Indonesian Muslim Masculinities in Australia

This article is an inquiry into evolving forms of masculinity in Indonesia. It refers to data collected during a pilot project on the construction of Indonesian Muslim masculinities in Australia when Indonesian men arrive and encounter Anglo-Australian men. Using the technique of asking the Indonesian interviewees to comment on ‘Australian’ men allowed analysis of what the Indonesian men thought about their own cultural tropes of masculinity. It emerged that their gender construction coalesced around two important cultural nodes of discourse about how to be a ‘man’: firstly, the Indonesian urban interpretation of global ‘hypermasculinity’; and secondly, the moral role of men in Islamic discourse

Comparative Masculinities: Why Islamic Indonesian Men are Great Mates and Australian Men are Girls

There may well be no known human societies in which some form of masculinity has not emerged as dominant, more socially central, more associated with power, in which a pattern of practices embodying the currently most honoured way of being male legitimates the superordination of men over women. This paper shows what a small sample of Indonesian men living in Australia thought of Australian masculinity, revealing much about hegemonic masculinity in Indonesia in the process, and disclosing some uncomfortable uniformities concerning men in both countries

Indonesian Muslim masculinities in Australia

This chapter is based around a series of lengthy interviews' conducted in Australia during 2006 with Indonesian Muslim men to elicit their understandings of their own and of Australian (Western) masculinities. In this respect, this chapter also addresses some identifiable gaps in the sociological literature on men and masculinity. First, research that explores the relationship between masculinities and religion is lacking (Brod 1987; Kimmel and Messner 2004; Kimmel et al. 2005; Engebretson 2006). Second, current social science that explores the relationship between religion, ethnicities and masculinities remains undeveloped even though there has been an increasing general interest in Islam and masculinity (see, for example, the edited collection by Ouzgane 2006). Finally, there has not been much mention of masculinity in the literature on gender relations in Indonesia, although some anthropological studies are significant because they explain how masculinity operates in specific cultures and traditions in the archipelago

Indonesian Muslim masculinities in Australia

This article serves as an inquiry into evolving forms of masculinity in the Asian region. It refers to data collected during a pilot project on the construction of Indonesian Muslim masculinities in Australia when Indonesian men arrive and encounter anglo-Australian men. Using the technique of asking the Indonesian interviewees to comment on ‘Australian’ men allowed analysis of what the Indonesian men thought about their own cultural tropes of masculinity. It emerged that their gender construction coalesced around two important cultural nodes of discourse about how to be a ‘man’: firstly, the Indonesian urban interpretation of global ‘hypermasculinity’; and secondly, the moral role of men in Islamic discourse

Genre Based Navigation on the Web

We report on our ongoing study of using the genre of Web pages to facilitate information exploration. By genre, we mean socially recognized regularities of form and purpose in documents (e.g., a letter, a memo, a research paper). Our study had three phases. First, through a user study, we identified genres which most/least frequently meet searchers ' information needs. We found that certain genres are better suited for certain types of needs. We identified five (5) major groups of document genres that might be used in an interactive search tool that would allow genrebased navigation. We tried to balance the following dual objectives: 1) each group should be recognizable by a computer algorithm as easily as possible 2) each group has a better chance of satisfying particular types of information needs. Finally, we developed a novel user interface for a web searching that allows genre-based navigation through three major functionalities: 1) limiting search to specified genres 2) visualizing the hierarchy of genres discovered in the search results and 3) accepting user feedback on the relevancy of the specified genres