The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies in cooperation with her partners organises the twenty first round of the DOING GENDER Lecture Series. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today. The lecture series wants to give space to the new generations of gender theorists and practitioners and to perspectives that innovate the field and do gender in new ways. Key is the notion of doing gender: what is the state of the art definition of gender? How do contemporary scholars and activists utilise this definition?
On Wednesday September 18, 2019 Ben Hegarty will give the Doing Gender Lecture Transparency and the global health/LGBT rights nexus in postauthoritarian Indonesia.
This presentation situates the intersection of global health/LGBT rights within a broader concern for transparency and truth-seeking in Indonesia. In terms of funding, personnel and vocabulary, global health serves as a crucial infrastructure for LGBT rights. The legitimacy and authority of global health is especially crucial to LGBT rights advocacy in Indonesia, where LGBT-identified people have increasingly emerged as prominent targets of homophobia and legal sanctions. For these and other reasons, activists and NGO workers increasingly rely on a logic of numbers: According to Human Rights Watch, homophobia is making outreach work more difficult in the context of an HIV epidemic where 1 in 3 men who have sex with men (MSM) in Jakarta has contracted the virus. In 2017, a local LGBT NGO survey identified 715 transgender women, 225 gay men, 29 lesbians and 4 other non-heteronormative people were victims of violence. This presentation presents preliminary research about the way that NGO workers in global health/LGBT rights organisations engage in practices of counting, categorisation and verification. As exemplary objects of scrutiny, attending to the efforts to undertake documentation (dokumentasi) by activists working at the intersection of LGBT rights/global health offers a perspective on exclusion and belonging in postauthoritarian contexts more generally.
Dr Benjamin Hegarty is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. His expertise combines ethnographic and historical methods with critical theory to investigate how gender and sexuality are implicated in transnational processes, with a focus on LGBT health and the mass media. His research in Indonesia received the Australian Anthropological Society PhD Thesis Prize, and appears in Medicine Anthropology Theory, Transgender Studies Quarterly and The Journal of Intercultural Studies. His collaborative research efforts with Indonesian critical public health scholars and physicians has been funded by a number of competitive grants.
Details Lecture:
Date: Wednesday September 18, 2019
Lecture: Transparency and the global health/LGBT rights nexus in postauthoritarian Indonesia
Time: 13:15 – 15.00 hrs
Location: Utrecht, Muntstraat 2a, Grote Zaal
Chair: Dr. Christine Quinan
Registration is compulsory: nog@uu.nl
