New Media, Urban Space, and The Notion of Play

By Monique Natalia Wiradisastra


Introduction

Urban space is characteristically seen as a means to an end in a capitalistic system.
Lefebvre’s writing and analysis of ‘urban space and urban life as a social fact’ describes that the city has become ‘the material device apt to organize production, control the daily life of producers and the consumption of products. ’

Just one foot into an urban space, reaffirms this statement. One cannot help but notice a massive amount of billboards, posters, shop windows, leaflets, brochures, neon signs, maps, and advertisings everywhere, bombarding dwellers and visitors alike with images of perfection, words of wonder. Each is an attempt to feed dreams, fantasies, stories, and fiction into one’s head about this urban space one live in. An image will try to persuade us to buy that dream house to have our perfect urban life, while another will tempt us to purchase the perfect clothes, the perfect car, the perfect book, the perfect gadget to complete an idealized image of the perfect urbanite. These never ending lullabies lulls one into states of unconsciousness, until sometimes one forgets to reflect on one’s idea of perfection, until one forgets one’s own idea of the city. Living in our own bubble of the perfect urban live prevents us from making new connections and to engage with the city. Travelling between cities, sometimes we trust our friend Mr. Google or Mrs. Wiki more than recommendations from friends about places to visit.

In this kind of thinking urban space is seen as something that is very rigid and full of constraints with its daily activities seen as something very mundane and predictable.
However, this mode of thinking about the city does not account for the fact that cities are made up of people from different backgrounds with various interests and many come to the city for a variety of different reasons. One usually moves to the city for ‘love, esteem and self-actualization, and to experience the diversity of the world around them and to learn to understand it,’ and as soon as one have settled in and become the perfect urbanite by the capitalist standard, one stops to engage with one’s surrounding and other urbanites.

Therefore, in order to be able to create a new possibility for urban space it is crucial to reconnect these urbanites with their surroundings and other members of urban society, to prevent them from falling into the trap of alienation, which separates them from their own experiences. The important question here is: how do we find the best way of reconnecting them with the city? How does one avoid falling into the trap of alienation? Where everything has been turned into a spectacle, including one’s own experience? Is there no more opportunity for urban society to experience ‘real’ experience?

Looking at the heterogeneity of urban societies and how this will make possible new and unique attempts at resisting control in urban space, I will argue that the only way for people to get back to experiencing ‘real’ experiences is through the concept of play. And this is where new media technology can play a big role. This essay will be an attempt to answer the questions above through an exploration of functions of new media, which can help create this new space of ‘play’ in capitalized urban spaces. The exploration will begin and be shaped with what new media technology has made possible in the context of enabling play in urban space which include possibilities of new connections, the notion of anonymity, and a new overlaying of a virtual urban space onto the already existing physical urban. This exploration will try to bring together thoughts and writings of authors such as of Gilles Deleuze, Edward Soja, Henri Lefebvre, and The Situationist International while analyzing urban new media art projects by the artist collective The Blast Theory, which were built around the concept of play and how this attempt can be seen as a way of trying to push the boundaries of urban space in order to help create a new possibility for urban space.


Making New Connections

To understand how new media technologies have helped to create new communities, one needs to look at how developments of information and communication technology have helped aided human communication. Without the aid of new technologies, the possibility of communication with another person is limited by the constraint of space and time. One needs to be in the presence of the other person to be able to communicate with them in real time. Drums, flags, and smoke are all ways for people to communicate in real time before the invention of the telegraph. Now with the invention of the mail, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and the internet, distance is no longer a problem in the process of message and information transmission and reception in real time. One can now communicate and create connections with people from many parts of the world.

However, the problem of the real urban city inhabitants remains. In this capitalized world, all forms of activity are considered as work or acts of producing. When one is engaged in an activity that is not productive, that cannot be valued by money, the activity is deemed useless, a waste of time. Furthermore, non productive activities such as leisure and the pursuit of aesthetics in the city have also been reconfigured to serve the functions of a capitalized world . If making new connections with new people will not earn money as the end result, why bother? Why waste one’s time to meet new people? Lefebvre analyses Marx’s concept of capitalism and commodity to elucidate this implication of the commodification of everyday life for urban connections. He explains this by using the term alienation, which is also used by The Situationists to explain how people have become alienated from every aspect of their life. Borrowing the concept from Marxism, which is based on his observation that as a result of capitalism, workers are separated from and inevitably lose control of the product of their work, which eventually result in the loss of control over their lives and selves, The Situationists argued that alienation has saturated ‘all aspects of social life, knowledge, and culture’. They strongly argue that people are kept away not only from the products they produce and consume, but also from their ‘experiences, emotions, creativity, and desires’. Hence, in today’s modern and highly capitalized urban space, people walk around and conduct their daily activities without really experiencing life, without really being in touch with their own desires, creativity, and dreams.

This problem of sustaining community interaction in the city has also been the topic of importance for many scholars and urbanists. In fact, the formation of urban areas also came from this urge to maintain community interaction. Ancient cities were designed so that every place of significance is within walking distance to one another . With less travel time, it was hoped that people would have more time to congregate and interact. The main difference now is how modes of transportation are being put into consideration. But the main goal remains, which is still to maximize interaction with minimal travel time. Hence, a physical form of a city can be thought of as a structure of public and private places with transportation links. Similarly, one could argue that the Internet as one form of new media technology has a similar structure to traditional cities. Instead of physical buildings and spaces, the World Wide Web has web sites, which can be thought of as virtual places, which is very similar to what exists in a traditional city . Especially now that more and more ‘physical’ institutions have a virtual form on the Internet in the form of a website (from the government institutions, schools and even religious institutions). And instead of roads and transportation links, the Internet is linked together electronically by hyperlinks between sites . The question one can ask regarding this matter is how does this virtual structure of a city influence interaction and constitution of communities as opposed to how communities are formed in a traditional physical structure of a city?

One can argue that the difference is not so great. In the traditional sense of cities, communities are formed through shared interests and activities, also with a consideration of spatial locations. Like wise, virtual communities are also formed because of the same reasons. Online groups generally share an interest or activity that forms the topic of discussion. One can argue that the main difference can be attributed to the inexistence of real spatial location in cyberspace, where one can form a community of neighbours, for example, in cyberspace there is no such thing as neighbours. Every site can be linked to one another, forming a giant network of ‘neighbours’. This idea of a giant network of ‘neighbour’ brings about the formation of communities that might not be have been possible before the Internet. One person living in London can now be a part of a virtual community with people from places as far away as Bangkok, Bogor, and Bogota for example. These virtual communities have influenced how people view social networks and the making and meaning of community. Virtual communities as network of individuals are transforming patterns of sociability in the new metropolitan life.’ However, studies about how virtual communities are affecting social networks often focus on the notion of transcending distance and eventually virtual communities are often criticized of creating ‘capsulised’ communities that withdraw themselves from their local neighbourhood . Instead of opening up urban space for new interactions and connections, virtual communities are accused of creating their own personal space, which can not be penretrated from the physical world.

