Photo by Imelda T. Mandala
Hello, it's me, Ferdi.
I am a researcher and educator whose lifework unfolds at the intersections of theory and lived experience, grounded in queer worldmaking practices and the affective entanglements of the everyday.
I am currently a Senior Lecturer in the Elite Master Program Standards of Decision-making Across Cultures at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, where I teach psychological anthropology and gender and sexuality studies, with a regional focus on Indonesia and broader Southeast Asia. In 2020, I earned a doctorate from Freie Universität Berlin and, afterwards, joined Leipzig University for a year as a postdoctoral fellow with the Children and Nature Working Group.
Alongside my work as an academic, I am also an artist, curator, and community educator focusing on the transformative potential of self-organisation through studying together. These interests are closely tied to my involvement with KUNCI Study Forum & Collective, an undisciplinary research initiative in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
Find me at ferdi.thajib@gmail.com
CV available upon request.
My Upcoming Book
Many gender and sexual minorities in Indonesia remain practicing Muslims, but they face violence stemming from Muslim society’s rejection of their sexual and gender identities. With their faith often pitted against their desires and ways of living, many are confronted with a forced choice between two seemingly irreconcilable ways of being.
Drawing on ethnographic research in multiple locations in Indonesia, Enduring Otherwise examines how Muslim individuals and communities grapple with the challenges and possibilities of inhabiting queer and trans religiosity. Some distance themselves from religious tenets because of the harms implicated in them, while others immerse themselves in religious practices and spiritual values, seeking to reimagine them. There are also those who remain caught in tensions, having to navigate a life entrenched in ambivalence. Yet across these varied engagements, they continue to find ways to keep going.
This book showcases how everyday gestures of endurance complicate widely held notions of survival and resilience. Through such actions, Muslim queer and trans subjectivities build complex relationships with faith, piety, and religious norms, while also laying the groundwork to transform the conditions that marginalize them.
Offering a nuanced account of the affective politics of worldmaking at the intersection of sexuality, gender, and religion, Enduring Otherwise highlights how the drawn-out moments of hope, failure, improvisation, and exhaustion experienced by queer and gender non-conforming Indonesians configure efforts to create a world where no one will have to endure the unendurable anymore.
This book will be published in March 2026 by NYU Press, as part of its Hauntings: Queer/Trans Studies in Religion series, edited by Ashton T. Crawley, Tamara C. Ho, and Melissa M. Wilcox.
Cover art & design by Cecil Mariani
"Enduring Otherwise powerfully reveals how Muslim queer and trans Indonesians forge lifeworlds in the face of rejection and exclusion. Thajib’s careful analysis shows us how struggles for acceptance, across an apparently unbridgeable chasm of incommensurability, illuminate intersections of faith and the forging of a livable life."
Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine
"Striking in its profound care for its ethnographic subjects and a gaze that refuses pathologization, Enduring Otherwise is a bold contribution, as unflinching in its look at the toll of homophobia and transphobia on Muslim queers in Indonesia as it is innovative in its insistence on Islam as a salient theater of complex, quotidian trans and queer action."
David K. Seitz, author of A House of Prayer for All People: Contesting Citizenship in a Queer Church
"To queerly exist in the ambiguous and intricate meshes of constraint, generosity, aperture and violence demand strategic expenditures of feeling and conjuring, and faith, Thajib’s inventive, heartful, and brave montage of vernaculars shows us how to endure the challenges of inhabitation in-between self-determination and adherence to the normative. However regarded, queer Muslims curate ethical practices of world-making amidst the inevitable contradictions not as marginals but generative accompaniments."
AbdouMaliq Simone, author of The Surrounds: Urban Life within and beyond Capture
"Enduring Otherwise is a highly original, compellingly written and evocative exploration of the affective work of endurance of Muslim queer and trans Indonesians as they live on otherwise in a world that violently denies their possibility of being. Thought-provoking and deeply moving, this book is a major achievement."
Annemarie Samuels, Leiden University
"Ferdi Thajib's brilliantly researched and written book shows in a complex and detailed way how even in the most difficult circumstances trans and queer people and communities in Indonesia survive through endurance. This is an important lesson to learn for everyone who attempts to advocate for trans and queer people and communities."
Dédé Oetomo, Founder and Trustee, GAYa NUSANTARA, Indonesia