Sexuality, Surah and Sholat : negotiating religious contestation in an Indonesian transgender boarding school

A. Ziegler

This thesis is based on five months of fieldwork in Yogyakarta in which I regularly went to the pesantren and joined the waria for other events such as the national transgender day or open discussion forums. I combined this participant observations with semi-structured interviews with most of the waria who are active at the pesantren as well as the two imams who were present at the time of research. Choosing this specific setting allowed me to focus on the life stories of my interlocutors and let me conduct an ?ethnography of the particular? as Lila Abu-Lughod calls it (Abu-Lughod 1991: 145). In line with Abu-Lughod?s ?writing against culture? it is not the goal of this thesis to formulate theoretical generalizations. Rather, I will present the particular stories of the attendant at the pesantren in order to show how gender is performed within this specific group of religious waria. I agree with Linda Alcoff on the fact that representations are always mediated and might be better seen as interpretations: 'I am engaging in the act of representing the other?s needs, goals, situations, and in fact, who they are [...] I am participating in the construction of their subject-positions' (Alcoff 1991: 9). Hence, I claim to only construct situated knowledge. In alignment with her concept of feminist objectivity Donna Haraway argues that situated knowledge is always partial and can never speak for every individual of a social group: 'The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision' (Haraway