With this issue in mind, one can quickly judge that games which employ new media technology would only work to further enclose people in their own personal space and discourages any chance of real interaction with a physical world. This what attracted me to the works of Blast Theory, a group of seven artists based in London. Even though they employ the use of new media technology and especially the internet, an important focus of their project is involving a real physical city and real people (either as players, actors in the game, or strangers) where participants can ‘physically’ reconnect with a real urban space and its inhabitant. Noticing the importance of creating new connections between people in the city, Blast Theory played with this notion of community making in cities and uses an intersection of the virtual reality and real urban space as literally a ‘playground’ for their projects. One can read Blast Theory’s project as a simple way to dismantle this alienation that people have from each other and everything that surrounds them. Works like Can You See Me Now, Uncle Roy All Around You and I Like Frank can be analyzed as a way of reconnecting urban society with their experiences, emotions, creativity, and desires about urban space and also to reconnect them with other inhabitants of the city. In Uncle Roy All Around You, for example, street players were given clues that involve strangers in the city (instructions to ‘pay no attention to the street cleaner with long gray hair’ or to turn around and follow a stranger wearing a white t-shirt are the type of clues the players get). In paling this game, participants are forced to not only pay attention to strangers but also to try to connect to them. They are forced to think about other inhabitants of the city. By setting up rules that forces engagements between strangers (online players have to help street players to get ahead in the game and street players need clues from online players to find Uncle Roy), Blast Theory confronts the idea of alienation in urban space and force people to make new connections.

Uncle Roy All Around You is a game played online in a virtual city and on the streets of an actual city. A map of the virtual city is presented online which corresponds to every aspect of the real city. Online Players and Street Players collaborate to find Uncle Roy's office before being invited to make a year-long commitment to a total stranger. Online players play the game by engaging with street players and helping them find Uncle Roy. One can analyze the trajectory of this game as a way of addressing the issue of forming new and random communities and relations in urban space, both virtually (online players with other online players) and physically (online players and street players). In their website Blast Theory writes that the games serve as an attempt for them to explore the issue of intimacy and trust in the virtual and urban world. Through rules that force people to engage with strangers, this work can also be seen as a way to dismantle the myth, that have been enforced to anyone living in the city, about not talking to strangers.

Regarding the use of a real city, Blast Theory also sees the city as increasingly becoming a space where ‘the unfamiliar flourishes’ where individuals become ‘disjointed’ and ‘disrupted’ from the whole of urban society. This project confronts those issues of unfamiliarity and individuality head on. Standing in the midst of the human traffic on Oxford Street in London, one can feel this sense of individuality straight away. Every single person passing by is enclosed in his or her own bubble of existence. Gazes are directed at shop windows rather than at other people. Occasional collisions with others will probably cause a momentary glance of acknowledgement that another being exists and is present in the same space. Unfortunately not for long, after mumbles of apologies, gazes are once again directed at inanimate, uniform things. Lefebvre argues that this fixation on the visual and visualization as having the function of concealing repetitiveness of space, objects and behaviour that is produced in a capitalist society . In modern urban society ‘Sight and seeing, . . ., turned into a trap’ diverting people from engaging with their surrounding, with other people, preventing people to experience life as it happens.

Through Uncle Roy All Around You Blast Theory tries to subvert this fixation with sight and seeing by creating an urban game which require players to re-engage with the urban space and urban community around them. Clues in the game tell them to follow strangers, to look for pointers in passing strangers, or to look for trivial objects and places, which would most probably escape their attention on a regular day in the city. Thorugh new media technology of mobile, navigational devices and the Internet (virtual reality), in this game creates another possibility of community formation, and while doing that invents anther possibility of urban space, a space between real life and virtual reality where you are invited to interact with and trust strangers, while engaging with the notion of trust and intimacy in the intersection between the virtual and the real in urban space.

Anonimity and Identity

One important issue that is raised with the mediation of communication through new media technology is the issue of anonymity and identity. The proliferation of chat rooms, public discussion forums, and social networking sites on the internet is the perfect example of how people actually look for the chance to create new connection with other people, and how the opportunity to do it ‘anonymously’ in cyber space is encouraging the creation of these connections. The question is: why are people more reluctant to meet new people in real space? I would argue that this has a lot to do with the idea of the image and how people are being guided and forced, at times, to be self conscious about their own image. Urban space is littered with advertising all telling us about what to do, how to look, how to act, and so on. Each tries to bombard one with ideas about how one’s image should be. Even though each billboard and poster looks different, at the end the image that you are meant to have as the perfect urbanite is the same. Looking at pictures of beautiful, happy, and slim people in all the advertisings create a sense of how one should look like if one wants to be accepted in the ideal urban society. New media technology gives one a chance to modify one’s image or to create an entirely different one. With no chance of real encounter, where the frauds can be found out, one is free to explore all the possibilities of identities that exists out there. Through social networking sites, blogs, and so on people are being given a chance to create a new identity and therefore to rid them selves off the commodified image that they are forced to succumb too in the real urban space.

This chance of anonymity and the paranoia about identity brings us to the issue of control and surveillance. Another impact that is felt with the development of new media technology is the emergence of a new mode of control and surveillance. With regards to mass digitalization, Gilles Deleuze in his essay Postscripts on The Society of Control states that now individuals have become “dividuals” and masses have become “samples, data, markets, or “banks”. Following Deleuze’s thinking, urban space can be considered a site for data collection. One’s daily activities everyday can be considered as acts of producing data, valuable data which can be tracked, controlled, monitored, marketed, sold and purchased. Every space in the city has become an enclosed spaces, with designated doors and entry points. Each door, each object and each inhabitant of the city is in possession of a ‘code’. As Deleuze states, ‘the code is a password. ’ The password is necessary to gain access to the city’s various offerings. However, the fact that the password can also be rejected is also discussed by Deleuze: ‘What counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position – licit or illicit’ which in turn will make possible ‘a universal modulation’ . Deleuze’s idea of control society is echoed in Lefebvre’s writing and analysis of ‘urban space and urban life as a social fact’ . He argues that the city becomes ‘the material device apt to organize production, control the daily life of producers and the consumption of products.’ Thus, in today’s modern urban space, the idea of not having an identity, of not being tracked is an elusive idea. Every where we go we are watched and tracked If not by the hundreds of the CCTVs that is strategically placed in every public space, it is through all the cards we swipe in order to get access to places or to buy products. Trying to escape is futile. As Matthew Fuller mentions in his book Media Ecologies, ‘being able to access, deploy, or simulate the correct informational qualities guarantees all ports access’. Otherwise one will only be greeted with blaring signs of “access denied”. The act of swiping a piece of plastic has replaced verbal information exchange.

These conditions of control create an image of urban space as a rigid space full of constraints, however this is also the point where one can expect a new form of resistance and subversion to arise. And this new form of subversion is something that every one of us is familiar with and capable of doing which is to play. Lefebvre argues that play functions as an important tactic in the struggle over capitalized space. But, how is one expected to play in an urban space full of watchful eyes? This is where new media technology can play a big role. With new media technology, the idea of anonymity and the chance to create new, multiple identities is something that can be practiced by anyone. With multiple identities one does not have to be afraid of being watched, of making mistakes. Even though there is always the possibility of being tracked, there is less risk with anonymity and new identities in cyberspace.

