style – Adventures in Design

The Banci in Ababi and Nengah’s Disgust

Sarong Series Number 4: More thoughts on gender and sarongs

There was to be a Joged dance performance in Ababi, the village where I lived from 1998 until 2000 to do research for a PhD in Cultural Anthropology (not Archeology; I studied contemporary ideas about the body and cosmology. I didn’t dig things up).[1] The Joged troupe arrived in a truck and the members started to climb down. We were standing in front of our gate (me, Julian – who was 3ish at the time – and Luh, the Balinese woman who lived with me during my fieldwork to help with household work and childcare) watching the troupe as other people from the village started to assemble and stand on the edges of the road to watch. Nengah, who was deaf, arrived and stood near me. People had called her Kolok when I first moved to the village. Kolok means something along the lines of deaf mute. I didn’t want to use the word Kolok to refer to my neighbor. So I asked people I knew from the village about her birth order.[2] First born is Wayan, Gede, or Putu. Second born is Kadek, Made or Nengah, which means middle. Third born is Komang or Nyoman. Forth is Ketut. If there is a fifth child you start over at Wayan. Kolok was the second born. I started to call her Nengah. Other people I knew also started calling her Nengah after that.

A local sign language had developed in the village to communicate with Nengah. I am not sure who developed the signs in use. I never asked how that came about, though now I wish I had. The structure of the signs loosely followed the logic of Balinese or Indonesian in terms of having sweeping gestures as time-markers to indicate when things occur(ed). In spoken Balinese and Indonesian, there is no verb tense. Instead there are words for a long time ago, yesterday, a short time ago, earlier today, just now, right now, later, tomorrow, sometime in the future. With Nengah, smaller or larger gestures in front of the self or behind the self indicated this notion of time. A hand cupped under the breast meant mother. A finger pointing down at the crotch meant man. I didn’t learn all of the signs people used but I never felt like I had trouble communicating with Nengah.

On the day the Joged came to the village and the troupe climbed down from the truck – dancers, musicians, the people doing the dancers’ hair, makeup, and costumes – Nengah identified a man in the group and frowned. She pointed to him then held her hand up, fingers spread, and shook it, a bit like jazz-hands. This gesture means ‘no’ and you use it to signal rejection from a distance or while you are walking away. She did this again, adding a dismissive gesture and vocalizing, making sounds without opening her mouth. Those sounds make me wonder, now, if the impulse to speak is inextricably part of us to the point that the will to communicate, even when it’s with signs, elicits the production of sounds. She indicated her sarong, pointed to his sarong, expressed disgust, waved her hand. I realized he had wrapped his sarong like a woman. Suddenly, what she was expressing was so clear to me. Her gestures were disciplinary, scolding, judgmental, public, and they surprised me. In my research, I talked to my teachers (I was studying palm leaf manuscripts and esoteric knowledge about the body and cosmology) often about gender, albeit in the contexts of ritual symbolism, music, and dance choreography. In these conversations, my teachers described a flexibility in the performance of gender – indeed it was acknowledged that there is a performative aspect to gender; there must be if a woman can dance in a male style or a man in a female style – without a socially judgmental attitude, or so it seemed to me.

There was no trans category. It was 1999. It was Bali. The notion of homosexuality (homoseks) was culturally available but was a Western import and didn’t have the same meaning in Bali as in the United States. The relevant native concept was banci (bahn-chee). Banci is an adjective that describes a combination of male and female, that is, androgyny. Banci can also be a noun, describing a person or thing having the characteristics of the adjectival banci. I contend that the man who was wearing his sarong wrapped like a woman – who had inspired Nengah’s adamant disapproval – was not a man wearing his sarong wrapped like a woman. He was banci, a legible subject position codified in particular ways – cross-dressing or combining aspects of male and female dress, cross-dancing or dancing in a style that is neither feminine nor masculine but something in between, doing the work of the opposite sex, or combinations of gendered forms of work that are usually segregated by sex. To be considered banci, there has to be a combination of clearly oppositely gendered elements – male body with female dress and work for example; female body with male dress and dance is another example. Banci is neither male nor female; banci is both male and female at once.

This is Bruce in April 2022. He was generous enough to stand in front of the camera and allow me, briefly, to visualize what I saw more than twenty years ago when Nengah drew my attention to the young man with the Joged who wore his sarong like a woman, which positioned him as banci.

