar. Abstract below:
A case for queering transnational “folk cinema” is made in this chapter through the cosmic-corporeal figure of a traditional Javanese dancer who occupies the centre of Indonesian arthouse filmmaker Garin Nugroho’s feature film, Kucumbu Tubuh Indahku/Memories of My Body (2018). The protagonist-dancer is not only queer but also specialises in syncretic folk dances that engage with cross-dressing and same-sex intimacy in the face of moral and political opposition in Indonesia. This chapter considers the film’s praxis of accommodating a critical reflection on the parallels of the self and folk culture while eschewing, through the film’s formal and narrative techniques, the trope of the exotic subaltern other. The film is rich with allusions to Tantric conceptions of femininity and masculinity as elements combined to form an esoteric experience of ‘wholeness’ (i.e. non-duality and union with the cosmos). However, set against a political context that demonises both non-normative sexualities and traditional Javanese dance forms as being associated with the subversive politics of communism, the meanings of “wholeness” are repeatedly undermined.
