Boellstorff | UC Irvine, Dept. of Anthropology

Tom Boellstorff

Associate Professor of Anthropology (PhD: Stanford, 2000)
office: Social Science Plaza B, 5289 | phone: (949) 824-9944
email: tboellst at uci dot edu

curriculum vitae | blurbs

Professor Boellstorff's book Coming of Age in Second Life:
An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human is now available at Amazon.com.

Click here for Professor Boellstorff's July 2008 interview on Wisconson Public Radio's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge."

Click here to see Professor Boellstorff's July 2008 interview at Powell's Books website technica Q & A.

Click here for Professor Boellstorff's July 15, 2008 interview for the Psychjourney podcast.

Professor Boellstorff is Editor-in-Chief of American Anthropologist. Click here to submit a manuscript.

Selected publications are listed (and some are available as PDF files) at the bottom of this webpage. Click here to skip to publications.

Boellstorff is pronounced "bell-storf"; the first "o" is silent.

RESEARCH

New Research Projects

I am currently engaged in two research projects. The first is an ethnographic study of community organizations in Indonesia that engage in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment among homosexual men and warias (male-to-female transgenders). This research builds on my prior work on sexuality in Indonesia (see my books The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton, 2005) and A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Duke, 2007)). It also builds on my work in HIV/AIDS prevention in Indonesia since 1992 (my first two visits to Indonesia were as a health outreach worker, before beginning graduate training in anthropology).

My second current research project concerns human culture in “virtual worlds,” persistent “places” online where persons interact and forge new forms of selfhood and society. Throughout human history, technologies—from the wheel to the book and beyond—have shaped forms of identity, community, and society. This second research project originates in the realization that we are on the verge of one of the most massive technological transformations in human history, the creation of societies on the Internet. The social sciences and humanities have only begun to acknowledge the speed with which online societies are becoming taken for granted among the young and are spreading among all age groups and around the world. We must develop tools and theories for investigating these online societies and their increasingly fundamental impact on human relations.

In my research in the virtual world Second Life, I apply the same ethnographic methods I have used in my work in Indonesia to examine virtual culture, as well as to explore how ethnographic methods much change for online contexts. In this virtual world my avatar (Tom Bukowski) has an office, "Ethnographia," which you can visit within Second Life (it is located in Dowden, click here for a link). As Tom Bukowski, I study cybersociality in Second Life using participant observation, interviews, focus groups, and the analysis of texts ranging from newsletters to blogs. A key element of my approach is thus to pair the study of virtual worlds with "traditional" ethnographic methods, paying attention to moments of breakdown when the social relations of the virtual world in question resist ethnographic interpretation as generally understood. The first product of this research is my book Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human (Princeton, 2008).

Here are some images from the party held in Second Life (at the Cetus Gallery District) on June 18, 2008, for the official release of Coming of Age in Second Life.

I am also exploring how virtual worlds can support the work of academic journals, and anthropology more broadly. With this in mind, I have created the American Anthropologist Virtual Campus in Second Life, on a part of "Anteater Island" kindly on loan from the University of California, Irvine Libraries. The campus has three primary structures: a central building to use used so that authors of manuscripts published in American Anthropologist can further discussions of their research; an open-air auditorium and area for learning more about other journals published in conjunction with the American Anthropological Association; and a building for displays created by persons conducting ethnographic research in Second Life itself.

Ongoing Research Projects

My primary research to date has been at the intersection of sexuality and gender studies, Southeast Asia studies, postcolonial theory, and the anthropology of globalization. This research has been published in a number of articles (see below) and two sole-authored books, The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia (Princeton) and A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia (Duke). This work begins from the apparent puzzle of Indonesians who identify with the ostensibly Western terms gay and lesbi and consider these to be "authentically Indonesian" concepts, demonstrating how these subjectivities have originated at the conjuncture of globalization and post-colonial nationalism. Under conditions ranging from grudging tolerance to open bigotry, gay and lesbi Indonesians reach halfway across the world to appropriate these terms, transforming them to interpret their local experiences. At the same time, members of this network of organizations, friendship circles, and intimate relationships describe their struggle as a national movement, in accordance with government ideologies of nationalism that represent Indonesia as an "archipelago" of diversity in unity. Beyond the national level, they also portray themselves as linked to international gay and lesbian movements elsewhere in Asia and in the West, envisioning Indonesia itself as one "island" in an global archipelago. How are we to understand subjectivities that connect and confound traditional social scientific levels of analysis (and, arguably, lived experience in the West) such as local, regional, national, and international?

My work asks how this case demands a rethinking of Western assumptions about contingency, hegemony, and belonging beyond the specific case of Indonesian sexual subjectivities. Indonesia, at the center of vast changes in the Pacific Rim, the fourth largest nation on earth and the world's largest Islamic society, presents challenges to contemporary frameworks for understanding the relationship between subjectivities and structures of power, but much more. This nation's gay and lesbi citizens have much to teach us about how cultural citizenship is linked in unexpected ways to nationalism, consumerism, and globalization. Scholarship on sexuality outside the West tends to cast subjectivities like Indonesian lesbi and gay as either evidence for global homogenization, or evidence for a deeply universal human sexual nature. Classically anthropological scholarship ignores these sorts of subjectivities altogether in a search for "authentic," "indigenous" sexualities. I show that the false dichotomy of either celebrating "global homosexuality" as revealing a hitherto hidden essence, or condemning it as a homogenizing force obliterating local diversity, is grounded in the modernist belief that sexuality is a self-contained, ahistorical domain.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books

Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. (Click here for the publisher's webpage.)

A Coincidence of Desires: Anthropology, Queer Studies, Indonesia. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. (Click here for the publisher's webpage.)