Banci people, historically, could develop alternative forms of intimacy; a makasihan relationship – which means “in love” – describes same-sex, marriage-like relationships of ‘life friends’ who refuse to marry, remain ‘sleeping partners,’ and share a living space. I most often heard stories of makasihan relationships in accounts of Gandrung, a very old dance genre in which beautiful young boys were imbued with love magic, adorned as women, and danced with men in a manner similar to Joged. a later form in which the female position was danced by a woman. This category of makasihan relationship has not survived to the present day. To put this another way, there are still men and women who never marry and have a same-sex ‘sleeping partner’ into adulthood and old age. People vaguely assume this style of relationship could be romantic and sexual but the descriptor makasihan is not used and it’s not necessarily the case that the actors consider themselves homoseks.

These images capture something that is a little hard to express. They look right. The person Nengah fixated on was not working to look feminine in any way other than how s(h)e wrapped the sarong s(h)e wore. I would not have noticed without Nengah’s visceral reaction.

***

I wrote the previous paragraphs and footnotes in the early Spring of 2022. I took the accompanying photographs of Bruce dressed up in one of my sarongs -wrapped the way a woman wraps a sarong – sometime before April 12, the date on which he elected to have a follow-up surgery that resulted in his death from Radiation Fibrosis Syndrome three months later.

I intended these photographs to be illustrations of what banci combinations of gendered elements – male body, female clothing for example – can look like. My previous posts on wrapping a sarong like a woman and like a man are the frame of reference. On the other hand, I dressed myself like a man, which is actually an example of banci.

I have alot to say about gender and sarongs. I have more stories. But the fact that I made these photos of Bruce for this post and saved it as a draft here with notes to myself to add material but then didn’t finish it because Bruce’s hospitalizations started and my life began to revolve around his health crisis and our shared fear of catastrophic bleeding, and then he died, seems like it demands a comment. I think his picture here, lively and funny and alive and convincing in his channeling of a banci vibe, has stopped me these months since July 12 when he left this earthy realm and became memory and images stored on my hard disk. I have felt paralyzed every time and recoiled, closed the laptop.

I have to start making and writing again. I feel like I have been floating in a half-life with diminished, sometimes totally absent, purpose for months. And I have to finish this post, even though it won’t take the ideas I have been playing with as far as I intended. Maybe that’s fine. My posts get too long. So I’m publishing this in its unfinished state with notes to myself at the end as teasers for future posts I will commit to writing. They are good stories.

In the meantime you may wonder – so what about the banci person with the Joged troupe who had the body and short hair of a man and also wrapped his sarong like a woman? I don’t know anything more about that particular person, though I do know quite alot more about banci and the difference it makes how one wraps a sarong.

***

Gandrung dance and Pak Later’s anger – “what is love?” Longing for the perfection of banci.

The hand movement to demonstrate the imaginary perfect companionate intimacy of husbands and wives.

Nengah’s other public anger about sex and her divorced aunt .

NOTE: I have used male and female pronouns here because we use gendered pronouns in English and these pronouns tell us something about the way different categories of person get combined or distinguished through clothing, work, and love in a sex-segregated Balinese context. I have not used plural they and their because these are not relevant linguistic terms or categories for Balinese. The Indonesian language does not have the same linguistic conundrum we have in English; the Indonesian pronoun dia is ungendered, meaning both he and she, as well as it. Further, the third person and passive voice are used in conversation both to refer to the self and to other people. Names are used instead of ‘you’ or ‘I.’ My Balinese collaborator actually refers to himself as I Raga, which simply means ‘the body’ or ‘the person.’ In many ways this linguistic landscape is much better suited to ambiguous or androgynous gender and combinatory subject positions. I often think we should just import the pronoun dia.

[1] Joged Bumbung (you can find videos on YouTube) is a courtship dance in which young women, accompanied by a bamboo gamelan orchestra that is specific to the genre, dance with men from the audience, comprised at least of the village where the Joged is happening and often surrounding villages. My description is based on the performances I have seen in the past, the last one of which was about two decades ago. Even from the first Jogeds I saw in 1993 to the most recent I have seen in 2003, Joged dance changed and has no doubt changed more since, under the influence of global dance trends visible on social media. The following paragraph describes a more classic Joged rather than more recent sexualized iterations I witnessed in the early aughts that were regarded as scandalous by local politicians who deemed Joged dancers’ hip gyrations as porno. This designation was particularly potent at the time as there were national debates about legislation to outlaw ‘pornographic action.’ In these debates, pornogaphy was not limited to media produced with the intention to arouse; pornography was instead more broadly defined as any action that caused a feeling of desire in a viewer. This broadened definition is particularly concerning for the way it positions aroused citizens as agents of the state, discerning who is engaging in behaviors that should be counted as pornoaksi (pornographic action) and subject to disciplinary action carried out by the state.

