Challenging Gender Norms: Five Genders Among Bugis in Indonesia

Sharyn Graham Davies's Challenging Gender Norms, Five Genders among Bugis in Indonesia, published by Thomson Wadsworth in 2007 as part of the long running Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology series, is a short ethnography built on Davies's own fieldwork in South Sulawesi documenting the Bugis system of five recognized genders, including the bissu ritual specialists whose gender lies outside the male and female binary entirely. Its strength is direct fieldwork among a community whose gender categories most outside readers have no framework for, presented in the community's own vocabulary rather than translated flatly into Western transgender or intersex categories that do not quite fit. Its limit is the case study format itself, deliberately short and introductory for classroom use rather than a comprehensive monograph, so it establishes the five gender system's existence and basic logic well but a claim needing the full historical depth of bissu ritual practice or its precolonial standing needs a longer specialist source alongside it.