Falling Into The Lesbi World: The Matrilineal Nature Of The Minangkabau

Falling into the Lesbi World holds more relevance to the anthropology of gender than simply pointing out a flaw in another academic’s work. For Blackwood, this piece is also, to some extent, an extension of her work on the understanding of kinship amongst Minangkabau. In her previous work on the matrilineal nature of the Minangkabau, Blackwood established the importance of the mother-daughter relationship (2005, 12-3), so in this ethnography when she examines the relationship between tombois and their mothers, it begs questions of how mothers react to seemingly losing a “daughter.” Through describing the ways in which tombois are both treated as men—given some masculine chores, allowed out at night—and expected to maintain some aspects of
Blackwood also contributes to the understanding of why being invisible may be valuable to people with queer subjectivities. The lesbi in Padang exist quietly behind closed doors and away from public eye; they are not activists nor are they, for the most part, open about their affections to one another (Blackwood 2010, 209). In some ways, this relates to being a docile agent, but it also comes from the danger associated with being “out.” Just by existing and acting on their desires, the lesbi are putting themselves at risk for persecution. Even when they do communicate with outside queer groups in safe ways, they are often misunderstood because their identities are dissonant to more top-spread conceptions of queerness, yet they presist. This relates to a paper done by Sabrina Alimahomed describes how in American culture, queer women of colour are often ostracized from the LGBTQ community, their subjectivities discounted by the “recognizable queer (white) forms of expression” (2010, 159). Instead, these women seek to validate their subjectives through negotiations of the situation based on context, relying on their invisibility to work through their oppression (Alimahomed 2010, 157-63). This is obviously comparable the conclusions Blackwood draws: the lesbi pick and choose what they exact from global queer discourse, developing their own practices within their own isolated community. Blackwood, like Alimahomed, calls for outside perspectives to be considerate and sensitive to the particularities of non-dominant queer subjectivities in order better address LGBTQ rights across the world (Blackwood 2010,