Julia Suryakusuma
The writer is the author of Sex, Power and Nation. She can be contacted at jsuryakusuma@gmail.com

A LONG time ago, in Italy—a land close to my heart because it’s where I grew up and, ahem, became a woman—there was a scientist called Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). Condemned by the Church in 1616, he was tried by the Inquisition in 1633 and found guilty of promoting the Copernican idea of heliocentrism: that the earth revolv