Spirit Encounters: Haptic Visuality and Queer Subjectivity in Indonesian Film

• In Event: Queering ‘Spirit’ in the Real and the Reel: Vignettes of Hope, Agency and Empowerment from Malaysia and Indonesia

Abstract

This paper attempts to kick off from Deleuzian approaches to experiencing film and engages very closely with Laura U. Marks’ work on haptic visuality, an understanding of the visual that has the ability to transcend the sensorial limits of sight. By paying tribute to the work of Deleuze and Marks, this paper suggests that the spirit of queer subjectivity is perceivable through ‘tactile’ cinema achieved through close-to-the-body camera positions and a range of other filmic techniques. The paper uses and analyses Sigi Wimala’s ‘Boy Crush’, a 2009 short film about teenage gay love produced by one of Indonesia’s greatest auteurs, Garin Nugroho, as a means of developing alternative ways of knowing the queer subject. The development of film culture in post-New Order Indonesia has witnessed a burgeoning interest in queer identities (not least the successful Q! film festival in Indonesia) in local cinema. Such a growing interest has meant also a development of new ways of perceiving queer identities across a range of genres and in the case of my paper, visualities. The notion of ‘spirit’ is foregrounded to establish the still shifting ground of terminologies and being queer in Indonesia beset by pockets of intolerance and growing understanding of LGBT experiences.

Author

• Alicia Izharuddin, University of Malaya