Passionate aesthetics and symbolic subversion: heteronormativity in India and Indonesia

By exploring the life stories of women in same-sex relations, sex workers and widows/divorced women in Jakarta and Delhi, this article analyses the way heteronormativity marginalises these women, both those who identify as heterosexual and those who do not. To counter the physical, material and subversive forms of violence they experience, they engage in various forms of agency, including symbolic forms of subversion. The focus is on the major concepts developed in this study - passionate aesthetics and symbolic subversion. The narrators in this study deploy overlapping yet distinct strategies to carve out their lives. The subversion of heteronormativity ranges from political, activist intentions to more invisible, symbolic acts, which are sometimes self-defeating. These forms of subversion are rooted in both embodied and social, public practices. In this article I discuss some of the major symbolic forms of subversion of heteronormativity that lie between the ultimate defiance of (self) destruction and the struggle for human/women's/sexual rights. Five strategies will be discussed: seeking economic stability; finding sexual partners; glorifying motherhood; negotiating religious peace; and claiming sexual speech. In the last section the embodiment of subversion is discussed.