Dubbing Culture: Indonesian Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities and Ethnography in an Already Globalized World

In this article I explore how Indonesians come to see themselves as lesbi or gay through fragmentary encounters with mainstream mass media (rather than lesbian and gay Westerners or Western lesbian and gay media). By placing this ethnographic material alongside a recent debate on the dubbing of foreign television programs into the Indonesian language, I develop a theoretical framework of "dubbing culture" to critically analyze globalizing processes. [globalization, homosexuality, identity, Indonesia, mass media, nationalism, postcolonial]

A s the 20th century begins to recede into historical memory, "globalization" presents itself as a completed project: We appear to live in a world that is already globalized (Appadurai 1996;Gibson-Graham 1996;Hannerz 1989;Miller 1995). Even with this state of affairs, however, globalization is more than background noise. Although a certain academic fatigue has set in concerning globalization, these processes are shifting and intensifying and so demand our continuing attention. Ethnography has an important role to play in such a refocused analysis, for it can show how even the most apparently "remote" communities are caught up in globalizing processes in ways that impact subjectivities as well as social circumstances (e.g., Tsing 1993).
Such are the foundational concerns of this article. In it, I bring an analysis of how Indonesians come to think of themselves as lesbi or gay through encounters with mass media together with a late 1990s controversy over the dubbing of foreign television shows and films into the Indonesian language, in order to develop a framework for rethinking ethnography in an already globalized world. (To keep gay and lesbi distinct from the English terms lesbian and gay, I italicize them. 1 ) I call this framework "dubbing culture," where to dub means, as the Oxford English Dictionary phrases it, "to provide an alternative sound track to (a film or television broadcast), especially a translation from a foreign language" {Oxford English Dictionary 1 , second edition, volume 4).
With regard to lesbi and gay Indonesians, my goal is to develop a theory that can account for a contingent, fractured, intermittent, yet powerfully influential relationship between globalization and subjectivities. Two additional requirements for such a theory are as follows. First, it must not mistake contingency for the absence of power; it must account for relations of domination. Second, such a theory must not render domination as determination; it must account for how gay and lesbi Indonesians transform this contingent relationship in unexpected ways.
More broadly, the framework of "dubbing culture" provides one way to conceptualize the relationship between persons and the cultural logics through which they come to occupy subject positions under contemporary globalizing processes. In particular, it does so without relying on biogenetic (and, arguably, heteronormative) metaphors like hybridity, creolization, and diaspora, which imply prior unities and originary points of dispersion. Gay and lesbi subjectivities do not originate in the "West" (they are not perceived as diasporic), nor are they a hybrid of "West" and "East"; they are distinctively Indonesian phenomena, formed through discourses of nation and sexual desire as well as a sense of linkage to distant but familiar Others. Gibson-Graham (1996), in a feminist critique of globalization narratives, notes their similarity to rape narratives; Both present a masculinized entity (the rapist, global capitalism) as always already in a position of dominance and a feminized entity (the rape victim, the local) in a position of weakness. This is more than a metaphorical parallel: As narratives about relationality and transfer, stories of sexuality are stories of globalization and vice versa. Gibson-Graham hopes that "a queer perspective can help to unsettle the consonances and coherences of the narrative of global commodiflcation" (1996:144). In this spirit, I explore how "dubbing culture" might provide a way to understand globalization as susceptible to transformation. In queering globalization in this manner, I do not lose sight of the immense suffering and injustice it causes. Instead, I highlight that this suffering and injustice is caused not by a singular "globalization," but by a complex network of interlocking economic, political, and social forces that are not always in agreement or absolute dominance. In terms of the dubbing metaphor, we might say that the voice of globalization is powerful but that that voice does not "move" across the globe. Rather, it is dialogically reconstituted; it is in a constant state of "dubbing." The framework of "dubbing culture" is crucially concerned with agency: It questions both deterministic theories that assume the hailing of persons through ideology and voluntaristic theories that assume persons voice and "negotiate" their subjectivities vis-a-vis structures of power. As a result, it aims to provide a more processual and conjunctural understanding of subjectivity: It gives us a new way to think through the metaphorical construal of hegemonic cultural logics as discourses. To "dub" a discourse is neither to parrot it verbatim nor to compose an entirely new script. It is to hold together cultural logics without resolving them into a unitary whole.
In this article, I first develop the concept of dubbing culture through a close ethnographic analysis of gay and lesbi Indonesians. Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation on earth and home to more Muslims than any other country, is a useful site from which to investigate emergent modalities of globalization. As a result, this article addresses itself to scholars with interests in contemporary Southeast Asia. Second, this article speaks to literature on the internationalization of gay and lesbian subjectivities, suggesting that this literature sometimes overemphasizes politics and activism, assuming that such globalization primarily takes place through channels like sex tourism, the consumption of "Western" lesbian and gay media, and the travel of non-"Westerners" to the "West." Third, I see this analysis as a contribution to mass-media theory. In much the same way that print capitalism presents a general precondition for national imagined communities, but in a manner open to reinterpretation (Anderson 1983), so contemporary mass media present a general precondition for dubbing culture, but not in a deterministic sense. I thus examine ways in which mass-mediated messages that might appear totalizing (because of their association with powerful political-economic actors) are, in fact, susceptible to contingent transformation. Just as the dubbed television show in which "Sharon Stone speaks Indonesian" does not originate in the United States, so the gay and lesbi subject positions I examine are Indonesian, not, strictly speaking, imported. 2 Yet just as the range of possibilities for a dubbed soundtrack is shaped by images originating elsewhere, so the persons who occupy subject positions that are dubbed in some fashion cannot choose their subjectivities just as they please. I move, then, from a literal, technical meaning of "dubbing" to a more speculative, analogical usage as a way to explore the relationship between social actors and the modes of subjectivation (Foucault 1985) by which such persons come to occupy subject positions.
Beyond these three audiences, however, the ultimate goal of this article is to speak at a broad level to the state of culture theory. Might it be that dubbing culture occurs in the context of globalizing processes not directly related to mass media, sexuality, or Southeast Asia? Indeed, at the end of this article I ask if the "dubbing of culture" Indonesians perform when they constitutively occupy the gay or lesbi subject position is all that different from the ethnographic project in an already globalized world. This article, then, has a reflexive (indeed, postreflexive) dimension. It asks if the ways in which much contemporary ethnography holds together, in tension, multiple cultural logics (like "the local" and "modernity")-in such a way that they are coconstitutive, not just juxtaposed-might not be productively interpreted in terms of dubbing culture.

Coming to lesbi or gay subjectivity
It is late morning in the city of Makassar (the regional capital of South Sulawesi province on the island of Sulawesi), and I am recording an interview with Hasan, a 32-year-old gay man I have known for many years. We are speaking about Hasan's youth, and he recalls his first sexual relationship as a young teenager, which took place with an older friend at school. At that point Hasan had never heard the word gay. Hasan here recounts a moment of recognition, one that later leads him to look for other gay men and eventually call himself gay. Through an encounter with mass media, he comes to knowledge of what he takes to be the concept "gay" and retrospectively interprets his same-sex relationships before acquiring this knowledge in terms of "blindness." Readers familiar with debates in queer studies over the internationalization of lesbian and gay subjectivities (e.g., Adam et al. 1999;Airman 2001) might seize on the fact that Hasan saw a gay demonstration as evidence of activism driving this "globalization," but, in fact, this is the most unusual aspect of Hasan's narrative. Three other elements prove more typical in the Indonesian context: Sexuality is tied to mass-mediated language; an outside way of being becomes intimate; and the border dividing gay culture from other cultures is national, not ethnic or local.

