Tom Boellstorff has a knack of using language in this way to elegantly and provocatively destabilise our commonly held notions of sexual subjectivities and national culture.

The Gay Archipelago might appear to be an atlas of gay and lesbi (the italics signify the 'authentically Indonesian' understanding of gay and lesbian subjectivities) places and lifestyles, but 'archipelago' is used in multiple senses here to signify ways of being same and different across the national body politic of Indonesia.

He works with a practice of dispersed ethnography (Surabaya, Makassar, Bali), and challenges commonly understood ideas of globalisation and sexual subjectivity to discuss how since the 1970s and 1980s Indonesian homosexual men and women have come to new understandings of themselves as sexual and Indonesian national subjects.

If that is a challenging idea, then that is what Boellstorff delivers: a whole suite of thoughtful insights into the way ethnography may be practised and how globalisation and media effects may be re-thought. For Indonesianists the ethnography works through and with other important ethnographies written about Indonesian cultures over the last forty years and takes us to a new place in a confident, richly researched national ethnography. Tom Boellstorff's ethnography of gay and lesbi sexualities in Indonesia is a gift to Indonesianists and students of the intricate and often confusing effects of globalisation. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005, 282 pp.

Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context

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