In their projects, Blast Theory takes advantage of this notion of anonymity that the Internet offers by conducting games, which invite online players from around the world to participate. The chance to be involved in a playful activity which is actually connected to a real and physical space of the city with the option to do it ‘virtually’ and therefore ‘anonymously’ helps people who are afraid of all the risks that physical space posses to participate and to engage with cities that they love.

The Virtual, Physical, and The ‘Thirdspace’

One thing that cannot be ignored with the advancements of new media technology in it relations to urban space is the ability to create a ‘new’ type of space which can be superimposed on real urban space through the use of virtual reality technology. Virtual reality is a technology, which allows a user to interact with a computer-simulated environment, be it a real or imagined one. Most current virtual reality environments are primarily visual experiences, displayed either on a computer screen or through special displays. Users can interact with a virtual environment either through the use of standard input devices such as a keyboard and mouse, or through other devices that is connected with sensors (for light, movement, sound, etc). The simulated environment can be similar to the real world, for example, simulations for pilot or combat training, or it can differ significantly from reality, as in Virtual Reality games. In practice, it is currently very difficult to create a high-fidelity virtual reality experience, largely due to technical limitations on processing power, image resolution and communication bandwidth. However, those limitations are expected to eventually overcome as processor, imaging and data communication technologies become more powerful and cost-effective over time.

Can You See Me Now, Uncle Roy All Around You, and I Like Frank takes advantage of this Virtual Reality technology to build a virtual version of a city which is then juxtaposed on the real city as important part of the game. All three games happen simultaneously online and on the streets of real cities. Players have a chance to either engage in the physical part of the game in real cities (such as Uncle Roy All Around which was staged in Sheffield and Can You See Me Now in Adelaide) or choose to participate from the virtual version of the city by being an online player (This is possible to do in Can You See Me Now which was staged in Sheffield).

In Can You See Me Now, which was first played on the real physical streets of Sheffield and online in a virtual version of Sheffield players anywhere can play online in a virtual city against members of Blast Theory. The game was developed from the simple notion of ‘chase’. Blast Theory ‘runners’ chases online players on the real streets of Sheffield. Rigged with handheld computers that let them be tracked by satellites, Blast Theory's runners appear ‘virtually’ next to the online player on a map of the city. The devices held by the runners show positions of online players, which guide them in tracking online players down.

Like Can You See Me Now, I Like Frank was also developed around the idea of a search. The game took place online at www.ilikefrank.com and on the streets using 3G phones . Players in the real city chatted with players in the virtual city as they searched for the elusive Frank through the streets of Adelaide. As in the two previous games, online players moved through a virtual model of the city, opening location-specific photos of the city. One photo revealed the location of a hidden object. Online Players then had to enlist a Street Player to go to that location and retrieve it. In this game players are invited to build relationships with other players (virtual and street) to swap information to reach a certain goal.

By using virtual reality in combination with a real urban space, Blast Theory is creating a ‘new space’, which is overlaid and superimposed on the real and physical urban space. In my perspective, one can also read these works as a way to create a ‘third space’, a terminology that was familiarized by Edward Soja. In this analysis of the use of new media technology to create a possibility of urban space, Edward Soja’s writing dedicated to exploring the third space gives one the chance to step beyond plain and predictable binarisms between physical and mental space or between physical and social space. Soja conceptualizes his notion of a third space through a reading and ‘reappropriation’ of Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space. In this book Lefebvre argues that the conventional dichotomy of physical space and mental space actually has a link which connects the two. The link is the process of the production of space which is enacted through ‘spatial practice’, which is based on the material experience of social relations in ‘everyday life’ . Lefebvre’s explorations also deal a lot with paradoxical concepts such as concrete abstraction, materialist idealism, and the simultaneous worlds of the real-and-imagined .

In a further development of his concept of the ‘Thirdspace, Soja talks about the concept of space and spatiality. Scholars usually approach the subject from either one of two perspectives. Spatiality is either seen as physical and material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained or seen as mental constructs, which are ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. However, with The Aleph, a short story by Jorge Louis Borges where The Aleph is described as ‘limitless space’ and as ‘one of the points in space that contains all other points’ , Soja found trouble in trying to ‘translate into words the limitless Aleph’ through either the idea of space as physical form or the idea of space as a mental construct. In his reading of The Aleph, he sees it as ‘an invitation to exuberant adventure’ and ‘an allegory on the infinite complexities of time space and time’ . By employing Lefebvre’s The Production of Space as guide lines and by exploring this fictional concept of The Aleph as a place where everything can be seen from every angle, Soja argues that there exists ‘Thirdspace’ which he defines as:
‘the space where all places are, capable of being seen from every angle, each standing clear; but also a secret and conjectured object, filled with illusions and allusions, a space that is common to all of us yet never able to completely seen and understood.
… Everything comes together in Thirdspace: subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history.’
Blast Theory’s projects can be analyzed as an exploration of this notion of the ‘Thirdspace’. By combining a physical urban space and a virtual form of that particular city and involving real players and online players, The Blast Theory has managed to combine ‘the real and the imagined’ and ‘the abstract and the concrete’. The Thirdspace of Blast Theory is a ‘hybrid space’, which merges the physical urban space with a virtual urban space through the simple notion of play in a game that joins the two space.

Conclusion

In today’s capitalized and highly commodified urban space, where people live in their own little bubble, it is important to create new possibilities of urban space where people can reengage with their surroundings and also establish new connections with other inhabitants of the same space. What is also important is to find a way to build new connections between all the alienated people of this modern urban space. According to The Situationists the process of commodification includes all aspects of experience including events, goods, roles and issue . As a result, these commodified experiences are how people experience cities.

However, today, despite capitalist efforts to homogenize and commodify urban space cities around the world are becoming increasingly dense as they are filled with more and more heterogenous societies. In this type of space, where there are limitless possibilities of encounters, interaction, mixing, exploration and even risk, the perfect ‘weapon’ for subversion is play. In this essay I have explored the ways that new media technology is helping to create this new and exciting form of subversion. The possibility to create new connections between people, the possibility of reclaiming one’s identity and image which has been commodified in a capitalized urban space through new media technology’s possibility for anonymity, and the creation of a form of space (virtual space) can all be seen as ways to help develop this form of subversion in the city.

The three projects of Blast theory, which are Uncle Roy All Around You, Can You See Me Now, and I Like Frank are all explorations of this concept of play as a form of subversion and a reclaiming of the city. Through the use of new media technology, Blast Theory helps to reconnect real people with real cities and help them to engage with their surroundings and the same time create the possibility of a new hybrid space of the city, where imagination and reality merges and becomes intertwined to help bring back a sense of belonging in the city. Even if the projects does not account for the fact that not everyone in the city can participate in the game and can also be seen as a form of fixation with technology, one can view them as starting points. Hopefully these projects can be the starting points for and inspire other attempts to confront the commodified urban space and experience one is so used to. By looking at these projects one is once again reminded of the potentiality of the city for our own fictionalization and also of the possibility of how, at least for a moment, one can create one’s own ‘Thirdspace’ of the city.


