Text
E-book The Made-Up State : Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia
Maya Puspa steps out of her home and salon with confidence and grace, narrowly avoiding the puddles that have transformed her lane into a muddy track. She smiles, arching her thin, penciled-on eyebrows as she turns to a group of elderly men gathered over a chessboard. It is her evening walk and, cheerily greeting the men, Maya strides out of her lane and onto a city street. Maya lives alone in one of the many poor, crowded neighborhoods in Jakarta, the enormous capital of Indonesia and a city in the center of a region populated by tens of millions of people. Enveloped by twilight, accompanied by the sounds of motorbikes and crackling evening calls to prayer from neighborhood mosques, Maya pushes on with athletic strength. She quickens her pace far more than her eighty-year-old frame would suggest is possible. Neighbors call out to her with the common greeting “Where are you going?” One middle-aged man on his way to the mosque—with a prayer rug slung over his shoulder and dressed in a sarong—grins as he spots Maya, greeting her with an honorific term of address reserved for senior members of the community. Her movement up the street is less a stroll and more a vigorous stop-start punctuated by warm greetings and playful cajoling from her neighbors. After powering up a steep rise, Mami Maya reaches a bridge that marks a halfway point to the community meeting that is our destination, before turning back to face the lights of the city. She surveils, with visible pleasure, the modern metropolis where she has made her home for over sixty years and where she plans to live out the rest of her days. This scene, unfolding in the middle of 2015, is a remarkable testament to Maya’s neighbors recognition of her as a respected member who belongs in their community on terms that are comfortable to her. Born in 1938 in a town on the island of Sumatra in the last decade of the colonial Dutch East Indies, Maya migrated to Jakarta in 1950, not long after the revolution that followed World War II and Indonesia’s declaration of independence on August 17, 1945.
Tidak tersedia versi lain