Hasan
Since 1992, I have spent about two years conducting ethnographic research on Indonesian nonnormative sexualities and genders, primarily in Surabaya (East Java), Bali, and Makassar (South Sulawesi). This research focuses on men and women who term themselves gay or lesbi, on waria (better known by the derogatory term banci)-what I roughly term male transvestites-and on persons calling themselves tomboi or hunter, who see themselves in some cases as masculine lesbi women and in other cases as men trapped in women's bodies.
Throughout my fieldwork, I have taken great pains to investigate how it is that Indonesians come to lesbi or gay subjectivity. The reason for this is that unlike so-called traditional homosexual and transgendered subject positions or the waria subject position, gay and lesbi are not concepts with significant historical depth; they appear to have first arisen in Indonesia in the 1970s. 1 They are experienced as new, not something one learns from one's community, kin group, or religion. Sometimes, as in Hasan's case, same-sex activity has taken place before thinking of oneself as gay or lesbi; in other instances such activity only begins after thinking of oneself as gay or lesbi.
Once gay men and lesbi women have come to gay or lesbi subjectivity and begin having homosexual relationships founded in that subjectivity, they usually begin to participate in what they call the "lesbi world" or "gay world" (dunia lesbi, dunia gay). These worlds are perceived to be nationwide, flourish primarily but not solely in urban areas, and are linked through travel, correspondence, and the informal publishing of small magazines. Later I describe some contours of these worlds, as well as the worlds of waria and "traditional" homosexualities and transgenderisms. For the purposes of this article, however, I focus on an early stage in the lesbi or gay life course, the process by which persons come to term themselves gay or lesbi in the first place.
This process appears, on first consideration, an ethnographic mystery. Most Indonesians, unless they are quite upper class or have traveled to the "West," are unaware of the terms lesbi and gay or think the terms (and homo) are English names for waria. Even gay men and lesbi women who went to elementary school in the late 1980s or early 1990s recall the use on the schoolyard of terms primarily for waria, such as banci, but rarely gay or lesbi. No local culture, ethnic tradition (adat), or religion sanctions gay or lesbi or even names them with any systematicity. How, then, do these subject positions take hold in the hearts of so many contemporary Indonesians?
A few Indonesians say that they first learned of the possibility of becoming gay or lesbi from friends (usually not gay or lesbi themselves). A few gay men say that they first knew that they could be gay after wandering into a public area frequented by gay men, and a few gay men and lesbi women say that they became aware of the subject positions after being seduced. It appears, however, that only a small fraction of Indonesians learn of the gay or lesbi subject positions through all of these routes to erotic knowledge combined.
Another possible avenue is through small magazines that gay men and lesbi women have been informally publishing since the early 1980s. These magazines might play a conduit role, importing and transmitting "Western" concepts of sexuality. No informants, however, have ever cited these magazines as the means by which they came to think of themselves as lesbi or gay. The primary reason for this is that Indonesians seem to access these magazines only after first occupying the lesbi or gay subject position (Boellstorff 2003). 4 It is also clear that gay and lesbi subject positions existed for several years prior to the appearance of the first gay publication in 1982. Despite impacting the subjectivities of those who read them, these magazines do not play a formative role. Although this may not remain the case in the future, particularly as greater press freedoms and increasing Internet access make the magazines more accessible, neither these magazines nor the other modes mentioned above explain how Indonesians have come to occupy the subject positions lesbi and gay to the present day.
For gay men and lesbi women, the element of Hasan's narrative with the greatest resonance is his description of a kind of "Aha!" moment when, during an encounter with mainstream print or electronic mass media, they come to think of themselves as lesbi or gay. Nearly 90 percent of my gay and lesbi informants cite mainstream mass media as the means by which they first knew they could understand themselves through the concepts "lesbi" or "gay." This is true whether the individuals in question are from lava, Bali, Sulawesi, or other islands; whether they are Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist; whether they are wealthy, middle class, or impoverished; whether they live in cities or rural areas; and whether they were born in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. Rarely is a cultural variable distributed so widely across such a diverse population. (In cases where peers tell lesbi or gay Indonesians of these terms, those peers apparently learn of the terms through mainstream mass media.) The critical role of mainstream mass media in the lives of lesbi and gay Indonesians is all the more notable when we compare the life narratives of lesbi women and gay men with those of waria. I have never heard waria cite mass media as the means by which they first saw themselves as waria; as I discuss later, they learn of the waria subject position from their social environs-schoolkids on the playground, a cousin, or neighbor-but not from mass media. Hasan's narrative rehearses a common story of discovery that most gay and lesbi Indonesians see as pivotal in their lives, a moment they recall without hesitation, as in the case of the following Javanese Christian man in Surabaya: In elementary school the only word was band I waria}. For instance, a boy who walked or acted like a girl would get teased with the word band. So I didn't know about the word gay until junior high. I heard it from books, magazines, television. And I wanted to know! I looked for information; if I saw that a magazine had an article about homos I'd be sure to read it. I knew then that a homo was a man who liked men. But I didn't know that homo meant gay at that time. So I tried to find out from books and things like that. I learned all of that stuff from the mass media.... So having someone come and tell me "It's like this," that never happened. 1 learned it all through magazines and newspapers.... And when I read those things, 1 knew that I was gay.
For this man "homo" is an impersonalized descriptive category, whereas "gay' is a framework for understanding the self s past motivations, immediate desires, and visions of an unfolding future. Abdul, a Muslim man who grew up in a small town in Sulawesi, tells his story in the following interview excerpt: TB: When you were in your teenage years, did you already know the term gay 7 .
Abdul: In my environment at that time, most people didn't yet know. But because I read a lot, read a lot of news, I already knew. I already knew that I was gay.
Through reading I knew about the gay world ...

TB: What kinds of magazines?
A: Gossip magazines, you know, they always talk about such-and-such a star and the rumors that the person is gay. So that broadened my concepts [wawasan], made me realize, "Oh, there are others like me." Because lesbi and gay representations mingle in these mass media, most lesbi women, like the following Balinese woman, also trace their subjectivities to encounters with mass media: "I didn't use the word lesbi because I didn't even know the term [when I was young]. I didn't hear about the word lesbi until about 1990, when I read it in a magazine. And right away, when I read about lesbi and what that meant, I thought to myself, That's me!' " Consider the following narrative from Susie, a Muslim who terms herself a masculine lesbi woman (hunter yang lesbi). Susie has been talking about sexual relations with other women in her early teenage years, and I ask her if she knew the terms hunter and lesbi at that point: Susie: I didn't know hunter yet, but I already knew lesbian, lesbi, I knew. I'd already-I'd already read it, don't you know? TB: Read it where? S: In magazines, through hanging out with friends who mentioned it, through means like that.