“The City” is a slippery notion. It slides back and forth between an abstract idea and concrete material.
-Rob Shields, ’A guide to urban Representation and what to do about it: alternative traditions of urban theory


BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balshaw and Kennedy, eds. (2000), Urban Space and Representation, London: Pluto Press)

Castells, Manuel (2004), “Space of Flows, Space of Places: Materials for A Theory of Urbanism In The Information Age” in The Cybercities Reader (2004), Graham, S. (ed.), London: Routledge

Deleuze, Gilles (1988) “Postscripts on The Society of Control” in The Cybercities Reader (2004), Graham, S. (ed), London: Routledge

Debord, Guy (1955) “Critique of Urban Geography” available online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/urbgeog.htm

Fuller, Matthew (2005), Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, MIT Press.

Graham, Stephen (2004), Introduction to “Netville: Community On and Offline in a Wired Suburb” in The Cybercities Reader (2004), Graham, S. (ed.), London: Routledge

J.G Ballard (1995) Crash, London: Vintage.

Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The Production of Space, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.

Mitchell, William (2000), “The City of Bits Hypothesis: from Hightechnology and Low Income Communities” in The Cybercities Reader (2004), Graham, S. (ed), London: Routledge

Plant, Sadie (1990), The Situationist International: A Case of Spectacular Neglect” in Home, ed. (1996), What Is Situationism, A Reader, Edinburgh: BPC Wheatons

Soja, Edward W (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angles and Other real-And-Imagined Places, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.

Stevens, Quentin (2007), The Ludic City: Exploring The Potential Of Public Spaces, Abingdon: Routledge.



Online Resource

www.blasttheory.co.uk

The New Nyais: Dismantling The Stereotype of Indonesia's Modern Day Concubines

By Monique Natalia Wiradisastra


Introduction
In Bhabha’s Location of Culture, he argues that the stereotype is “a complex, ambivalent, contradictory mode of representation ”. He sees the need to look beyond stereotype as merely a false representation between what is good and what is bad or as a false representation of other binary oppositions and to think of the stereotype as a discursive strategy of colonial discourse which effects both the colonized and the colonizer in a relation of both “domination and dependence” and also “power and resistance ”.
A reading of Bhabha by Bart Moore-Gilbert in his book Post Colonial Theory: Contexts, Practices and Politics confirms that stereotype is not simply a manifestation of the colonizer’s security in his position but in fact it is an indication of his “fractured and destabilized” colonial identity and authority . He starts explaining this concept by stating the importance of “fixity” in colonial discourse. How important it is to maintain the stability of the representation of the image of the colonized in discursive practice. Nonetheless, Bhabha sees a contradictory practice in the reproduction of these stereotypes. They are repeated again and again in various forms as if these forms are constantly trying to validate their claims in society. And the stereotype grows larger than life with each repetition. As McRobbie puts it “it is more than in order to be less than” .
In Indonesia, interracial relationships, along with inter-religion relationships, have always been regarded as sensitive and much discussed issues and the persons in such relationships are expected to submit to social scrutiny. This is particularly so for Indonesian women involved in a relationship with male expatriates of Caucasian descent in particular or Caucasian expatriates (dubbed bule in Indonesian ).
Stereotype about such women are often the source of gleeful ridicule by both male and female members of society. I would argue that the ridicule has to do with the aura of illegitimacy that haunts these relationships; that although these relationships are often thought of as being products of contemporary, global culture, the illegitimacy may be traced back to the colonial era when women are taken as Nyais, concubines, by the colonials; and that contemporary technologies and popular culture (television, internet, magazine, celebrity tabloids, etc) resuscitate and disseminate the stereotype.
This colonial legacy remains to this day when people talk about modern day Indonesian women who are in interracial relationships. These stereotypes are repeated through time and though today much has changed, the core of the stereotype remains intact. These women are judged on the color of their skin and that of their spouse/partner. Not only by the ‘new colonizer’, expatriates who come in droves under the banner of multinational corporation and global free trade, but also by Indonesians themselves.
Beginning as a word of mouth fable from the colonial times, the stereotype has been repeated with the rise of the internet in society. Frequent surfing on the web with the key words bule (a popular Indonesian word to describe Caucasian foreigner) and Indonesian women will unearth tons of blogs, posts and articles about the stereotypes. As it gets repeated the stereotypes get bigger with endless exaggerated embellishments added on as if to ensure the validity of the claim. In this essay I would like to show how the identity and authority of the colonizer is “fractured’” and “destabilized” by these stereotypes (the old colonials, the new colonials, and Indonesians themselves) and also show the ambivalent relation between “dominance” and “dependence” and also between “power” and “resistance” as a result of these stereotypes. In order to do that, I shall also show the relation between the contemporary stereotype and the colonial stereotype of the Nyai by examining a novel titled This Earth of Mankind that takes place in Indonesia during the colonial time about a man who falls in love with the daughter of a Nyai by Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
Have these women become the new Nyais? And finally, is it possible to see the life-choices made by women in interracial relationships as instances of contemporary mimicry of the new colonizer, by which they create the space [or spaces?] of “insubordination, or antagonism” of which Angela McRobbie writes ?


