PAPERS:Contestations of Gender, Sexuality and Morality in Contemporary Indonesia
Contestations of Gender, Sexuality and Morality in Contemporary Indonesia
Maria Platt,Sharyn Graham Davies &Linda Rae BennettAbstract:
This special issue explores morality agendas in the recent Indonesian context, and in doing so reveals the dynamism of morality debates as they occur in Indonesia and in broader Southeast Asian perspectives. In this Introduction we illustrate how morality (or the perceived lack of morality) acted in part as the impetus for reformasi (reformation), which forced an end in 1998 to the authoritarian New Order era. Subsequently, we discuss how reformasi influenced morality debates in Indonesia by both opening and foreclosing opportunities for tolerance around gender and sexuality. Specifically, we consider the impact of increasing democratisation and how various moral panics have been articulated in the widening space for social and moral critique. The articles in this special issue make a significant contribution to expanding three key themes – morality and boundaries, moral threats, and morality and subjectivity – and show how these themes intersect with the conceptualisation and functioning of morality in contemporary Indonesia. We tease out how the five articles in this special issue engage with these themes. Finally, we comment on our observations regarding the increasing visibility of morality debates in Indonesia in the past two decades, and the increasing social currency attributed to morality issues and debates in the public sphere.
Important quotation
Morality and boundaries
The ways in which morality both functions to mark out boundaries, and operates in accordance with different boundaries, are teased out in this special issue. Both Platt (2018) and Davies (2018) explore how women’s morality, and the surveillance and/or protection of their morality, are conflated with state boundaries and national identity. Platt’s detailed consideration of the Indonesian state’s temporary moratorium on the migration of Indonesian women as foreign domestic workers uncovers a set of gender-specific moralities – simultaneously directed at women. Her analysis traces how women’s migration is “inflected by a nationalist form of morality”, as the protection of women migrants abroad has become conflated with the dignity and pride of the Indonesian state in public discourse. Thus, Indonesia’s regulation of women who literally transgress national borders has become an increasingly moral-laden project. Platt’s critique of how gendered moralities operate between and across borders also highlights how women migrants must negotiate “domesticated moralities”, where physically co-located motherhood in the domestic sphere is prioritised. She articulates that the moral threat is perceived as stemming from women’s increased mobility, and that the potential for greater sexual autonomy (read as immoral) is assumed to be a consequence of this expanding mobility. Platt also notes how dominant forms of domesticated morality can be invoked to depict transnational mothers, who travel across borders to work, as morally complicit in the neglect of “left-behind” children, when such children encounter adversity.
Davies (2018) delves into highly gendered moralities that are undeniably centred on women’s bodies as moral sites, and deploys the concept of “bio-borders” to analyse state control over female bodies and morality. Her critique of compulsory virginity testing for unmarried female police recruits leaves us in no doubt that the female body, and the hymen in particular, is seen as a delineating boundary between moral and immoral women. Again, women are positioned as symbolic of the morality of the larger body corporate – in this case the body corporate of the police force, whose boundaries refuse entry to women who fail to maintain virginity prior to marriage. Davies juxtaposes the competing perspectives on this form of morality testing, including medical views, human rights views, official police views and the ambivalence of Indonesian policewomen themselves. The ambivalence of policewomen towards this procedure, which they clearly experience as unpleasant, reflects the extraordinary influence of dominant moral projects on the subjectivities of individuals.
Interrogating the relationship between morality and public/private boundaries has also proved fertile ground for our contributors. Savitri Hartono (2017) guides us through recent Islamic debate in Indonesia on the potential immorality of social media in the form of Facebook. Here the potential for private or intimate matters to become public, and in doing so threaten the stability of Indonesian marriages, is raised. The threat of breaching the boundaries of privacy has been perceived by some as a potential moral threat to Muslim society. Ultimately Savitri Hartono contrasts the moral concerns of male Islamic scholars, who raised opposition to the corrupting potential of Facebook, with the everyday practices of Indonesian Muslim women who use Facebook as a public expression of their religious piety. In this sense, her work makes a key contribution to unveiling the multiplicity of voices seeking to define morality and moral practices within the spectrum of contemporary Indonesian Islam.
The salience of public/private boundaries in defining moral versus immoral behaviour is also highlighted by Spagnoletti et al. (2018) in their exploration of how breastfeeding mothers in Yogyakarta negotiate increasing resistance to breastfeeding in public. Spagnoletti et al. (p. 15) identify how the “body of the breastfeeding woman transgresses the boundaries and ideals between the maternal body and the sexual body”, and that this partly feeds a collective moral panic about the public exposure of breasts in the Indonesian context. These authors assert that Indonesian women’s right to expect the provision of comfortable, private and clean breastfeeding spaces is a fundamental prerequisite to meeting what is constructed as their “moral obligation” to exclusively breastfeed for six months.
Moral threats
The construction and deployment of moral threats is another theme intertwined in the five articles, one that plays out on multiple levels, from interpersonal relationships, to institutional norms, up to the level of transnational politics. Different authors offer us detailed insights into how particular moral threats position specific actors as at risk of moral dangers, as responsible for creating or enhancing moral threats, and as being responsible for protecting the vulnerable against moral threats.
