Enduring Otherwise: Muslim Queer and Trans Worldmaking in Indonesia (Hauntings: Queer/Trans Studies in Religion)

Explores Muslim queer and trans experiences in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country

Many gender and sexual minorities in Indonesia remain practicing Muslims, but they face violence stemming from Muslim society’s rejection of their sexual and gender identities. With their faith often pitted against their desires and ways of living, many are confronted with a forced choice between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of being.

Drawing on ethnographic research in multiple locations in Indonesia, Enduring Otherwise examines how Muslim individuals and communities grapple with the challenges and possibilities of inhabiting queer and trans religiosity. Some distance themselves from religious tenets because of the harms implicated in them, while others immerse themselves in religious practices and spiritual values, seeking to reimagine them. There are also those who remain caught in tensions, having to navigate a life entrenched in ambivalence. Yet across these varied engagements, they continue to find ways to keep going.

This book showcases how everyday gestures of endurance complicate widely held notions of survival and resilience. Through such actions, Muslim queer and trans subjectivities build complex relationships with faith, piety, and religious norms, while also laying the groundwork to transform the conditions that marginalize them.

Offering a nuanced account of the affective politics of worldmaking at the intersection of sexuality, gender, and religion, Enduring Otherwise highlights how the drawn-out moments of hope, failure, improvisation, and exhaustion experienced by queer and gender non-conforming Indonesians configure efforts to create a world where no one will have to endure the unendurable anymore.

Ferdiansyah Thajib is senior lecturer in the Elite Graduate Program “Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures” at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. He is co-editor of Embracing Faith and Desire: Queer and Feminist Engagements with Islam and Christianity as Lived Religions and Affective Dimensions of Fieldwork and Ethnography.