Book Launch: The Made-Up State by Benjamin Hegarty

By Benjamin Hegarty

The SSN is delighted to invite in-person and online attendees as we launch Benjamin Hegarty's new book, published by Cornell University Press. Join us for an introductory talk by Ben, followed by discussion with guests (TBC), and a Q and A.

In The Made-Up State, Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, who compose one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty.

The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.

Benjamin Hegarty is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of queer and transgender studies, science and technology studies, and global health. His research is based on research with transgender communities in Indonesia. Before joining the Global Health Program at the the Kirby Institute at UNSW, Benjamin was a McKenzie Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne (2019-2022). His ethnographic and historical research appears in Visual Anthropology Review, Ethos, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Journal of Asian Studies. Benjamin is a member of the Editorial Board of American Ethnologist.

You can learn more about Ben, and download his free e-book, on his website

TBC

Host or Publisher Deakin Science and Society Network