Susie then talked about short articles in newspapers that would occasionally mention how women could have sex with women, concluding, "Through that I could know that I was lesbi" (lewat itu saya bisa tahu bahwa saya itu lesbi). Indeed, the intertwining of lesbi and gay in mass media is so common that in at least one case a man who now calls himself gay termed himself lesbi for several years as a result of reading women's magazines, switching to gay only after reading a magazine "about historic English royalty... Richard someone." The role of mass media is striking because to this day there is little coverage of openly gay Indonesian men or lesbi Indonesian women: What Indonesians usually encounter through mass media is gossip about Indonesian celebrities, Dubbing culture -American Ethnologist but particularly gossip about "Western" celebrities and gay and lesbian "Westerners," real and portrayed. 5 And what they see is not a one-hour special on "Homosexuality in the West"; rarely is it even the kind of demonstration described by Hasan. Gay and lesbi Indonesians typically speak of brief, intermittent coverage: a single 15-second item on Rock Hudson's AIDS diagnosis one night in the 1980s, an editorial about Al Pacino's role in the movie Cruising, a gossip column about Elton John or Melissa Etheridge, or a short review of The Wedding Banquet or My Best Friend's Wedding (two films that had homosexual characters). 6 Although some lesbi women and gay men actually see such films, either because the films make it onto Indonesian screens or, increasingly, are available on video or DVD, these Indonesians also stress the role of print media, particularly newspapers and women's magazines like Kartini and Femina. References to Indonesians engaging in homosexual acts or terming themselves lesbi or gay in some fashion occasionally appear in these media, but in most cases the references to homosexuality are negative-psychologists presenting homosexuality as a pathology, or disapproving gossip columns. Sporadic coverage of same-sex scandals and arrests dates back to the early 20th century. The earliest extensive study of contemporary Indonesian homosexuality to my knowledge, sociologist Amen Budiman's 1979 book Lelaki Perindu Lelaki (Men Who Yearn for Men), notes that in this decade [the 1970s] homosexuality has increasingly become an interesting issue for many segments of Indonesian society. Newspapers, both those published in the capital and in other areas, often present articles and news about homosexuality. In fact, Berita Buana Minggu in Jakarta has a special column, "Consultation with a Psychiatrist," which often answers the complaints of those who are homosexual and want to change their sexual orientation. It's the same way with pop magazines, which with increasing diligence produce articles about homosexuality, sometimes even filled with personal stories from homosexual people, complete with their photographs. [1979:89-90] Budiman later adds, "It is very interesting to note that homosexuals who originate in the lower classes often try to change their behavior by seeking advice from psychiatric or health columnists in our newspapers and magazines" (1979:116). In the 1970s, however, and among my presentday informants (a few of whom became gay or lesbi in the 1970s or earlier), many lesbi and gay Indonesians are not changing behavior but coming to occupy what they see as legitimate and even healthy sexualities through these same mass media. From their beginnings to the present, these media have "exposed" not a fully articulated discourse of homosexuality, but a series of incomplete and contradictory references, in translation, sometimes openly denigrating and hostile. It is not a transmission of self-understanding so much as a fractured set of cultural logics reconfigured within Indonesia. Yet from "translations" of this intermit tent reportage come subjectivities by which myriad Indonesians live out their lives.
Gay and lesbi subject positions thus lead us to a specific sociological problem. Indonesians learn of the possibility of thinking of oneself as gay or lesbi through the intermittent reception of messages from mass media. These messages do not intend to convey the possibility of a kind of selfhood. They are often denigrating and dismissive, but above all they are fragmentary. In the 1980s an Indonesian might encounter such reportage a few times a year at most, if an avid reader; in the 1990s it became more frequent but still was quite minimal given the universe of topics appearing in the mass media. The question, then, is how modes of subjectivation become established when the social field in which they arise establishes them neither as discourses nor reverse discourses. Indonesian mass media certainly do not intend to set forth the possibility of gay and lesbi subject positions, nor do the imported programs they frequently rebroadcast; in fact, they rarely take a negative stance on gay and lesbi subject positions. Yet it is these mass media that, in a very real sense, make gay and lesbi subjectivities possible, just as the national imagined communities that are so socially efficacious worldwide could not have existed before Gutenberg struck type to page.

Subjectivities and subject positions
Readers may have noticed three somewhat atypical dimensions to my analysis thus far. First, the term identity has not appeared in this article, and I speak instead of subjectivities and subject positions. Second, I treat Indonesia as a single ethnographic unit rather than segregating data from Java, Sulawesi, Bali, and elsewhere. Third, I do not segregate data by gender but bring together gay men and lesbi women as well as transgendered subjectivities like waria/banci. All of these methodological and theoretical moves relate to the concept of "dubbing culture." Addressing each in turn will foreclose some possible misunderstandings of this analysis and provide an opportunity to situate the narratives of Hasan, Susie, and the other informants in a wider ethnographic context.
In this article 1 eschew the identity-behavior binarism in favor of a language of subject positions (extant social categories of selfhood) and subjectivities (the various senses of self-erotics, assumptions about one's life course, etc.that obtain when occupying a subject position, whether partially or completely, temporarily or permanently). As many scholars of sexuality have noted (e.g., I-lliston 1995), "identity" versus "behavior" is a false dichotomy: Identity is not only simply a cognitive map but also a set of embodied practices, and behavior is always culturally mediated through self-narrative. As a result, focusing on subject positions and subjectivities turns attention to the total social fact of gay and lesbi selfhood. This is a basically Foucauldian framework that draws from the epistemological break between volumes 1 and 2 of The History of Sexuality (1978Sexuality ( , 1985, wherein Foucault shifted from an emphasis on "the formation of sciences" of sexuality and the "systems of power" inciting sexuality to "the practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being" (1985:4-5). This approach is attuned to the role of discourse in making subject positions intelligible historical and cultural possibilities, "an analysis of the 'games of truth,' the games of truth and error through which being is historically constituted as experience" (Foucault 1985:6-7), a framework that situates agency in specific discursive contexts.
I think of "subject position" as a rough translation of jiwa, which means "soul" in Indonesian but often has a collective meaning; lesbi women will sometimes say "lesbi have the same jiwa;" waria will say they "have the same jiwa"; or lesbi women and gay men will sometimes say they share a jiwa. I think of "subjectivity" as a rough translation of pribadi or jatidiri, both of which mean approximately "selfconception"; a gay man once distinguished pribadi from jiwa by saying that "every person possesses their own pribadi." Identitas has a much more experience-distant, bureaucratic ring for most Indonesians: One gay man defined identitas as "biodata: name, address, and so on" (biodata: nama, alamat, dan sebagainya)?

The Indonesian subject
This framework provides a useful place from which to consider the implications of treating Indonesia as an ethnographic unit for the case of the lesbi and gay subject positions. Subject positions are not always lexicalized, but like any aspect of culture they always have a history. They come into being at a certain period of time, which shapes them, and they also change through time as long as they persist. Subject positions also always contain within them "spatial scales" (or "spatial fixes"; see Brenner 1998;Harvey 2000). To be a "Yale student" has a different cultural logic of scale than to be a "New Yorker" or "Japanese." Additionally, the various subject positions through which we live at any point in time may not have isomorphic spatial scales: For instance, one's sense of self as a youth could be global, as a man local, and as a laborer national, all at the same time. Or, to be a youth could be both local and global at the same time, intersecting. As a result, three crucial issues in the ethnographic investigation of subject positions are (1) their historicity (that is, the way they are shaped by their embedded notions of their own history and what counts as history); (2) their spatial scales; and (3) how they intersect with other subject positions and the histories and spatiaJ scales of those other subject positions.
In this regard, it may surprise readers unfamiliar with Indonesianist anthropology that the national imagined community has rarely represented a subject for ethnographic inquiry. Instead, anthropological research in the archipelago has been guided by what I term "ethnolocality" (see Boellstorff 2002). This mode of representation originated in the colonial encounter as a means of impeding the possibility of translocal spatial scales other than colonialism (in particular, nationalism and Islamic movements). As reified in the work of the Leiden school, "custom" (adat) was understood to belong not to the Indies as a whole but to groups framed in terms of the equation of ethnonym with toponym, an equation whose persistence has been noted by many scholars (e.g., Keane 1999:180). In this understanding (which can be emic as well as etic), culture is assumed to be the property of "the Balinese," "theMakassarese," "the Javanese," and so on. Under this formulation Indonesia is a field of anthropological study, but not the "field" in which one does "fieldwork" (Josselin de Jong 1977). Although a large body of anthropological scholarship has productively denaturalized ethnolocality, at the level of epistemology it remains influential. Indonesianist scholarship now typically acknowledges that in the decades since Indonesian independence a national culture has taken root-aided by the state-supported spread of the Indonesian language and commodity capitalism-but that national culture is often treated as a force impacting local culture rather than the possible location of a subject position in its own right. This issue is of particular importance in the post-Soeharto era, when movements for regional autonomy and adat "revitalization" threaten to renaturalize ethnolocalized conceptions of self and society.
