The Aroused Public in Search of the Pornographic in Indonesia

This paper explores the language and implications of the Indonesian pornography law passed in 2008 and a 2006 draft that targeted ‘pornographic action' as well as pornographic media. While noting how pornographic action was seen as an attempt to impose Shari'a law especially insofar as it focused on women's bodies, this paper also examines how pornography, widely available through new technologies and economic liberalization, has come to be seen as an array of foreign and mapped sexual practices. This paper argues that as sexual practices become ethnicized, and as pornography comes to encompass a wide range of bodily practices from bathing to dancing to dressing, ethnicity itself has become pornographic, and the nation has been encouraged to become voyeuristic peeping Toms monitoring cultural performance.