Liminal Masculinity: Narratives of Class and Sexuality in Post-authoritarian Indonesia

Abstract

In contemporary Indonesia, the fragmentation of a collectively-imagined future has generated ambivalent and contradictory ways of being and becoming a man. This article investigates this tension by drawing on interviews and ethnographic data collected from young men aged 18–30 who engage in transactional sex work in the capital city Jakarta. The narratives of these young men suggest that transactional sex is a choice linked to the cultivation of an appropriate form of masculinity. This understanding, however, is complicated by mobility in two ways. First, geographical mobility tied to migration is understood to be necessary to becoming a man who is independent from family. Second, temporal m..