But if ethnolocality can be problematized, if a subject of Java can be regarded as a subject of "Java" (Pemberton 1994), then can we dissolve the implicit scare quotes that prevent us treating a subject of "Indonesia" as a subject of Indonesia? Can there be such as thing as Indonesian adat? Can there be an ethnography of Indonesians? Are "the village" (Breman 1982), ethnolocality, and world religions like Islam and Christianity the only spatial scales shaping subject positions in contemporary Indonesia? Or could there be subject positions with spatial scales that are foundationally national, even if persons inhabiting such subject positions might consider themselves in terms of ethnolocality with respect to other aspects of their lives? Could one think of oneself, for instance, as "Madurese" with relation to conceptions of exchange, but "Indonesian" with relation to sexuality?
This ethnographic emphasis on locality is shaped by anthropology's emphasis on difference. In this tradition, difference is expected: unproblematic, obvious, and authentic It asks nothing more than to be recorded, typologized, interpreted, and rhetorically deployed. Sameness, however, awakens disturbing contradictions. On the one hand, sameness is uninteresting: If you study the Other and they are the same, what is there to say? Are they a proper Other at all? At the same time, there is discomfort: Sameness cries out for explanation and modeling. It must have a reason: Is it diffusion or convergent evolution? There is a sense that contamination has occurred and authenticity has been compromised. In an already globalized world, however, anthropologies of similitude and translocality can illuminate new transformations of ostensibly "Western" discourses.
It goes without saying that there will be differences between different islands and ethnic groups, just as there is always difference between households or neighborhoods. At issue is the critical analytical moment when the ethnographer determines the boundaries of "the field" (Gupta and Ferguson 1997), deciding at what point the threshold from similitude to difference has been crossed. This is a culturally located act, and in the context of this act, this heuristic compromise, it seems methodologically sound to take into account our informants' senses of inhabiting subject positions with translocal spatial scales. James Siegel, in his classic Solo in the New Order, names this compromise when he says, "I want to stress how various Java is. Whatever claims I make about it should be understood to refer to [the city of] Solo alone, relieving me of the tiresome duty to qualify my statements in every instance" (1986:11). Although Siegel is certainly correct in pointing out the diversity of Java, the problem of spatial scale is not only one of overreaching but also of underreaching. It appears unlikely that Indonesians in Solo, even if ethnically Javanese-living in a city where one main cruising area for gay men is known as "Manhattan"-"refer to Solo alone" in their own cultural worlds. What Siegel points out here is the ethnographer's tiresome duty of looking not only for solid data but also for a methodological and theoretical construction of the field site pitched as closely as possible to the cultural geographies of those whose lives the ethnographer seeks to interpret. Questions of the ethnography of translocality link to gay and lesbi subject positions on an epistemological level: In both cases a crucial element of the research is theorizing the threshold between similarity and difference. This will prove to be the central problematic of "dubbing culture." To date, most studies that consider the possibility of national subject positions in Indonesia focus on mass media or literature (e.g., Heider 1991). Although I foreground mass media in this article as well, mass media may simply represent the visible leading edge of a "superculture" that, as Hildred Geertz (1963:35) noted some time ago, includes the impoverished as well as the middle class and extends beyond urban centers in many cases. Sexuality and gender have been central elements of this national culture since its inception, and much contemporary work on women in Indonesia examines the influence of the nation-state and, thus, at gendered subjectivities with a national spatial scale." Looking at nonnormative genders and sexualities can contribute to this body of work and will provide important clues to the operations of "dubbi ng culture."

National transvestites
The most enduring "Western" stereotype regarding homosexuality and transgenderism in Indonesia (and Southeast Asia more generally) is that these regions are "tolerant." Although it is true that there have been-and in some cases, still are-socially recognized roles for male-to-female transgenders as well as widespread acceptance of secretive homosexual behavior, transgenderism and homosexuality are hardly valorized in contemporary Indonesian society. Although homosexuality and transgenderism usually escape official comment, if directly asked, most religious and state authorities swiftly condemn transgenderism and homosexuality as sinful and incompatible with "Indonesian tradition." Considerations of nonnormative sexuality and gender in Indonesia sometimes focus on what I term "ethnolocalized homosexual or transvestite professional" (ETP) subject positions, such as bissu transvestite priests in South Sulawesi or the homosexual relationships between male actors and their male understudies in East Java known as warokgemblak (Andaya 2000;M. Kennedy 1993;Wilson 1999). Although ETPs persist in some parts of contemporary Indonesia, I know of no cases where gay men and lesbi women see their subjectivities as an outgrowth of them (most appear to be unaware of their existence). This is not surprising, since ETPs are found only among some ethnic groups in Indonesia, are in most cases only for men and for only part of the life span, and are linked to adat ritual or performance. In fact, it is a misnomer to speak of ETPs as sexualities, as that term is understood in the "West," since they are above all professions, not categories of selfhood organized around sexual desire. 9 Waria are far more familiar to Indonesians-lesbi, gay, or otherwise. Waria are better known to the Indonesian public by the rather derogatory terms band or bencong, but themselves tend to prefer waria, an amalgam of wanita (female) and pria (male) coined in 1978. A succinct but inevitably incomplete definition of waria is "male transvestites." I use transvestite rather than transgender bet ause most waria see themselves not as becoming female, but as men who (1) have the souls of women from birth, (2) dress as women much of the time, and (3) have sex with "normal" (normal) men. In contemporary Indonesia waria are truly "national": Waria can be from any ethnicity, religion, or part ol the archipelago, including Papua and Aceh. Unlike the gay and lesbi subject positions, the national distribution ot the waria subject position is really a colonial distribution; the subject position has significantly greater time depth than the lesbi and gay subject positions, dating to at least the mid-19th century and possibly earlier. Waria are much more visible than gay or lesbi Indonesians: Many dress as women 24 hours a day, but even those who do not are readily identifiable because of their feminine appearance (coded through tweezed eyebrows, long hair, and movements and speech deemed effeminate). In any Indonesian city and even in rural areas, you can encounter poorer waria on the street or in a park looking for sex work clients. Above all, you will find waria working at salons, and you would certainly hope to have a waria do the makeup and hairstyling for your daughter on her wedding day. It is this transformative power of waria to change the public appearances of others (in line with their ability to change their own public appearance) that is their ilmu, their great skill, in Indonesian society, and waria cite this as the reason they should be valued. Waria are part of the recognized social mosaic.
One consequence of this recognition is that, as noted earlier, waria do not come to that particular subjectivity through mass media as lesbi women and gay men typically do. This does not mean, however, that waria are absent from mass media and other public fora. You can see them in television comedy shows and Bayer Aspirin commercials or performing at amusement parks and Independence Day celebrations. In all of these contexts, waria are construed as artful, skilled in beauty, and as silly, worthy targets of disdain. In other words, although waria are acknowledged elements of contemporary Indonesian society, it would be a mistake to take seriously the orientalist claim that there is tolerance in anything but the barest sense of the term. The "Western" liberal assumption that to be public and visible implies acceptance (a notion that the concept of "coming out" reapplies to sexual subjectivity) does not hold here. Although the parents of waria usually release such children from the imperative to marry (particularly if the waria works in a salon and contributes economically to the household), some are thrown out of the family. Waria have been held underwater by angry fathers until they have almost drowned, have been tormented, stabbed, and killed by street youths, and have died of AIDS on an island far from home, rejected by their own families. At the same time, many waria enjoy steady incomes and relative social acceptance, and in some respects their condition is better than that of transgenders, lesbians, or gay men in much of the "West." All in all, then, it seems difficult to hold up Indonesia as a transgendered nirvana. Nonetheless, waria see themselves as a significant element of Indonesian national culture. Like lesbi women and gay men, they typically assume that others sharing their subject position can be found across Indonesia, but an important difference is that they have only a weak sense that people like them exist in other parts of the world. Indeed, they often ask me, "Are there waria in America?"

