Sensual subjects in an Islamic epistemological arena: negotiating the borders of aurat in Aceh

In this article I focus on sexuality as a fundamental source of self-identification. Because sexuality is about relating or striving to relate to others or otherness and so is anthropology, I, like other researchers, reaffirm methodological need to include sexual relationships in the researches. Drawing on a lifelong experience of research in Malaysia and Indonesia, I show that, as Lyn Parker puts it (2010), “something different happens” in this part of the word when it comes to sexuality and sexual subjectivity. In my Malaysian and Acehnese experience, Islam shapes such difference while it connects the past generations’ local (archaic?) world to the present generations’ (post modern?) partly globalized worldview. Some major contributions to the abundant literature dealing with these matters in the Indonesian and Malay world will be discussed, particularly when it comes to local ideas about desire and reason . I then evoke a broader, unreliable East-West differentiation which revolves around the idea of sexuality as an individual right as op- posed sexuality and sexual selves as a social capital.