The made‐up state: Technology, trans femininity, and citizenship in Indonesia By Benjamin Hegarty. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. 198 pp.

Benjamin Hegarty's The Made-Up State traces the historical relationship between technology and gender among warias in Indonesia. The term waria is a portmanteau combining terms for woman (wanita) and man (pria) to denote a person who unifies the gender binary in a single body. Drawing from ethnographic observations and historical evidence of warias’ engagement with the public presentation and reception of gender (framed in the book as “public gender” in postcolonial Indonesia), Hegarty examines how political and cultural claims to citizenship in the country are shaped by competing socio-technological visions. By arguing that gender is a technology of classification (p. 10), Hegarty destabilizes the boundaries of social belonging and citizenship that “naturalize dualisms of male/female, mind/body, and cisgender/transgender at the level of the individual self” (p. 22). Another dichotomy that characterizes claims of citizenship in Indonesia, as Hegarty and other Indonesianists elsewhere have pointed out (Boellstorff, 2005; Siegel, 1998; Strassler, 2010), is the distinction between authentic (asli) and false (palsu), which has been inherited from the colonial order of racialization. Moving away from essentialist gender constructs helps us understand how the configuration of gender among waria emanates from their social embeddedness, sometimes in tension with the state's intervention. The book's structure charts how trans femininity evolved over time, from late-colonial Indonesia to the early decades after the fall of Suharto's New Order regime in 1998, also known as the post-Reformasi era. Hegarty begins by drawing an intriguing analogy between colonial practices of racial ordering and postcolonial state politics of citizenship in Indonesia; he does so by showing how both systems relied on outward appearances as the essential basis for personhood. Hegarty accomplishes this through a case study on banci, or transvestites, whose visibility in public spaces of the newly independent nation incited both widespread hostility and titillation. The first chapter makes clear that gender nonconformity complicated the state's efforts to impose boundaries on citizenship amid the country's nascent modernity. In the early New Order Indonesia of the late 1960s, urban spaces became the key arena for competing claims of national belonging between state actors and waria. During this period, gender-nonconforming subjectivities were integrated into municipal regulations through their formal identification as waria or wadam, a combination of the Indonesian words for Eve and Adam. A pivotal figure in shaping this dynamic was Ali Sadikin, governor of Jakarta from 1966 to 1977, whose policies aimed to regulate waria “to limit their appearances to more respectable settings and to improve their appearances through training in vocational skills” (p. 44). For many waria, these efforts were mainly welcomed as an affirmative form of recognition, opening up possibilities for accessing respectability. Yet, because these processes were deeply rooted in a developmentalist model of public order and morality, it remains a tenuous achievement. As captured in chapter 3, a critical turning point unfolded in the next decade, when the grammar of medicalization and psychiatry, mixed with Islamic legal interpretation, predominated in debates on classifying public gender, focusing on the alignment of mind, body, and genital morphology. Partly a response to global trends, this shift not only led to greater visibility of trans femininity in mainstream media, but also constituted warias as objects of scientific and medical expertise. Meanwhile, warias themselves continued to negotiate these generic classifications by enhancing their bodily capacities for femininity by becoming beauty experts. The warias’ creative tenacity in appropriating the technologies of feminization is further substantiated in chapters 4 and 5 through Hegarty's observation of their practices of dandan, or applying makeup. As discussed in chapter 4, dandan also refers more broadly to wearing cosmetics and dressing up for everyday or special occasions, but it holds special significance for warias as experts on feminine beauty. Hegarty's interlocutors convey that dandan is not “altering or transforming the natural or preexisting biological reality” but rather “a necessary part of the externalization of a hitherto concealed self” (p. 93). Here again, the mind/body dualism that predominates in Western thought is unified by warias’ unruly ways of inhabiting public visibility through their gendered expressions and participation in social life. Chapter 5 shows how, through dandan, warias can bypass the state's project of disciplining gender to claim recognition in the everyday aesthetics of the urban milieu. The chapter stands out thanks to Hegarty's astute treatment of his interlocutor Tadi's personal photo collection, dating to the 1980s, which glamorizes warias’ practices of spatially and temporally navigating the seeing public. The timing of this historical ethnographic work is fortuitous. Hegarty's ethnographic fieldwork in Jakarta and Yogyakarta occurred at a time when discriminatory municipal policies were increasingly targeting gender nonconformity. Shortly after completing his fieldwork in 2015, the social positions of waria grew even more precarious with the rise of anti-LGBT sentiment nationwide. Situated at the crossroads of anthropology and history, this book gives a nuanced historical account of warias as “a group of people sometimes considered to have no history of their own or who are understood as marginal within Indonesian national history” (p. xviii). Moreover, it places the dynamics of gender and sexuality in a domain that is congruent with Indonesia's broader history of personhood and national belonging. Scholars working in fields such as transgender studies, critical gender studies, and the anthropology of gender and sexuality have defined gender as a multifaceted concept that surpasses the binary model and seeks to resist modes of essentializing gender. Hegarty's findings enrich this approach by underlining how gender operates as a technological means for categorizing human differences, but with outcomes that necessarily remain incomplete, open-ended, and emergent. Consistent with the closing argument of this book, I share Hegarty's optimism that if we learn from the history of waria in Indonesia, our aspirations for social justice can exceed the zero-sum conflict between the politics of inclusion and exclusion (p. 136), and we can attend to the uneasy pursuit of recognition in carving out different scopes and scales for collective spaces of belonging.