Gay and lesbi Indonesians
I have never been asked such a question by a lesbi or gay Indonesian; just as the modern Indonesian nation-state is assumed to be one unique element in a global network of nation-states, so there is a strong sense that the gay and lesbi subject positions are Indonesian phenomena linked to the global existence of persons with homosexual subjectivities (even if this is, in my experience, rarely phrased in terms of a movement). For these Indonesians, the prerevelatory period of sexual subjectivity is usually experienced locally; the local is the social space of the not-yet (belum)lesbi or not-yet gay. What they describe when they encounter the concepts lesbi or gay through mass media is a moment of recognition, a moment that involves a shift in sexualized spatial scale; it is not only that same-sex desire can be constituted as a subjectivity, but also that its spatial scale is translocal. The deictic "That's me!" places the self in a dialogic relationship with a distant but familiar other.
On one level this spatial scale is national. One reason for this is that the mass media through which Indonesians come to gay or lesbi subjectivity employ the national language, Indonesian (not ethnolocalized languages like Javanese or Buginese) and emphasize themes of national unity and patriotism. A second reason is that, unlike ETPs, the concepts lesbi and gay are seen as self-evidently incompatible with ethnolocality: No one learns what lesbi or gay means through "Makassarese culture" or "Javanese culture." Gay and lesbi persons thereby think of themselves as Indonesians with regard to their sexualities-to the point that they sometimes use nationalist metaphors of the archipelago concept (wawasan nusantara) to conceptualize their community (Boellstorff 1999). On a second level (unlike waria) lesbi and gay Indonesians see their subjectivities as linked to a transnational imagined community: They regard themselves as one "island" in a global archipelago of gay and lesbian persons, a constellation including places like Australia and Europe as well as Malaysia and Thailand. They do not regard themselves as a "rerun" of the "West"; they view themselves as different, but this difference is not seen to create a chasm of incommensurability.
Based on my own fieldwork and that of other scholars, as well as the networks built by lesbi women and gay men, it seems clear that gay men and lesbi women can be found throughout Indonesia. Of course, this does not mean that they are found everywhere in Indonesia, but that they can be found both in major cities and in smaller towns and rural areas. Although some lesbi and gay Indonesians are wealthy and well educated, most are not, giving lie to the stereotype that gay men and lesbians outside the "West" are the product of wealth, decadence, or estrangement from tradition. 10 Indeed, if one common "Western" misconception about Indonesia (and Southeast Asia more generally) is that transgenders are always valued members of society, another misconception is that gay men and lesbian women are products of the executive, jet-setting classes. Here the cultural effects of globalization are thought to correlate with class in a linear fashion: The richer you are, the more you are affected by globalization, and thus the less authentic you are. The proletarian becomes the new indigene. As any Nike factory worker in Indonesia could tell you, however, class is poorly correlated with the degree to which someone is impacted by globalizing forces. And, indeed, most gay men and lesbi women in Indonesia are primarily lower class (90 percent of my gay informants make less than $60 a month), do not speak English, and have never traveled outside Indonesia. From the testimony of my informants, it appears that most have never met a "Westerner" before myself-gay, lesbian, or otherwise-particularly if they have never spent time in Bali or Jakarta. Like waria, many gay men work in salons, but because they are poorly visible to Indonesian society, they can also be found in other professions, from the highest levels of government to street sweepers. Lesbi women can also be found in a wide range of professions, but many are quite poor, particularly if they have a masculine appearance that renders them unfit for careers deemed women's work.
As noted earlier, most Indonesians still confuse the terms gay and waria, supposing that the former is an English rendition of the latter. Gay men and waria do not share this confusion, but they do see each other as sharing something: an attraction to men. Few gay men, however, speak of themselves as having a woman's soul. Not all are effeminate; though many gay men dendong, or "do drag" for entertainment purposes, in the rare cases where gay men begin to dress like women all of the time, they consider themselves to have become waria (and are so regarded by other gay men). 11 Like gay men, lesbi women can be found throughout Indonesia. In fact, there appears to have been greater massmedia coverage of lesbi women than gay men when these subject positions first entered public awareness in the early 1980s, but this is probably an artifact of the greater scrutiny placed on women's sexuality in Indonesia more generally. As in the case of gay men, lesbi women can come from any class position-since they usually come to lesbi subjectivity through mainstream mass media, as gay men do, it is not necessary that they be members of feminist organizations, have a high level of education, or live in the capital of Jakarta.
There are many other similarities between lesbi women and gay men. Both usually describe their desires in terms of a "desire for the same" (suka sama suka). Another important similarity is that the lesbi and gay subject positions both have a national spatial scale. To this day gay slang (spoken by some lesbi women as well) is based only on Indonesian, the national language, not an ethnic language like Javanese or Balinese. I have never been able to discover consistent geographical variation for lesbi or gay subjectivities: no place where there exists an ethnic or island-specific network (though there is a national network), no place where expectations about heterosexual marriage differ from other parts of the country, no place where coming to lesbi or gay subjectivity takes place primarily through kinship networks, international tourism (even in Bali), or some modality other than mainstream mass media. Note that this is not a proscriptive argument. There is no reason that an ethnic-specific lesbi or gay subject position ("Sudanese lesbi" or "Batakgay," for instance) might not emerge in the future: The point is that from the 1980s until the present this has not been the case, nor have lesbi and gay Indonesians perceived this as a problem. 12 That the lesbi and gay subject positions have this national spatial scale (and are shaped by state discourse) does not mean these Indonesians have a greater investment in the nation-state than other Indonesians; it does not imply patriotism any more than the shaping of "Western" homosexual subject positions by sexological and psychoanalytic discourse (Foucault 1978) means that these "Westerners" are enthusiasts of psychoanalysis. Similarities between lesbi and gay Indonesians can be understood not only because of widely distributed conceptions of gender complementarity that de-emphasize gendered difference (Errington 1990], but also because lesbi and gay appear to have taken form in Indonesia more or less together, as gendered analogues, each implying the other and suggesting the (sometimes fulfilled) possibility of socializing between lesbi women and gay men.
A relational analysis, however, reveals differences between the lesbi and gay subject positions. Perhaps the most consequential of these is the relationship between what we could call masculine and feminine lesbi women. As noted above, gay men sometimes act in an effeminate manner. The distinction between masculine and effeminate gay men, however, is not an organizing sexual principle; some gay men will say they prefer "manly" men (laki-lakiyangkebapakan), which can mean non-gay men, but this is seen to be a matter of personal taste and does not denote a category of person. In contrast, a distinction between masculine and feminine lesbi women is ubiquitous in Indonesia, and it is typically assumed that sexual relationships will be between masculine and feminine lesbi, not between two masculine or two feminine lesbi.
This state of affairs might seem to be an import from the "West," where a long tradition of butch-femme distinctions often plays an important role in lesbian communities (Halberstam 1998;Kennedy and Davis 1993), without a clear parallel in gay sexual norms. Indeed, some observers oUesbi Indonesians have characterized masculine and feminine lesbi women in terms of butch and femme (Wieringa 1999).
Although not an intended interpretation, this could be seen to imply that the lesbi subject position, complete with an internal butch-femme distinction, is globalizing from the "West" except insofar as individual lesbi women "resist."" The key point, however, is that when gay took form in (not "globalized to") Indonesia, it did so in the context of the well-known waria subject position. The gay subject position thus came to structure "desire for the same" within the category of masculinity. Although gay men and waria are often friends, it is considered highly abnormal for them to have sex with each other, since gay men are understood to desire "the same" (i.e., other gay or normal men) and waria "real men" (laki-laki normalltulenlasli).