The Old Nyais and Their Masters
The illegitimacy about these interracial relationships may be traced back to a colonial era stereotype dating back to the 17th century until 1942. During the Dutch colonial era, these interracial relationships were made illegitimate by the system of apartheid-style laws protecting strict racial segregation. Yet, partly because of the death of European women in the colonies—particularly in the more remote plantation regions in Java and Sumatra—Dutch men often bought women from the villages to serve as concubines. And “by the 19th century concubinage was the most prevalent living arrangement for European men” in Indonesia . This act of taking a concubine was not legal by law but was something that was ‘expected’ of Dutch soldiers and officers living in Indonesia. As Stoler states “concubinage served colonial interests in other ways. It permitted permanent settlement and rapid growth by a cheaper means than the importation of European women.” These Indonesian women were then referred to as Nyai (which in old Java were actually used as a term of respect for older and married women).
The long colonial history of the stereotype is the subject of the novel This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. It is a novel about colonial life in Central Java in the late 19th century. The story tells the tale of a young Javanese student, Minke, who is granted the privilege because of his royal lineage of studying at a European School amongst ‘pure’ Dutch. He falls in love with Annelies, the beautiful Indo-European woman. Annelies is the daughter of a Nyai the concubine of a Dutch plantation and farm owner, Herman Mellema. As a young girl Nyai Ontosoroh was sold to Mellema by her father, in exchange for the prized position of the clerk for the company owned by Mellema. In those days, most Dutch men living in Indonesia already had a wife in their home country, and it was common practice for these lonely men to take a local woman as a concubine for the duration of their stay. And in those times Nyais, bore the mark of a sinful woman, a whore, a mistress, a concubine. Even Minke in the first part of the story still adheres to this stereotype:
“…it felt as if the whole world knew, that such indeed was the moral level of the families of nyais: low, dirty, without culture, moved only by lust. They were the families of prostitutes; they were people without character, destined to sink into nothingness, leaving no trace. ”
It was as if it was the choice of these women to be taken as a mistress by the ruling Dutch, when in fact these women were taken from their families, sold, or given as an offering in return for a favor without their consent. And sexual service was not the only thing expected from the women. According to Ann Laura Stoler, the term concubinage in Indonesia also meant various “arrangements” which also included labor without pay and legal rights to the children she bore . As victims of circumstances, these women also had to bear scorn from society (both from their fellow country men and women and also from the Dutch) who likened them to prostitutes and women with low morals who should be avoided at all costs. This view was also extended to their family members as Toer writes in his story of Minke’s life after his introduction to the family. Minke became an outcast, avoided by his classmates and teachers. This was the consequence of being acquainted with a Nyai and her family in those days. The fate was even worse for the children of these interracial relationships. Called by the Dutch name of voorkinderen (which means children from a previous marriage or union), the term was “marked to signal illegitimate children of a mixed union” .
The Nyais were alienated from their families and culture with the task of adjusting to a new life style and culture in a short time. Nyai Ontosoroh explains this to her daughter: “He never forced me to do anything, except study. In this matter, he was a hard but a good teacher” . And then she adds, “I studied everything possible about my master’s wants: cleanliness, Malay, making the bed, ordering the house, cooking European food” . This is a form of what Bhabha calls mimicry, which, he argues, is actually a form of colonial discourse strategy which represents the colonizer’s need for a ‘recognizable’ and ‘reformed other’ .
At first the difference attracted Mellema, which lead to his appropriation of her as his mistress. However by training her in Dutch customs, language, knowledge, Mellema shows the other side of the coin: his anxiety of the unfamiliar difference of the ‘other’ who is now living in his house, hence the attempt to familiarize the differences by assigning her a more familiar life style, a lifestyle mimicking his own. This, in its truest form is an evidence of colonial mimicry which Bhabha (adapting Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration) describes as ‘the desire for a reformed, recognizable other, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite’ .
However, Bhabha also adds “in order to be effective, mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference”. In This Earth of Mankind this is apparent in Mellema’s decision, in spite of having taught her everything she needed to know about European culture, after recreating her as a “Dutch woman with brown skin”, he still refuses to completely embrace her as someone who is on the same level as him . He does this by refusing to marry her. This is the difference that he must maintain in order preserve his control over her. He further tries to reinforce this difference by constantly reminding her that even though she is ‘cleverer and better than all of them’, it is still impossible for her ‘to be like a Dutch woman’ .
With the difference in place, Mellema grows to feel more secure and continues to transfer all of his knowledge including how to run his company and slowly begins to let Nyai supervise the daily operation of his company. Little does he know that as he grows fonder and more dependent on her, she becomes more and more independent. As she starts preparing for the day when Mellema would leave the country and abandon her (this is a common practice in colonial times) she starts shedding her old identity as Sanikem (the name given to her by her parents):
“Yes, Ann, as time went on, the old sanikem began to disappear completely. Mama grew up into a new person with a new vision and new views… Sometimes I asked myself: Had I become a Dutch woman with brown skin? ”
This mimicry has created a third space for Nyai’s resistance and subversion from Mellema. Toer himself sees this subversion of the colonized as an important part of the story. He uses this subversion at the beginning of the story to give a different view to his reader about the power relation between a native and a colonizer, between Nyai and Mellema. This is shown in the second chapter of the book when Mellema gets angry and threatening as he discovers Minke in his house, without his permission. In defence of her guest Nyai, threatens him back and tells Mellema that he has no rights in the house:” ‘A mad European is the same as a mad Native!’ Her eyes burned with hatred and disgust. ‘You have no rights in this house. You know where your room is.’ The Nyai pointed to a door. ”
In this story the mimicry has indeed unsettled the colonizer and provided “a space for insubordination and antagonism” which is taken to the extreme in this story by showing how Nyai can triumph over Mellema in that dispute. With this mimicry, Nyai has also taken her enslavement as a turning point from her old self who is always governed and controlled by another (first her father and then Mellema) to someone that has control over her self: “So it was that I began to understand that in reality I was not at all dependent on Mr. Mellema. On the contrary he was dependent on me” . In this novel, Pramoedya reveals the ‘fractured and destabilized’ identity of the colonizer as a result of the ‘third space’ of subversion created by the stereotype and mimicry.



