Indonesia’s Fight Club: Men, Masculinity and Cultural Trauma in the Internet
Marshal Clark (University of Tasmania)
This paper investigates representations of men and masculinities in post-New Order, and post-tsunami, Indonesian popular culture. It begins by examining some of the ideas raised in the nexus between the studies of Internet, cultural trauma and gender in Indonesia. This leads to an analysis of one of Indonesia’s most popular Internet chat forums, Kaskus.com, with a particular focus on its notorious forum, ‘Fight Club’, where Christian and Muslim men regularly engage in high-spirited flame wars. In the wake of the recent tsunami disaster in Aceh, quite a few threads have focused on the causes, meanings and consequences of the disaster, constructing what Alexander (2003) would class as a “new master narrative”, a key ingredient of “cultural trauma”. Here, in the domain of cyberspace, it is shown how Indonesian ‘men’, like Indonesian ‘women’, are constructed in a complex and often contradictory manner. Underlying this analysis is the theoretical sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, which is utilized to suggest that if Indonesian women are to be assisted in their efforts to resist the gender inequality of Indonesia’s patriarchal gender regime, then the social gendering, and social practices, of men and masculinity must also be understood.