Crucially, however, no female analogue to waria existed at the time that lesbi took shape in Indonesia: Masculine women and female-to-male transgenders certainly existed, but they were not publicly known as a category of person, as waria were. As a result, the subject position lesbi includes not only women attracted to women (of masculine or feminine gendering) but also persons born with women's bodies who feel themselves to have the soul of a man and strive to be considered social men. These persons, who usually call themselves "tomboi" (also hunter in Sulawesi and parts of Java, cowok [male] in parts of Sumatra, or sentul in parts of Java), tend to dress as men 24 hours a day and engage in stereotypically male activities (Blackwood 1998). Indeed, unless they speak, some are often mistaken for men on the street.
The consequences of this are manifold. First, like lesbi and gay (but unlike waria/banci), tomboi is understand to be a "foreign" concept that has been Indonesianized. Tomboi does not appear in a 1976 Indonesian dictionary {lesbian does, but gay is absent [Poerwadarminta 1976:592]); by 1991, however, it appears with the definition "an active girl, full of adventuring like a boy." That tomboi was Indonesianized by this point is indicated by the fact that the term could already occur with the circumflex ke-an to form the abstract noun ketomboian, "tomboi matters" (Salim andSalim 1991:1630). These common Indonesian uses of tomboi, however, do not mark a minoritized sexual subject position but indicate what is understood to be a temporary and benign characteristic of young girls. 14 The use of the term tomboi to label an adult sexual subject position builds from this understanding in a manner that has no parallel for the terms waria, gay, or lesbi. An important topic for future research will be to investigate how the tomboi subject position is "dubbed," both with relation to the "West" and to Indonesian popular culture, in a way that the lesbi, gay, and waria subject positions are not.
The most important consequence of this dual "dubbing" is that there is active debate among tomboi as to whether they are a subcategory of lesbi-masculine lesbi (as Susie put it, a "hunter who is a lesbi" [hunteryanglesbij)-or a separate transgendered subject position analogous to waria. For instance, the tomboi protagonist in the novel Menguak Duniaku, in the first of a series of pivotal encounters with mass media, reads about the first waria sex change operation (on Vivian Iskandar in 1973) and thinks to herself: "I wanted to tell my mother, my father, that I was the same as Vivian" (Prawirakusumah and Ramadhan 1988:51). 15 This ambivalence regarding the lesbi-tomboi boundary does not appear to be localized to any one ethnic group or island: For instance, I have heard tomboi and lesbi women in both Bali and Sulawesi state, "Not all tomboi are lesbi, and not all lesbi are tomboi." The sense that tomboi and lesbi might be separate subject positions is complicated by the fact that, whereas gay men and waria rarely have sexual relationships, tomboi and lesbi are ideal sexual partners (although some tomboi also have relationships with "real women" who, they often assume, will eventually leave them for men). The "desire for the same" that characterizes gay subjectivity is thus more fractured for lesbi women. This analysis shows how considering tomboi in relation to waria, lesbi, and gay provides a better understanding of the gendering of the tomboi subject position and its spatial scale than could be reached otherwise. 16 The "problem" of dubbing Eros and language mesh at every point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, are subclasses of the dominant fact of communication.... Sex is a profoundly semantic act ... human sexuality and speech [together] generate ... the process ... whereby we have hammered out the notion of self and otherness.

-George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
With this broader discussion of lesbi and gay life in mind, let us now return to the crucial role of mass media in Indonesians' coming to lesbi and gay subjectivity. The relationship between mass media and being Indonesian has a long history in the archipelago. From the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, print media played a central role in the formation of nationalism among the diverse and far-flung peoples of the Netherlands East Indies. Print media were also important in the establishment of Indonesian (a dialect of Malay formerly used as a lingua franca of trade) as the language of this new imagined community, a language that could permit communication among a populace speaking over 600 languages. 17 In contrast to some other postcolonial states like India, imports now represent a substantial amount of cinematic and televised fare in Indonesia. 18 Although there is a long tradition of filmmaking in Indonesia dating back to the early 20th century and at some points garnering nationwide audiences, in the late 1990s the Indonesian film industry generally produced only 15-20 films per year, mostly low-budget erotic films that went directly to second-or third-run theaters (Ryanto 1998:42). 19 By the late 1990s, each of Indonesia's five private television stations was importing approximately seven thousand shows per year, many which originated in the United States ( Republika 1996), and beginning in the 1990s dubbing became an increasingly popular way of presenting these broadcasts to Indonesian audiences (Lindsay 2003). 20 It was in the context of this rise in imported television that, in a joint news conference on April 4,1996, one year after one of Indonesia's private television stations went national for the first time, Minister of Information Harmoko and Minister of Education and Culture Wardiman Djojonegoro announced that "foreign films on television should no longer be broadcast in their original language version with Indonesian summaries or subtitles but were to be dubbed into Indonesian" (Lindsay in press). This regulation on dubbing {dubbing, sulih suara [to substitute sound]) was to take effect by August 16, in accordance with a soon-to-be-passed broadcasting law, which included the first set of broadcasting regulations to be issued in 18 years. This bill, which had been debated in parliament for several months at that point, was to become one of the most contentious legal documents of the New Order's twilight years (the "New Order" refers to the 30-year rule of Soeharto, Indonesia's second president, which ended in 1998). The requirement that all programs be dubbed into Indonesian was greeted with little fanfare: As the public relations manager of station TPI noted, many of the programs imported each year by private television stations were already dubbed in response to viewer demand. Acquiescing to the state's long-standing goal of building nationalism through language planning, the public relations manager of station RCTI added that the requirement was "a good policy that will help build Indonesian skills in society" (Republika 1996).
Within a month of the announcement, however, Aisyah Aminy, a spokesperson from the House of Representatives, suggested "this problem of dubbing is going to be discussed in more depth" {Suara Pembuaran Daily 1996). Revealing dissent within the state apparatus, Aminy expressed concern that "at present, foreign films on television are not dubbed selectively and show many things that do not fit well with the culture of our people" {Suara Pembuaran Daily 1996). The influential armed forces faction also weighed in against the measure, but the House forged ahead, incorporating the dubbing requirement in its draft broadcast law of December 6,1996.
What made the broadcasting bill such a topic of discussion was the way in which it was debated and revised, extraordinary even for the typically arcane machinations of the New Order bureaucracy. A first draft of the bill was completed by a legislative committee early in 1996 and sent to parliament for approval. As usual in the New Order, the bill had been essentially crafted by the president and even bore his initials (McBeth 1997:24). In December 1996, the parliament duly rubber-stamped the bill, returning it to Soeharto for his signature. After seven months, however, on July 11, 1997, Soeharto dropped a bombshell: In an official letter he refused to sign the draft broadcast law and returned it to parliament for revision, claiming that "several articles will be too difficult to implement from a technical standpoint" (Kompas 1997;Soeharto 1997). This unconstitutional act was the first time in national history a president refused to sign a draft law already passed by the House, a refusal made all the more perplexing by his approval of the original bill (Kompas 1997). House debate on the president's proposed revisions began on September 18, 1997, and was marked by unusual (for the Soeharto era) interruptions from parliament members and heated argument over executive-legislative relations.