The New Nyais and Contemporary Stereotypes
For the colonials, illegitimacy of these interracial relations was used to reinforce difference, to further accentuate segregation and the divide between the pure blooded Europeans and the low ranked natives. This colonial legacy of illegitimacy remains the essence of contemporary stereotypes of modern day Indonesian women who are in interracial relationships. These stereotypes are repeated through time and though today much has changed, the core of the stereotype remains intact. Women who are in interracial relationships or even women who are seen with a bule man are still seen as ‘bad women’, which means easy, promiscuous women with loose attitude towards men and questionable morals, by both Indonesians and by the expatriate community living in Indonesia.
The stereotype is widely available on the internet through personal websites and weblogs to online chat forums. A website created by an expatriate living and working in Indonesia called Jakartablokm.com has even dedicated a separate category describing Indonesian girls one would most likely find in a typical Jakarta bar designed to attract expatriates, with no less than 30 categories of girls . He uses terms like gold-diggers, sharks, derelicts, psychos, and brain dead beauties to describe the women frequenting these bars. Another popular term that is used frequently when describing these women is the term ayam. A blog entry titled ‘On The New No Ayam Policy’ by an expatriate man living in Indonesia talks about the stereotypes in detail: ‘Ayam should suffice as it is well understood by everyone. Personally I don’t really care if you want to call them ‘pembantu’ or ‘slutty’ or ‘exotic’ or whatever’. And to further illustrate he describes the word slutty in this context as: ‘Ugly, classless, tasteless, misbehaved, ill mannered and fashion challenged. Slutty Ayams are the worst of this sub-species, aesthetically speaking.’ This blog is actually a summary of several discussions happening around the same time on personal blogs about these stereotypes. “Ayam” in Indonesian literally means “chicken”. In this context the term has been used to represent a certain group of Indonesian women who frequent places where these new colonials congregate. These ‘new colonials’ are likening these women to something that is less than human in order to be able to feel superior to them. However, the degrading process does not stop there. Not only do they refer to these women as less than human but also as being powerless when confronted with humans, something raised only to be consumed by humans. In this case it is clear where Bhabha’s thinking comes into play, how the stereotype is exercised to construct an image of something that is less than the colonizers on the bases of physical attributes and other differences in order justify the exercise of power over them: “The objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and instruction” .
This notion of treating women as livestock is also apparent in colonial times as described by Toer when he tells the story of how Nyai Ontosoroh wants her daughter to have a better life than her, to be able to marry anyone she likes: “You, my child, you must not be treated like a piece of livestock. My child may not be sold to anyone, no matter what the price” . In this story Nyai Ontosoroh is referring to herself when her father ‘sold’ her to Mellema in exchange for a high position in the company. This exploitation does not exclude Indonesian men. Toer’s description of this exploitation based on racial character can also be seen in his choice of name for the main character, Minke. In the story the reader is never told who Minke’s real name is and at the beginning of the story Minke was reminded about how he got his name. It was actually a nickname given to him by his teacher when he came close to calling him a monkey (which was what the Dutch used to refer to Indonesian natives) when he scolded him. Monkey is also what Mellema called Minke the night he sees Minke in the house without his permission. He uses the term to degrade Minke as a native compared to Europeans, even though he has learned to ‘mimic’ the Dutch by going to a Dutch school and speaking the language: “ ‘You think, boy, because you wear European clothes, mix with Europeans, and can speak a little Dutch you them become a European? You’re still a monkey’ “.
This discursive practice of dehumanizing a group of people by reducing them to a degrading stereotype also carries another meaning. Even though these new colonials refer to these women by degrading terms, there is still a sense of exoticism about the women that attracts them. By developing categories of Indonesian women and also specifying these women in very detailed categories to recognize and ‘conquer’ them (this is apparent in personal blogs like jakartablokm.com with detailed guides to Indonesian women and in which bars to find them), these stereotypes actually betray their (expat desire) desire for the women. Bhabha’s concept of the stereotype as fetish, helps us understand this idea that the stereotype as a colonial discursive strategy is actually a form of fear and fascination at the same time . Freud describes fetishism as a case when, “the normal sexual object is replaced by another which bears some relation to it, but is entirely unsuited to serve the normal sexual aim…” . In Bhabha’s reading of fetish and the stereotype, he argues that both are similar in construction. Both fetish and stereotype connects something that is different, disturbing, unfamiliar with something that is more accepted and “familiar” (the foot as the fetishized object to replace the castrated penis in Freud’s case, while the labeling of these women as ayam is a familiarization process of the seemingly different object). The labeling of the woman as an ayam is a form of familiarization of the seemingly different object. In enforcing these stereotypes, they are showing a fractured sense of their own identity and authority as the ‘new colonials’ who have come to make their living in Indonesia. This raises a question: can this act of dehumanizing women be seen as the resurrection of the old colonial anxiety (as seen in Mellema’s case which eventually became true when he was eventually cast out from his own house by his mistress)?
In this case of the contemporary stereotype there is always a play between the image of the woman as ‘easy’, cheap with questionable morals while on the other hand there is also a desire for the different, ‘exotic’ looking women. With regards to this, Bhabha argues that fetishism or the stereotype as fetish is always “a play” between what is rejected and feared and what is accepted and even desired . This is evident in the content of some articles found in blogs written by expatriates living in Indonesia where the discussion is centered around the reason why bule man prefer Indonesian women with very specific physical traits. The title of one such blog is: Bules Like Pembantus? . This blog summarized heated discussions about similar topic of Western men and Indonesian women in three other blogs and asked his readers about their opinion on the matter. Pembantu is actually the Indonesian word for maid. What is of particular significance is the physical appearance usually associated with the stereotype of “maid”: long black hair, dark skinned, with a flat wide nose, and protruding lips. To most people these are the facial features of people from Central and Eastern Javanese kampung (village), where many women come from to look for jobs as domestic servants in the capital. It is not considered attractive or beautiful by contemporary Indonesian ‘standards’ of beauty. Several commentators of the blog see these physical traits as the sign of exoticism that some Western men may find attractive in Asian women. This discussion was actually sparked by a post in a personal blog, written by Thang D. Nguyen , a Vietnamese writer who is now working and living in Indonesia, where he wrote about a conversation he had with an Indonesian friend about the type of Indonesian women that Western men like. He quotes his Indonesian friend asking the question: “Don’t you think that many of the Indonesian women that white foreigners (buleh) go out with or marry are so unattractive?” He then continued to quote the friend saying: “They look like maids, don’t they?” He finishes the post by summarizing that for Indonesian men “an Indonesian woman with a dark complexion, buck teeth, and a high forehead typically found among remote mountain villagers in Java, is not beautiful.”
This post then sparked a lengthy discussion over the matter and was also taken up by other bloggers. The topic has also moved into mainstream media, when this post by Nguyen was rewritten and published in one of the main English newspaper in the country, The Jakarta Post, with most of the demeaning comments and reference to the pembantu look replaced with words such as such as unattractive, dark skinned or chocolate skinned women . This physical feature of the stereotype then becomes more powerful as it becomes the easy-to-spot character to categorize and label the women. With regards to this, one can look at Baudrillard’s notion of representation and control as Robert Young writes: “as soon as the other can be represented, it can be appropriated and controlled” . Thus, as soon as these women can be represented as something that is less than human (ayam/chicken—a commodity) and as domestic servant (another commodity), they can be appropriated and controlled.
Another form of control over the stereotype and a vehicle to ensure its validity by constant repetition, is offered by contemporary popular culture, in particular TV commercials. In Indonesia, television broadcasts an almost endless array of commercials for skin whitening products. Most of these commercials are of brands from various multinational companies such as L’Oreal, Unilever and P&G that have been dominating the country in their own right along with other multi national corporations invading the country under the banner of free trade and globalization , creating unreachable dreams for Indonesians where every women is fair skinned, happy and rich with the only worry they have is trying to get the guy next door to notice them. And for a lot of Indonesian women the hope of ever achieving that dream is to purchase a bottle of whitening product being advertised and also by purchasing clothes from Western brands like Guess, Gap, Topshop, Zara, Mango, etc. Not too mention the popularity of studying abroad (preferably in a university in the US or any of the Western European countries) which has become one of the main qualifications for one to be employable (in a well known company with a good position) in Indonesia. This can also be seen as and example of Bhabha’s mimicry which relies on the concept of resemblance, the colonized mimicking the colonizer in every little detail resulting in a realization that even with all the knowledge they have learned about the colonizer’s culture, education, way of life they will never be exactly the same. In This Earth of Mankind, Nyai Ontosoroh learns all the ways of the Dutch from Mellema until she herself questions her identity of being Dutch woman with brown skin. Nonetheless, the colonizer always puts the colonized back in their place by confirming that it is impossible to be exactly like them. As evident in this quote of Mellema answering Nyai Ontosoroh when she questions whether or not she has become a Dutch woman: “It’s impossible for you to be like a Dutch woman. And it’s not necessary either. ” In old colonial time, the mimicry stops at this point. Now with the introduction of whitening products, Indonesian women also have the option of being ‘white’. This is also another form of the new domination by foreign capital that is coming in, which is further playing on the social/class divide between the haves and the have nots in Indonesia with some physical embellishments thrown in.
These whitening product commercials are inserted in domestic soap operas in which the overwhelming majority of female protagonists are much lighter-skinned than the average Indonesian woman. These soap operas, called sinetrons, have one of the highest ratings and, in fact, compete with infotainment shows that actually feature news and gossip about actresses and actors from these soap operas. An average Indonesian viewer watches around 24 hours of sinetron every month . This means 24 hours of constant streaming of stereotyped images of women and the standard ideal representation of what is considered beautiful and ideal, and this does not even include all the infotainment shows which also have high ratings and commercials.
Alongside the ideal picture of beauty, there is also the ‘ideal’ stereotype of the opposite of beauty, which is seen in the character of the domestic servant, a staple in all middle to upper class households shown on television. In contrast to the fair skinned, Eurasian looking female protagonists, there is also the stereotyped image of the domestic servant. In accordance to the stereotype of ‘maid’, the part is usually played by actresses who are darker skinned and with a more ‘native’ or Malay looking features, which most probably is the source. This dichotomy is further amplified through contemporary Indonesian popular culture with versions of the fair/dark skinned, rich/poor, educated/uneducated, city kids/ village children stereotype. The servant is always shown as someone coming from the kampung. Most people associate living in the village with working in rice fields, under the sun, hence the darker skin of the women and men originating from villages. This rings true in the fore-mentioned Jakarta Post article where the writer mentions that “in most Asian societies, a dark complexion is the symbol of peasantry, hard labor, and life in a rural area. By contrast, a fair complexion is the symbol of high-society status, leisure, and life a cosmopolitan city “. Thus, the word kampung (or the adjective kampungan) has also become synonymous with being tacky, not modern and uneducated. A way of dressing and talking are also other ways of identifying someone as kampungan and, by extension, as domestic servants. In contemporary popular culture, the beautiful heroines are always dressed in the latest fashion, while the costume designer of these shows go to great lengths to dress the so-called kampungan people in a cheesy, tacky, ‘cheap’ manner, much like how the chavs are described in British popular culture.
By assigning a certain stereotype to differentiate a group of people from others, one is actually acknowledging the differences and at the same time showing one’s fear of that difference and, in this case, attraction to that difference. Bhabha argues that fetishism or the stereotype as fetish is always “a play” between what is rejected and feared and what is accepted and even desired . In this case there is always a play between the image of the Nyais as ‘easy’, cheap with questionable morals while on the other hand there is also a desire for the Eurasian look, which is the result of these ‘feared’, illegitimate relationships. This brings one back to the issue of illegitimacy. In This Earth of Mankind, Minke falls in love with the beautiful, fair skinned Annelies, however Toer also shows Minke’s fear about entering the house of a Nyai in the first part of the novel by describing her house as “eerie and sinister .”
This desire is quite evident when one observes Indonesian popular culture on the media. Almost all of local soap operas feature Eurasian looking models and not to mention lifestyle, teen, women and men’s fashion magazines which feature where the use of Eurasian looking or even Caucasian models has become an unspoken norm. Some magazines even go as far as requesting that their stylists only use Caucasian models or ‘white’ looking Eurasian models. I experienced this when I worked for an Indonesian edition of a British magazine. Hence, the mother is rejected, because of the aura of illegitimacy that always surrounds these inter-racial relationships, while the hybrid of the relationship is embraced and worshipped by the society.
Some comments on the blogs also mentioned the fact that not all Indonesian women in interracial relationships can be boxed into the dark skinned ‘domestic servant’ look category. Some also mention the fact that a lot of Indonesian actresses and models and other women from middle to upper social class are also in interracial relationships with white foreigners. However, this statement is actually reinforcing the existing stereotype among Indonesian men that women with fair skin equals to class and ‘good’ behaviour, as most examples given with the statements are usually of Indonesian celebrities with fair skin and Eurasian features.
Indonesian men respond to this phenomenon of Indonesian celebrities pairing up with foreigners with posts such as All Local Men Unite, which was the subject on a thread of a posting forum, posted by an Indonesian male in 2004 . The initiator of this particular thread displayed his worries about Indonesian women being taken over by foreigner. This fear is brought about by the fact that more Indonesian women, especially celebrities he sees in tabloids, are choosing to settle down with foreigners instead of local men. The discussion then once again returns to the stereotype of the unattractive, dark skinned women who would usually attract a white man. I would also argue that their fear is also rooted in the fact that white men, both in the old colonial time and today, are still seen as richer and more powerful. This argument is also evident in the discussion of another contemporary stereotype that is circulated among Indonesians for the new Nyais, which is the label gold digger. The domination of the multinational corporations in Indonesia has brought about major changes in the employment field. Now more and more people from other countries are coming to work in Indonesia, with most of them occupying high level management positions with huge paychecks. This has given rise to the common assumption that being white is synonymous with being rich. As Fanon writes (as quoted by Bhabha): “the originality of the colonial context is that the economic substructure is also a superstructure…you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. ” And this statement describes what was and is still going on in Indonesia, white men are seen as having more power and more money than natives with a few changes: in the old colonial time, they were plantation owners and colonial government officials while now they are managers of big multinational companies.
All these facts, recalls another stereotype, one which is concerning the ‘new colonizer’, these expatriates coming from ‘wealthy’ Western countries, bringing their powerful troops to conquer Indonesia’s wealth by setting up multinational companies and controlling the production and harvesting of Indonesia’s national resources, while at the same time occupying all the high positions of the companies without giving any chance for the ‘natives’ to make a small claim of what should be rightfully theirs.
Albert Memmi asks the question why does one leave his country to expatriate? The way he answers in his book The Colonizer and The Colonized, gives us an idea of the reasons most expatriates choose to settle in Indonesia today. A colony is defined as “a place where one earns more and spends less. You go to a colony because jobs are guaranteed, wages high, careers more rapid and business more profitable” . Confirming this, Ian, a British man who settled in Indonesia for almost five years, whom I interviewed for this essay states,” In Indonesia I managed to secure a very high position at a TV station, which probably would not have been the case, had I stayed in the UK.”
Today, not only the top jobs are taken over by foreigners, most of Indonesian natural commodities have also been taken over by multinational companies. In his book, The New Rulers of The World, Pilger exposes some of the largest of the multinational companies operating in Indonesia “The Freeport Company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. An American and European consortium got West Papua’s nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia’s bauxite. A group of American, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra, West Papua and Kalimantan” . Multinational companies also benefit from the fact that they can employ Indonesians for lower level jobs and also middle management positions at a much less cost than importing their own countrymen. Reza, an Indonesian working for a multi national company I interviewed for this essay, expresses his fear of not being able to progress much after he has achieved the middle management level: “I am now only one step away from becoming a brand manager of multinational personal care company, but I really don’t see how I can move further up the ladder if I’m not a bule.” Now, powerless to stop the appropriation of their country’s natural resources without being able to even make a small claim on what they perceive to be rightfully theirs (in the form of high level employment), Indonesian men (and women) are seeing how this wealth and power owned by the ‘new colonials’ are enabling them to also ‘takeover‘ Indonesian women. Indonesian women have become commodities and in a false bid to protect them from being appropriated by the Westerners, Indonesian men resort to degrading the new Nyais with demeaning stereotypes. “All these women equate white foreigners with money, when they see a bule guy all they see is the dollar sign because they know all the big companies here are headed by bules,” says Budi (not his real name), another Indonesian man working in a multinational company.
This fear and anxiety shared by today’s Indonesians of the appropriation of resources by the West is similar to the fear Indonesians share in colonial times. Toer describes this through the analogy of the rape of the helpless Nyai Ontosoroh (as the representation of the fertile and beautiful land of Indonesia) by Mellema . In Toer’s story Nyai Ontosoroh represents all the resources that have been appropriated by the colonials. When one sees this story through contemporary cultural setereotypes, these women are still seen as bodies that can be exploited. By ascribing derogatory and demeaning stereotypes (ayam/chicken and pembantu/maid), women’s bodies are once again seen as something that can be exploited and consumed. In the same stereotype one can see the fractured sense of identity and power of both the colonizers and the colonized.