In the classic dance, the Joged dancer begins behind a curtain (the dance space was just open ground, sometimes in the yard outside of a temple, in which a curtain was rigged up temporarily and a mat laid down for musicians), creating a sense of expectation by grasping the two curtains at their opening and making the curtain shake and dance before she dramatically parts the curtain and enters the space to perform an opening solo dance, using a fan, and accompanied by a musical overture. When this introductory dance finished, the music and choreography changed. The Joged began a coquettish, stylized walk around the space to indicate she was ready to select a partner. Holding her fan in her right hand, her hand just above shoulder level, she rotated her hand, in this way fluttering her fan. She would flutter the fan like this for the length of time she circled the dance space looking for the man she wanted to dance with her.

Historically, she would select from the group of men who showed they wished to dance by sitting on the ground on the periphery of the dance space (By the time I did my PhD fieldwork, this spatial organization had changed and little kids and their mothers would ring the dance space for a better view while the men stood behind. When the Joged picked a man from this group by pointing her fan, he would have to make his way through layers of seated women and children.). Once the Joged decided who she wanted to dance with, she touched him on the thigh with her fan, at which point he would get up, join her in the dance space and pay for the dance. Historically, men would pour coins into a copper pot so that the audience could hear from the clatter how much the partner was capable of paying; the more he chose to pay for the dance, the higher his status. The man would begin to dance with the Joged and they would improvise, using a range of loose choreographic conventions that indicated seduction (the Joged shaking her hips while looking over her shoulder at her partner then jumping away playfully when he approached, hip-shaking, jumping away, and on like that), conflict (mock-hitting each other with leafy branches supplied in the dance space for the purpose), reconciliation (one partner turning away from the other, crouching, pretending to wipe away tears, and having to be comforted and coaxed back into the dance), elopement (pretending to be on a horse together). Mock sex was an addition to this conventional repertoire in the early aughts with the Joged pulling her partner in close, holding his hips against hers with one arm around his waist, and thrusting her hips against him, often ending this embrace by thrusting against him once (punctuated by the music) hard enough to knock him off balance, a move that read as both rejecting and humiliating. I saw this lead to real rage on the part of the partner more than once and he went after the Joged with true violent intent, a few times grabbing the branches left on the dance floor as a prop. The Joged, each time I saw this happen, retreated behind the orchestra where she was shielded from the furious partner, who was restrained by other men and expelled from the dance space.

When the dance performance was over, the music and choreography changed once again and the Joged performed a meandering slow-down dance, waving goodbye with her fan and exiting by the curtain through which she had initially entered the space.

[2] In Balinese cultural naming-practice, people have two names, a birth-order name and a personal name. Names get more complicated upon marriage, the birth of children, assumption of a ritual specialist role, all transformations that involve a re-naming. People are addressed by this birth order name up to marriage, sometimes by a personal name (and sometimes a nickname, especially for men). Which name is used seems to depend upon context. Because birth order names are non-specific with reference to the individual, personal names are used when use of the birth order name could be confusing. Actually, I’m sure it’s much more complex than this linguistically and culturally speaking. But it’s not something I ever paid much attention to. I just used names in the way the people around me used names – birth order names in some contexts, birth order plus personal names in other contexts.

The Value of Stitches

More about the Little Black Overdress

In my previous post about the Little Black Overdress, I described noticing an impatient feeling while backstitching the gathers of the skirt onto the bodice. I kept thinking – this is taking too long. What disturbed me about that feeling, that thought, is the fact that I really do want to enjoy every stitch. This is a goal. And mostly I enjoy my stitches, which is why that agitation surprised me when I became aware of it, which I almost didn’t. We become used to such back-of-the-mind thoughts. Or at least I imagine I am not the only one who has the experience of gauzy thought-feelings moving behind the surface tension of other more front-of-the-mind thoughts. I have come to think of this sensation as something like clouds moving slowly across the sky, casting shadows on the ground, somewhere else, so we barely notice.

As I mentioned before, I realized I was valuing different stitches differently. My embroidery was the most valuable. My visible seam stitching was next on the list. My pretty interior stitching was third, my invisible stitches were fourth, and my covered up practical stitches – in this case the backstitching to hold the gathers in place and connect the skirt and the bodice, and later covered with a ribbon – came in fifth. As I was reflecting on this hierarchy I saw different aspects of my own labor were starting to relate to the value of women’s labor in global markets, classed labor here in the United States. Fast fashion garment workers’ labor is not valued. If the clothes are disposable, then the labor and materials that created them is viewed as disposable. Even couture seamstresses are referred to as ‘hands.’ My impatience over my backstitches was in this mix.

