Terms of Endearment: Love and Angst Among Indonesian Youth

Since the early 2000s, a set of new terms and phrases dealing with affective subjectivity have become trendy within Indonesia’s growing middle class. These forms proliferate in the stories young people tell about their romantic relationships, as well as circulating widely in life-coaching seminars, the sermons of hip Muslim preachers, and on the book spines of best-selling self-help paperbacks in urban bookstores. Although some of these terms have long existed in Indonesian, they have taken on new prominence; others are borrowed from English but have been assigned rather different meanings. This paper explores several of the most interesting of these keywords: galau (a state of [particularly adolescent] confusion; angst), move on (especially, to leave a relationship behind), and hijrah (to move on to greater piety). The paper examines in particular the prominence and function of these newly popularized terms in discourses surrounding youth sociability and sexuality. Strikingly, these affective phrases have been pressed into service by ultra-conservative Islamist preachers like Felix Siauw and used to fan the flames of moral panic over youth immorality. Richards and Rudnyckyj’s (2009) notion of an “economy of affect” highlights the role of emotion in the practices through which people transform themselves into modern individuals capable of self-effectuation. In Indonesia, to be modern, young, and middle class is to be capable of new modes of emotional expression and affective flexibility, but such expressivity is viewed by many as threatening long held models of personhood.