The New Nyai and Her Space for Subversion
In the story of the old colonial times, one can read Toer’s tale of Nyai Ontosoroh’s efforts of becoming ‘the very best nyai’ as a form of mimicry, which in turn provides her with a space of subversion. How is this space of subversion exercised in contemporary stereotype? When one tries to employ Bhabha’s concept of mimicry to contemporary stereotype, one also need to discuss the physical mimicry of the women in question. The physical quality that characterizes the ayam stereotype is carried through in discussions of their way of dressing. Often associated with the lower social class trying to mimic members of the upper social class in a brash and flashy way, slinky and sexy clothes with big and flashy accessories are much-mentioned traits. Mira, a general manager of a local PR agency who is also happily married to a white Australian, always makes it a point to dress ‘up’ when she is out with her husband and son. And what Mira means by dressing ‘up’ is dressing in exactly the opposite way of how the stereotype is seen in society. She would try to avoid wearing low cut tops and dresses and also too short skirts. Instead opting for modest simple outfits with very simple jewelry or professional looking clothes, such as two-piece suit sets. Thus, in this case Mira has taken the stereotype and uses it in reverse to give herself her own space of identity. Knowing the stereotype, she feels that she is much more in control of how she is letting others view her as a spouse in an interracial relationship. In this case she has created a new meaning for the stereotype as it’s described by McRobbie that the stereotype can “become an instrument for new modes of self representation” .
Other ‘victims’ of the stereotype recognized how destructive the stereotypes can be and they decide to create a space of their own by creating an alliance of Indonesian women in interracial relationships in the form of an organization called Srikandi. Quoted from the website, Srikandi is a “non-political and non profit organization for Indonesian women of all religions who are married or were previously married to foreigners. Its mission is to create a mutual bond between members by providing a forum for networking, support, sharing of experiences and information for self improvement, and to enhance family life” . The formation of this organization signifies these women’s recognition of being seen as something different and also their rejection of the stereotypes.
Another form of stereotyping that has found its way into the mainstream media is the class-biased stereotype (darker skin is often thought of being equal to lower, uneducated class). Mainstream magazines targeted for upper class Indonesian women and teen such as Cosmopolitan Indonesia, Seventeen Indonesia and Cosmogirl Indonesia, recognize the dark skin stereotypes and challenges them with special articles (articles about healthy and clean skin instead of fair looking skin), choice of models (Cosmopolitan, Seventeen and Cosmogirl have all used models that are considered to be darker) and even advertising (to advertise Seventeen when they first started, the magazine decided to portray the magazine using four different looking girls with one of them being darker skinned with curly hair). Some may argue that these magazines jumped on the bandwagon of darker skinned beauty simply because it was popular at the time to talk about these issues (with The Body Shop leading the way with campaigns stating things like: You don’t need to have be fair skinned and slim to enjoy life). Nonetheless, this can also be seen as an attempt to produce new meaning to contradict the stereotype, and in McRobbie’s words a “reworking of the stereotypes” .