Here is what I wrote about this in my journal:

May 16, 2021

This image shows the gathering but not the finishing I describe below.

Yesterday I attached the skirt to the bodice, gathering the back stitches worked on the skirt side from left to right, until I got to the straight-stitched section, where I switched to working on the bodice side and continued right to left, which is more comfortable for me.

I trimmed the seam when I was finished. I would have liked to bind the gathered edge with the bodice seam allowance. But I didn’t want to stitch on the skirt and I hadn’t left a long enough seam allowance on the bodice side that I could wrap the skirt seam allowance and still have fabric to turn under and stitch in the ditch. So I sewed some of my grey ribbon onto the skirt seam allowance and then top-stitched that on the right side of the bodice so the appearance of the seam is very similar to, but not identical to, the other seam.

I like the way this looks on the front but not on the back. I can see my stitching line wavers on the ribbon – the black thread stands out on the grey ribbon. On the right side the stitching line does vary in distance from the first top-stitched line, but that variation is not really noticeable because it’s black thread on black fabric and also because the relationships I’m focusing on – one stitching line in relation to another – are consistent. The ribbon was not as carefully arranged on the back and I was adjusting to a mild fluctuation in the gathering line, which I then supplemented with a lone of top-stitching on the wrong side of the bodice.

Maybe this discussion is not important. But maybe it is. One of the things I have been thinking about is how Brenda Dayne talks about her projects. To a great extent her podcast is a discussion, or rather a narration, of her problem-solving. She charts her decision-making. She is always tweaking and experimenting. She talks about what she tried, whether it worked. If it didn’t work why not? If it did work, is she happy with the result?

The other thing I have been thinking about is how layered and constant the decision-making is at this stage. I imagine that as I become better at this, that more of what I do, the decisions I make, will become automated (is this right?). I’ll learn techniques that will start to feel natural in their execution. I won’t spend so much time trying to work it out in my mind. Or at least that is my fantasy – that it will get easier and faster.

I just wrote faster and that raises questions for me. As I have been working on different parts of the Little Black Overdress, I discern a sense of urgency that sometimes emerges for me. I notice that I have had the thought that what I’m doing is taking too long. The taking-too-long feeling doesn’t come from any external constraint. It’s not as if I don’t have something else I can wear. There is no deadline. I would like to wear the dress this summer but not yet. The weather isn’t quite there yet. I am enjoying the sewing. I am enjoying the embroidery. I’ve been going back and forth between the two – garment construction to embroidery to garment construction to embroidery again.

This image was taken June 19. 2021, when Brood X of the 17 year Cicadas had hatched and were everywhere, on everything, their collective soughing a soundtrack that was sometimes so loud it drowned out birdsong. Or maybe they just gave up trying to broadcast the boundaries of their territories. In this image you can see that I had thread-traced stitching-lines on the plackets (embroidered to match the cuffs) and the bodice.

The fact that this sensation / anxiety about speed came up alerts me to the cultural bias toward efficient execution. Get it done. It reminds me of my Dickensian Coat, which is so beautiful and deliciously comfortable. David asked me why was I taking so much time to mend a coat? Wouldn’t it be faster just to buy something new? Wouldn’t it be faster?

Bruce (Instagram: @bruce_falkinburg) asked me the same question about the Little Black Overdress. Wouldn’t it be faster if you sewed it on the machine? Yes. The answer is yes, it would be faster. But I don’t want it to be faster. Observing the feeling of anxiety, then, is interesting and points out how much work there is to become aware of all the ways this cultural value manifests, and also how to have an intentional response to it. I don’t think that’s quite right. What I’m trying to think about is the conscious development of a counter-narrative and a personal methodology.

Feelings like this, we are taught, are individual [here you can start to tell I’m an anthropologist]. To the extent they are individual, when you have a feeling that is contrary to the goal, or which even obstructs, you have failed. There is a moral failure – a lack of discipline, a lack of knowledge. But the feeling is actually cultural. If I seek to change the goal to enjoyment of my stitches over speedy execution of the task, then I have to grapple with the feelings that arise. I have to make the feelings part of the method.

Here you can see the final appearance of the bodice of the Little Black Overdress. Photography by @bruce_falkinburg in his photography studio in Frederick, MD

My contention is that the making itself should be enjoyable. My contention is that slow-making should be enjoyable. Slowing it down will draw out the enjoyment. But if the cultural value system is that a little dress should not take too much time – after all it’s just a little dress – then slowing down and putting a lot of time into the dress would be anxiety-producing. That which I have posited should be enjoyable, that is slow-making, becomes fraught.

