Febi R Ramadhan

FEBI RAMADHAN, then a graduate student at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, received funding in October 2022 to aid research on “How to Do Things with God: The Making of Incommensurability of Same-Sex Sexualities and Islam in Indonesia,” supervised by Dr. Mary J. Weismantel. This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of the production and reproduction of Islamic religious knowledge on same-sex sexuality in Indonesia, which, in turn, affects and shapes the gender politics and politics of sexualities in Indonesia as well as the lives of Indonesians with same-sex sexuality. This research focuses on an Indonesian organization that provides counseling sessions for more than 27,000 Indonesian Muslims with same-sex attraction so they can live heterosexually and its networks, including anti-LGBTQ+ movements in Indonesia and globally, especially those that rally under the banner of Islamic orthodoxy. This research demonstrates that heteronormativity demands conscientious and deliberative acts of reproduction, reenactment, and reconfiguration. By focusing on the Indonesian case, this research argues that heteronormativity entrenches itself in Islamic orthodoxy — making the Islamic tradition in Indonesia, and arguably elsewhere, able to be imagined as always already heteronormative. Furthermore, this research historicizes the intertwinement between heteronormativity and Islamic orthodoxy in three routes, including: 1) the global history of conversion therapy practices since the 1990s in the US and the UK; 2) a transnational history of political Islam in Indonesia since the 1930s; and 3) transnational anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-gender politics in the contemporary time.