In the wake of the president's refusal, government sources gave conflicting accounts of the issues at stake. One issue, however, stood out above the others for its cultural, rather than directly economic, emphasis: the edict on dubbing. What was notable was the total reversal that occurred during parliamentary revisions: When the dust cleared in December 1997, Article 25 of the draft law, concerning dubbing, "had been completely reversed. All non-F.nglish language foreign films henceforth had to be dubbed into English, and all foreign films shown with Indonesian subtitles' (Lindsay in press). Why this sea change? As one apologist later explained: Dubbing can create gaps in family communication. It can ruin the self-image of family members as a result of adopting foreign values that are "Indonesianized" \diindonesiakan] ... This can cause feelings of becoming "another person" to arise in family members, who are in actuality not foreigners ... whenever Indonesians view television, films, or other broadcasts where the original language has been changed into our national language, those Indonesians will think that the performances in those media constitute a part of themselves. As if the culture behind those performances is also the culture of our people. [Ali 1997:341-342, my translation, emphasis added] In the end, the final version of the bill indeed forbids dubbing most foreign programs into the Indonesian language. What is of interest for our purposes here, however, is the debate itself. Why, at this prescient moment in 1997-as if foreshadowing the collapse of the New Order regime the following year-did translation become a focal point of political and cultural anxiety? What made the ability of Sharon Stone or Tom Cruise to "speak Indonesian" no longer a welcome opportunity to foster linguistic competency but, rather, a sinister force threatening the good citizen's ability to differentiate self from Other? Why, even with widespread discontent in many parts of the archipelago, was the state's fear suddenly recentered, not on religious, regional, or ethnic affiliation overwhelming national loyalty but on transnational affiliation superseding nationalism and rendering it secondary-1 And what might be the hidden linkages between this dubbing controversy and the crucial role mass media play in gay and lesbi subjectivities?

Dubbing culture
An error, a misreading initiates the modern history of our subject. Romance languages derive their terms for "translation" from traducere because Leonardo Bruni misinterpreted a sentence in the Nodes of Aulus Gellius in which the Latin actually signifies "to introduce, to lead into." The point is trivial but symbolic. Often, in the records of translation, a fortunate misreading is the source of new life.

-George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language in Translation
We now have two problems centering on mass media. First problem: How do Indonesians come to see themselves as gay or lesbi through the fragmentary reception of massmediated messages? Second problem: Why would the question of dubbing foreign television shows into the Indonesian language provoke one of the greatest constitutional crises in Indonesia's history? Both of these problems raise issues of translation and authenticity in an already globalized world. I suggest that we might address the first problem through the second. In effect, we can "dub" these two sets of social facts together and in doing so discover striking convergences and unexpected resonances. 21 It was long after becoming aware of the link between mass media and gay and lesbi subjectivities that I learned of the dubbing controversy. I had been struggling with the question of lesbi and gay subjectivities for some time without a clear conclusion, particularly concerning questions of agency. Were gay and lesbi Indonesians simply mimicking the "West"; were they severed from their traditions once they occupied the subject positions lesbi or gay? After all, as I discuss elsewhere (Boellstorff 1999), gay and lesbi Indonesians tend to view themselves in terms of a consumerist life narrative where selfhood is an ongoing project developed through treating one's life as a kind of career. Alternatively, were these Indonesians queering global capitalism, subverting its heteronormativity and building a movement dedicated to human rights? Were they deploying the terms lesbi and gay tactically, as a veneer over a deeper indigenousness?
A notion of "dubbing culture" allowed me to move beyond this impasse of "puppets of globalization" versus "veneer over tradition." Through individual encounters with mass media-like reading one's mother's magazines or an advice column in the local newspaper, or viewing television coverage of a gay pride march in Australia-Indonesians construct subjectivities and communities. Construct is the wrong word; it connotes a self who plans and consciously shapes something. 22 Better to say that these Indonesians "come to" lesbi and gay subjectivity through these entanglements with mass media; their constructive agency, and the lesbi and gay subject positions themselves, are constructed through the encounter. This is not a solely individual process; although the originary encounters with magazines or newspapers are typically solitary, as soon as the person begins to interact with other lesbi-or gay-identified Indonesians, he or she reworks these mass-mediated understandings of sexuality. Romance, for instance, is a crucial element of lesbi and gay subjectivities but rarely appears in media treatments of homosexuality.
A set of fragmented cultural elements from mass media are transformed in unexpected ways in the Indonesian context, transforming that context itself in the process. In other words, lesbi and gay Indonesians "dub" ostensibly "Western" sexual subjectivities. Like a dub, the fusion remains a juxtaposition; the seams show. "Speech" and "gesture" never perfectly match; being lesbi or gay and being Indonesian never perfectly match. For lesbi and gay Indonesians, as in "dubbing culture" more generally, this tension is irresolvable; there is no "real" version underneath, where everything fits. You can close your eyes and hear perfect speech or mute the sound and see perfect gesture, but no original unites the two in the dubbed production. This may not present the self with an unlivable contradiction, however, since in dubbing one is not invested in the originary but, rather, the awkward fusion. Disjuncture is at the heart of the dub; there is no prior state of pure synchrony and no simple conversion to another way of being. Where translation is haunted by its inevitable failure, dubbing rejoices in the good-enough and the forever incomplete. Dubbing is not definitive but heuristic, interpretative-like many understandings of the ethnographic project.
It is this dimension of dubbing that transcends the apparent dilemma of "puppets of globalization" versus "veneer over tradition." The idea of "dubbing culture" indicates that the root of the problem is the notion of authenticity itself, the colonialist paradigm that valorizes the "civilized" colonizer over the "traditional" colonized. In line with the observation that postcolonial nationalisms usually invert, rather than disavow, colonial categories of thought (inter alia, Gupta 1998:169), the Indonesian state simply flips the colonial binary, placing tradition over modernity as the ultimate justification for the nation. To the obvious problem of justifying a recently formed nation in terms of tradition, the Indonesian state (like all national states) has worked ever since to inculcate a sense of national culture (kebudayaan nasional). This is built on the pillar of the Indonesian language and propagated via mass media. Through mass media, citizens are to come to recognize themselves as authentic Indonesians, carriers of an oxymoronic "national tradition" that will guide the body politic through the travails of modernity. By speaking in one voice-in Indonesian-a hierarchy of tradition over modernity can be sustained and reconciled with statehood.
"Dubbing" threatens this hierarchy: It is lateral, rhizomatic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), "a multiplicity that cannot be understood in terms of the traditional problems... of origins and genesis, or of deep structures" (Bogue 1989: 125). The authoritative voice is at odds with the visual presentation. "Dubbing culture" sets two elements side by side, blurred yet distinct. It is a performative act that, in linking persons to subject positions, creates subjectivities (Butler 1990); but this "dubbing" link is profoundly not one of suture, a term originating in film studies regarding "the procedures by means of which cinematic texts confer subjectivity upon their viewers" (Silverman 1983:195). In "dubbing culture," subjectivity is constituted not through suture but collage. Yet this productively partial incorporation of the self into discourse is not a failed performance: In its iteration, its holding together of two ostensibly incompatible cultural logics without conflating them, a space for subjectivity appears.
The original television show or movie may preexist its Indonesian dub temporally, but to the interpreting audience neither voice nor image is prior. They happen together; neither dominates. Agamben, citing Benjamin's concern with the relationship between quotation and the new "transmissibility of culture" made possible by mass media, notes that quotation "alienat[es] by force a fragment of the past... mak[ing] it lose its authentic power" (1999:104). But "dubbing culture" (in a literal sense as well as the metaphorical sense I develop here) is more than just quotation; it adds a step, first alienating something but then reworking it in a new context. The power of the "dub" comes not by erasing authenticity but by inaugurating new authenticities not dependent on tradition or translation. It disrupts the apparent seamJessness of the predubbed "original," showing that it too is a dub, that its "traditions" are the product of social contexts with their own assumptions and inequalities.
The Indonesian authorities were keenly aware of these disruptive implications during the dubbing controversy. For decades, Indonesian had been the vehicle allowing Indonesians to speak with one voice. But now the possibility that Sharon Stone could "speak Indonesian" meant that this vehicle was spinning beyond state control-into the control of globalizing forces but also into an interzone between languages and cultures, a zone with no controlling authority: "The Indonesian dubbing was so successful in making the language familiar that viewers lost any idea that it was strange for foreigners to speak Indonesian.... The language was too familiar, too much like real speech, too colloquial, and therefore the speech was too dangerous" (Lindsay in press).