Conclusion
Stereotypes of Indonesian women and Western men date back to colonial times, with traces of it still very much alive in and contemporary stereotype enforced by popular culture. The technologies of power behind the colonial discursive strategy of the stereotypes work to create a racial and social divide based on skin color among Indonesians themselves (as people coming from the same racial background). When in the past this colonial discursive strategy is created and maintained by the colonials to ensure a relation of power, in contemporary stereotype it is maintained to provide people with unreachable dreams and fantasies to ensure the domination of the ‘new colonials’ which are multinational corporations dominating the country’s economic front.
However, following Bhabha’s thinking, the stereotype always carry a double meaning and it creates as much a disturbance for the colonizer as it is for the colonized. While even though these women are rejected and derided though the stereotypes, at the same time their difference makes them desirable as a new and easy to manipulate potential market. In its binarism, this stereotype works as a fetish which, according to Robert Young in his reading of Bhabha, “gives access to an identity which is based on mastery and pleasure and also on anxiety and defence” . Moore-Gilbert agrees with this reading of Bhabha and further states that Bhabha translates the stereotype not as evidence of fixity and stability, but rather as a form of “destabilized and fractured” sense of identity and authority. This ‘fracturing’ of the colonizer’s identity can be seen through the constant repetition of the stereotype through popular culture and also more personal discursive practice (such as weblogs, etc). It is as if the colonizer is constantly trying to “guarantee certainty” through the persistent repetition of these stereotypes . Until today, through continuous exaggerated repetition of these stereotypes, these women still remain as the society have it and as Bhabha puts it “an ‘other’” and yet entirely knowable and visible” . However, this continuous repetition of the stereotypes also provides a space for agency and subversion from the colonized. The ‘old nyais‘ uses mimicry as a tool to fight back and to create her own space, as illustrated by Toer in the story of how Nyai Ontosoroh gains her master’s trust to control the house and business and in the end it resulted also in control over him. While in contemporary cultural practice, the use and the meaning of the stereotype is turned around and given another meaning by the ‘new nyais’ to create their own space to subvert the negative stereotypes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.

Freud, Sigmund (1977) On Sexuality: Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, London: Penguin Books.

McRobbie, Angela (2005) ‘Look Back in Anger: Homi Bhabha’s Resistant Subject of Colonial Agency’ in The Uses of Cultural Studies, London: Sage Publications.

Memmi, Albert (1974) The Colonizer and The Colonized, London: Earthscan Publications.

Moore-Gilbert, Bart J. (1997) Post Colonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics, London: Verso Books.

Pilger, John (2002) ‘The Model Pupil’, in The New Rulers of the World, London: Verso.

Stoler, Ann Laura (2002) Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Toer, Pramoedya Ananta (1996) This Earth of Mankind, trans. Max Lane, New York, London, Victoria, Toronto: Penguin Books.

Young, Robert (1990) ‘The Ambivalence of Bhabha’ in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, London: Routledge.


ARTICLES AND ONLINE RESOURCES

Nguyen, Thang D., “Beauty, Indeed, is in the Eyes of The Beholder!”, The Jakarta Post, sec. Lifebites, 28 October 2006

http://jakartablokm.com/

www.new.coratcoret.com

http://thangthecolumnist.blogspot.com/

http://thejavajive.com/blog/?p=479

http://theunspunblog.com/2006/10/04/bules-like-pembantus/

The Show! Discarded Intimacy

Here are pics from the show! Dang! Too bad I was too drunk and too high strung on opening night to take pictures.
It's called Discarded Intimacy by the way. More writing and pictures coming up, after my bloody dissertation is done. For now click www.discardedintimacy.com