So my personal theory and practice has to include a strategy for re-thinking making, re-feeling making. I need to understand where all of the feelings are coming from. What are they about? I need to be able to read and interpret the feelings in terms of the economy of waste and haste.

We have elevated being minimally skilled. It is a cultural value to be able to produce something useable/wearable with minimal skill.

As I have been writing, I have been having another parallel line of thought about the fabric I’m using. I thought it was cotton. But the way it glitters and the way it smells when I iron it, makes me think it could be a cotton/poly mix. I just took a flame to it. It does not melt. The steady fast burn with a yellow flame and no smoke suggests cotton. If it does have polyester it’s not much.

More views of the finished dress on the hoof with a silver silk slip as an underdress and metallic gunmetal leather Trippen boots. Photography – @bruce_falkinburg.

Somehow the fiber is making a difference to me. There is a way in which I feel like devoting this much time to a ‘cheap synthetic’ is not justified. So here I’m bumping up against another prejudice I have to grapple with.
Issue: expense or value of materials
Issue: style of project – what am I making?
Issue: mode of use – where will I wear it? Is it fancy? Is it for wearing every day?

There are hierarchies of value here that are really old and have been delivered to us historically and culturally and need to be re-worked in order to get to a new place with making.

When I wrote the above, part of me wanted to mock the observation as so obvious as not to require statement. But it does require statement in order to examine it in more depth and figure out how it’s operating here and how to counter the narrative that says that the Little cotton Overdress does not warrant the time I am spending on it. Are sumptuary laws at play here? Class hierarchies? Race hierarchies? Social evolutionary frameworks?

The value of different kinds of labor. I’m thinking of inexpensive, hand-embroidered cotton things from India. In that instance, the embroidery is rustic, probably executed quickly. The ornamentation is not high-value. It’s not refined (this has nothing to do with the skill of the embroiderer. It has to do with the use to which it’s put, the requirements of the buyer, and the compensation for the work). There is a relationship between the value of the labor and the way we value the result of the labor.

I finished the dress in July.

A few final photographs of the finished dress . . .

I am fortunate to work with Bruce on photographs of my makes. This shoot just felt like pure joy. I love wearing the Little Black Overdress: I feel pretty and glamorous. I wear it, now, when I travel because I feel protected. I recently wore it to the theater because I feel stylish. I want everything in my closet to feel like that.

Bruce told me to lean against the wall and put my hands on it, a pose that felt unnatural to me, so I decided to pose in an even more unnatural manner, as an ancient Egyptian figure, which made me laugh.

The Second Scarf

In my last post I told you about my knitting experiment. I wanted to re-create my first scarf. So I did. It had its challenges like any new project and required me to develop new skills. Being random, or at least appearing random, intentionally requires effort and control. I developed a technique. I got better at it.

In this image you can see the uneven quality of the knitting:

Not only did I vary my stitch length and tension. I varied the number of stitches in the rows, adding and subtracting to create a varied profile. It was simple knitting. No purling. No rib. This sort of knitting-every-row knitting can boring. Instead, it was interesting and I started to to control the inconsistency. I know this goes against the stated project but I did want to achieve the look of the child-knitting I sought to re-create.

Then I styled it. The first styling I did (and which I show you here) I have used before with a long rectangle. I think I love this one in particular because it transforms the long rectangle so completely that it is often a revelation to the knitters I talk to. There is a kind of knitting epiphany that can happen on multiple levels. First, that a plain old long rectangular scarf could take on such a dramatic shape. And second, that my screw-in pedestal buttons and closures can take you out of the button box, so to speak. This one unique styling of a simple shape can lead to the realization that these styling tools can take any simple shape to a different level. Simple shapes can become dramatic, sculptural shapes that show-off the knitting (why would you hide it after working so long) and show off you!

To follow is a series of images of the first styling from different angles. What can you do with your simple rectangles and a little JUL? I would love to see your images on Instagram.

Tag @jul_designs / #juldesigns so I will see your images.

Use the coupon code FIRSTSCARF for 15% off pedestal buttons and the Cordoba Series closures.

Front:

Front right:

Back:

Side back:

Don’t forget: I want to know what you can do with your simple rectangles and a little JUL? I would love to see your images on Instagram.

Tag @jul_designs / #juldesigns so I will see what you are up to.

Use the coupon code FIRSTSCARF for 15% off pedestal buttons and the Cordoba Series closures.

More stylings coming soon . . .