The sudden shift during the dubbing controversyfrom an insistence that all foreign television programs be dubbed into the Indonesian language to an insistence that none of them could be so dubbed-reveals a tectonic shift in the position of mass media in Indonesian society. For the first time, fear of this juxtaposition, of "Westerners" "speaking" the national tongue, tipped the scales against a historically privileged concern with propagating Indonesian as national unifier. Now the ability of dubbing (and the Indonesian language itself) to explode the national imagined community-to show that one can be Indonesian and translate ideas from outside-presented a danger greater than the potential benefit of drawing more sharply the nation's archipelagic edges.
"Dubbing culture," then, is about a new kind of cultural formation in an already globalized world, one for which the idiom of translation is no longer sufficient. It questions the relationship between translation and belonging, asserting that the binarisms of import-export and authentic-inauthentic are insufficient to explain how globalizing mass media play a role in lesbi and gay subject positions but do not determine them outright. For queer studies, the lesson here relates to understandings of lesbian or gay non-"Westerners" in terms of "rupture or continuity" (Altman 2001) or "indigenous or Western import" (Jackson 1997:186). Although tactically useful, such binarisms do not capture the possibility of subject positions with more nuanced and conjunctural relationships to the "West," ones that may stand outside usual definitions of identity politics.
In a metaphorical sense we might say that lesbi and gay Indonesians dub "Western" sexual subject positions: They overwrite the deterministic "voice of the West," yet they cannot compose any script they please; their bricolage remains shaped by a discourse originating in the "West" and filtered through a nationalistic lens. This process of dubbing allows lesbi and gay individuals to see themselves as part of a global community but also as authentically Indonesian. Unlike waria, they never ask, "Are there people like me outside Indonesia?" because it is already obvious-"built into" the dubbed subjectivities-that there are such people. These Indonesians imagine themselves as one national element in a global patchwork of lesbian and gay national subjectivities, not through tradition, because lesbi and gay have a national spatial scale.
More broadly, "dubbing culture" as a metaphor speaks to the nonteleological, transformative dimensions of globalizing processes. It is useful for questioning the ability' of globalizing mass media to project uniform ideologies. Although it is true that contemporary mass media have enormous power, it is crucial to emphasize that this power is not absolute; it can lead to unexpected results-like lesbi and gay subject positions themselves. The metaphorical use of "dubbing culture" provides a useful fleshing-out of theories linking ideological apparatuses with Althusser's thesis that "ideology interpellates individuals as subjects" (1971: 160-162). By this, Althusser meant that ideology forms the subject positions by which individuals come to represent their conditions of existence to themselves and to others. Althusser terms this function of ideology interpellation or hailing and illustrates it in terms of a person on the street responding to the hail "Hey, you there!" When the person turns around to respond to the hail, "he becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was 'really' addressed to him" (Althusser 1971:163). Many social theorists, particularly those interested in mass media, have found this a useful analytical starting point. The question most commonly posed to this framework by these theorists concerns the issue of structure versus agency: Although there would be no turning around without first having been hailed, neither would there be a turning around without some readiness to turn. But... how and why does the subject turn, anticipating the conferral of identity through the self-ascription of guilt? What kind of relation already binds these two such that the subject knows to turn, knows that something is to be gained from such a turn? [Butler 1997:107] Part and parcel of this dilemma of agency is the question: How are we to explain the circumstance when people "recognize" something the ideology does not intend? Indonesian mass media never meant to create the conditions of possibility for national gay and lesbi subject positions. One way to address this problem might be through the dubbing culture concept, where what is recognized in the hail is itself a product of transformation. This does not entail compliance with state ideology. Yet neither does it imply a freewheeling, presocial, liberal self-assembling of an identity from elements presented by mass media, independent of social context.
Gay and lesbi Indonesians often playfully employ the notion of authenticity (asli)-I have often heard gay men describe themselves as asli gay. In doing so, they implicitly challenge the state's monopoly on designating what will count as tradition in Indonesia. Authenticity is crucial for mass-media studies as well. For Benjamin, the very concept of authenticity is put under erasure by mass media. Because mass media depend on mechanical reproduction (no mass media circulate as a series of handcrafted originals) and for Benjamin "the presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity," it follows that "the whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical... reproducibility" (1995:220). Benjamin sees the most significant aspect of this reproducibility to be that of movement: "Above all, [technical reproduction] enables the original to meet the beholder halfway. .. the cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room" (1955:220-221).
Gay and lesbi subjectivities are not moved from one place to another, as Benjamin saw mechanical reproduction, but are the dubbing of cultural logics in new ways. "Dubbing culture" is thus articulation in both senses of the term, an interaction of elements that remain distinct-like the image of speech and the dubbed voice-and also the "speaking" of a (dubbed) subjectivity. 23 This lets us "queery" globalization without posing either an oppositionally authentic "native" or globalization as simple movement.
"Dubbing culture" also speaks to conceptions of translation in the age of mechanical production. As Benjamin notes with reference to magazines, "For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting" (1955:226). This is because captions are a guide to interpretation, juxtaposed to the work of art yet at a slight remove. They serve as "signposts" that "demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them" (Benjamin 1955:226). They are a mediation internal to mass media, a translation within.
Dubbing, far more than a subtitle, is a caption fused to the thing being described. It comes from the mouth of imagic characters, yet is never quite in synch. The moving lips never match the speech; the moment of fusion is always deferred, as dubbed voice, translation-never-quite-complete, bridges two sets of representations. 24 Gay and lesbi Indonesians dub culture as they live a subjectivity linked to people and places far away. They are completely Indonesian, but to be "completely Indonesian" requires thinking of one's position in a transnational world. In speaking of translation, Benjamin wrote that "unlike a work of literature, translation does not find itself in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one" (1955:76). Gay and lesbi Indonesians have made of that echo subject positions that bespeak subjectivity and community even under conditions of oppression. They live in the echo, in the mass-mediated margin of incomplete translation, and find there authenticity, meaning, sex, friendship, and love.

Coda
As I noted as the beginning of this article, the concept of dubbing culture has a reflexive dimension for ethnography in an already globalized world. Indeed, to the extent we can consider translation a structuralist enterprise framing movement between languages and cultures in terms of grammar and meaning, many contemporary ethnographers engage in "dubbing culture" when they employ poststructuralist frameworks that question received understandings of the relationship among signiflers, and between signifiers and signifieds.
Additionally, "dubbing culture" need not be construed only in synchronic terms. There has been a striking retreat from the anthropology of postmodernity in recent years, perhaps induced by the lamentable vulgarization of "postmodern" from a specific theory of political economy, representation, and culture to an epithet hurled at methodologies or writing strategies one finds difficult to apprehend. Yet what is the emerging anthropology of alternative modernities-of modernity without metanarrative (Lyotard 1984)-if not an anthropology of postmodernity? And what is "dubbing culture" if not the antiteleological mode of historicity that produces postmodern bricolage, pastiche, the more-than-juxtaposition and less-than-unification of pasts, presents, and futures?
Contemporary ethnography, then, can be said to be engaging in dubbing culture when it brings together parts and wholes, data and theory. Lesbi and gay Indonesians engage in dubbing culture as they come to sexual subjectivity; they show not that "authentic Indonesian tradition" is a lie but that this authenticity is processual, constructed through active engagement with an unequal world. And if tradition and belonging are not given but constructed, they can be contested and transformed. The playing field is certainly not even-lesbi and gay Indonesians are not about to become fully accepted members of Indonesian society-but it is a playing field nonetheless, and there is space for change. Similarly, even in an already globalized world, non-"Western" cultures are not doomed to the status of reruns, even when confronted by "Western" hegemony.