The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Winner of the 2005 Ruth Benedict Prize, Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists. (Click here for the publisher's webpage.)

Edited Volumes

East Indies/West Indies: Comparative Archipelagos. Tom Boellstorff, Kathryn Robinson, and David Murray, editors. Theme issue of Anthropological Forum (Volume 16, Number 3, November 2006).

Bodies of Emotion. Tom Boellstorff and Johan Lindquist, editors. Theme issue of Ethnos (Volume 69, Number 4, December 2004).

Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language. William L. Leap and Tom Boellstorff, editors. University of Illinois Press, 2004. (Click here for the publisher's webpage.)

Research Articles and Review Essays

Crafty Knowledges. PoLAR: The Political and Legal Anthropology Review.

Queer Studies in the House of Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007):1–19.

When Marriage Falls: Queer Coincidences in Straight Time. GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 13.2/3 (2007):227–248.

Gay dan Lesbian Indonesia dan Gagasan Nasionalisme (Indonesian translation and reprint of Gay and Lesbian Indonesians, and the Idea of the Nation). Antropologi Indonesia (the flagship anthropology journal in Indonesia) 30.1 (2007):1–6.

From West Indies to East Indies: Archipelagic Interchanges. Anthropological Forum 16.3 (2006):229-240.

East Indies/West Indies: Comparative Archipelagoes. With David Murray and Kathryn Robinson. Anthropological Forum 16.3 (2006):219-227.

Domesticating Islam: Sexuality, Gender, and the Limits of Pluralism. Law and Social Inquiry 31.4 (2006):1035-1053.

Gay and Lesbian Indonesians, and the Idea of the Nation. Social Analysis 50.1 (2006):158-163.

Queer Studies under Ethnography's Sign. GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 12.4 (2006):627-639.

A Ludicrous Discipline? Ethnography and Game Studies. Games and Culture 1.1 (2006):29-35.

Between Religion and Desire: Being Muslim and Gay in Indonesia. American Anthropologist 107.4 (2005):575-585.

Playing Back the Nation: Waria, Indonesian Transvestites. Cultural Anthropology 19.2 (2004):159-195.

Zines and Zones of Desire: Mass Mediated Love, National Romance, and Sexual Citizenship in Gay Indonesia. Journal of Asian Studies 63.4 (2004):367-402.

Gay Language and Indonesia: Registering Belonging. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14.2 (2004):248-268.

The Emergence of Political Homophobia in Indonesia: Masculinity and National Belonging. Ethnos 69.4 (2004):465-486.

Bodies of Emotion: Rethinking Culture and Emotion through Southeast Asia. With Johan Lindquist. Ethnos 69.4 (2004):437-444.

Dubbing Culture: Indonesian Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities and Ethnography in an Already Globalized World. American Ethnologist 30.2 (2003):225-242. This article has been reprinted in The Anthropology of Globalization, Second Edition, edited by Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, Blackwell (2007), and in Cosmopatriots: Globalization, Patriotism, and Cosmopolitanism in Contemporary Asian Culture, edited by Jeroen de Kloet and Edwin Jurriëns, Rodopi (2008).

"Authentic, of Course!" Gay Language in Indonesia and Cultures of Belonging. In Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language. William L. Leap and Tom Boellstorff, editors. Pp. 181-201. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Introduction: Globalization and "New" Articulations of Same-sex Desire. In Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language. William L. Leap and Tom Boellstorff, editors. Pp. 1-21. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

I Knew It Was Me: Mass Media, Mass Media, "Globalization," and Lesbian and Gay Indonesians. In Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia. Audrey Yue, Fran Martin and Chris Berry, editors. Pp. 21-51. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Ethnolocality. Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 3.1 (2002):24-48.

The Perfect Path: Gay Men, Marriage, Indonesia. GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 5.4 (1999):475-510.
This article has been reprinted in Postcolonial And Queer Theories: Intersections And Essays, edited by John C. Hawley, Greenwood Press (2001), and in Queer Studies: an Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Robert Corber and Steve Valocchi, Blackwell (2002).

A New Archipelago Concept for the Era of Reform? Anthropologi Indonesia 63 (2000):109-116.

Gay and Lesbi Subjectivities, National Belonging, and the New Indonesia. In Women in Indonesia: Gender, Equity and Development. Kathryn Robinson and Sharon Bessel, editors. Pp. 92-99. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asia Studies Press, 2002.

Selected Single-book Essays and Commentaries
Here are a few of my single-book essays and commentaries that touch on larger themes that may be of general interest. For a full listing of my single-book essays and commentaries, see my CV.

Cultural Travel and Migrancy: The Artistic Representation of Globalization in the Electronic Media of West Java. American Anthropologist 108.4 (2006):881–882.

Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority. POLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review) 29.1 (2006):151–153.

Remembering Anthropology’s Sexuality. Current Anthropology 47.2 (2006):397–398.

Diagnosing Difference: Anthropology's Heteronormativity. American Ethnologist 32.1 (2005):37-38.

Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology. American Anthropologist 107.1 (2005):155–156.

The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. American Anthropologist 105.2 (2003):422–423.

Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand. American Ethnologist 28.2 (2001):492–493.

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In 1991, right after finishing college, I traveled to the Soviet Union with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights commission to work with gay and lesbian groups in Moscow. With those groups I participated in the resistance to the coup attempt that led to the eventual breakup of the Soviet Union itself. Here is some information about these events, with apologies for the poor quality of many of the scans and photos. During the coup attempt I ran out of film and had to purchase some low-quality black and white film, which I used to photograph the memorials to the three youths killed in Moscow during the coup attempt, and also the pulling down of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the "father" of the KGB.