ARI Working Paper Series

Focusing on the bissu, the transgender priests of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, the article explicates the emergent indigenous transgender identity within the contemporary artistic and economic practices. The bissu‘s interactions with the local clients, the state and global culture industry, as well as their representations on mass media and performing arts demonstrate that the bissu transgender priesthood serves as a trope of indigeneity, the trope mediated by the modern artistic constellation of estrangement and orchestrated by the colonial, capitalist and multiculturalist desire for an exotic and sovereign traditional community. Yet, any attempt to sustain the exotic and sovereignty of the bissu fails to discern the contradictions in the mediated representations. The contradictions emerge because the transgender norm the bissu provoke – the religious piety they perform – remains constrained by the local Islamic heterosexual traditions. The indigeneity does not delineate the bissu as a sovereign traditional community, instead it provides a discursive and social space where the bissu exists outside of the normative territory of the state, Islam and heterosexuality. It emerges within economic networks that permit interventions and negotiations. It subverts the essentialist and monolithic representation of indigenous people centered on the imagined sovereign territory.