In terms of discourses of protectionism the articles in this issue illustrate how the Indonesian state occupies a pivotal position as “defender” of Indonesian women against both internal and external moral threats. Platt (2018) names the moral threats identified by the state that female domestic workers are assumed to encounter through their migration and employment abroad. These threats include the threat of physical and sexual abuse, and exploitation and detainment by foreign employers. Less explicit in state rhetoric, but still prominent in popular discourse, is the threat of moral corruption that women are likely to encounter with increased mobility, income and the removal of the moral surveillance provided by their left-behind families and communities. Platt notes the gap between the moral panic that led to a temporary moratorium on sending female domestic workers abroad, and any concrete state action to protect women such as negotiating international agreements aimed at ensuring better working conditions and rights abroad. In doing so, she provides a key example of how moral panics are often temporary in nature, and while the impact may be felt keenly in the short term, long-term structural changes are rarely built on the back of such moral panics.
Davies (2018) identifies how autonomous female sexuality, and most explicitly female sexual activity prior to marriage, is constructed as a potential internal moral threat that could corrupt the police force from within. The construction of sexually experienced women, as opposed to virgins, as a major threat to the morality of the police force is deeply ironic. It conveys women’s untamed sexuality as extremely dangerous, thus in a sense, attributing a great deal of potentially corrupting power to women. In this light, the insistence on virginity testing for female police recruits can be read as a reaction to the fear of female sexuality, albeit a somewhat irrational one. As virginity is only a prerequisite for female police recruits, and not male recruits, it is women who are placed at the centre of this moral threat and made responsible for mitigating it on behalf of the police force.
Spagnoletti et al. (2018) reveal how the moralised rhetoric of popular breastfeeding promotions represents women’s failure in their moral obligation to exclusively breastfeed as a direct threat to the development and health of infants and toddlers. Moreover, this moral failure on the part of mothers is further interpreted by breastfeeding advocates as an ongoing lifelong threat to children who are not breastfed, who if we are to believe this moral rhetoric are more likely to engage in drug use and other socially transgressive behaviours. In this moral dynamic, mothers are situated as “the moral guardians of their children’s future”, and the moral failure of women who do not (or cannot) breastfeed is directly linked with the moral risks for their children. The careful social construction of this particular moral threat, and the authors’ convincing deconstruction of the moral discourses currently surrounding exclusive breastfeeding, provide another example of how this special issue exposes the extraordinary significance of gender ideals in fashioning and deploying moralities in Indonesian society.
In Savitri Hartono’s (2017) exploration of Facebook as a medium with ambivalent moral potential, she reveals how particular threats to Islamic morality are projected onto the medium of Facebook. Longstanding Islamic traditions of avoiding behaviour that is considered haram, or believed to be likely to invoke immoral behaviour, are refashioned in the objections of conservative Islamic scholars cited by Savitri Hartono. Her analysis reveals both the continuity and the recycling of moral threats propagated by religious conservatives. In particular, the threats of fitnah (dissension) and ghibah (slander), and violating the privacy of marriage are understood as moral threats to be avoided by pious Muslims. In addition to Savitri Hartono’s description of the progressive use of Facebook by communities of Indonesian Muslim women to affirm their faith, the official response of Nahdlatul Ulama (The Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars) that Facebook itself does not pose a moral threat is particularly impressive. This is impressive because the response distinguishes between a person’s actual moral behaviour and the medium through which such behaviour is enacted, and does not seek to restrict freedom to communicate via social media in the name of a moral threat that cannot be controlled.
Wijaya Mulya (2018) zeroes in on young people’s internalisations and negotiations of the moral threat to the individual in the form of sin. His work with young Christian Indonesians offers an important perspective from which to think through the significance of religion in shaping perceived moral threats. He reveals how the very act of being sexually active, or even acknowledging one’s sexual desire, is interpreted as a dire moral threat for young Indonesians outside the context of marriage. While he identifies the inherent moral dilemma for young people created by a rigid moral dichotomy that insists premarital abstinence is the only valid path to avoiding immorality, he also opens a new dialogue that moves beyond this dichotomy. In a nuanced exploration of how young people negotiate the moral threat of premarital sexuality, his article reveals several alternative possibilities for thinking about sex among his young informants, including casting off religion, reinterpreting religious morality and practising a double morality. He makes a crucial contribution to acknowledging and theorising the sexual agency of young Christian Indonesians, and firmly acknowledges sexually active young people as moral subjects in their own right.
Morality and subjectivities
Contributions to this issue explicitly privilege the interrogation of morality as it is lived and internalised in the personal subjectivities of Indonesians. This attention to the ways in which sexual and gendered subjectivities are formed through particular moral lenses challenges the assumption that morality necessarily operates in a top-down fashion, and acknowledges a variety of ways in which Indonesians can and do exercise agency in enacting their own moral subjectivities. Both Spagnoletti et al. and Savitri Hartono explore maternal subjectivities and how they are aligned with morality. Savitri Hartono (2017) identifies how her informants are actively pursuing specific forms of subjectivity as both mothers and Muslims, by sharing on Facebook their views and experiences of what constitutes appropriate mothering for Muslim women, which is infused with their roles as the moral teachers of their children. Spagnoletti et al. (2018) explore how the moral discourses that surround and promote the imperative of exclusive breastfeeding can create a struggle for women in achieving maternal subjectivities that are both personally and socially acceptable. This contribution illuminates the need to consider how morality discourses embedded in state policy and health promotion messages can impact both negatively and positively on women’s subjectivity. The authors conclude that less moralising and more informative and supportive breastfeeding messages and education are needed so that women who encounter difficulties breastfeeding do not necessarily experience themselves as subjective moral failures.
Discussions of female subjectivity in this special issue also engage with the issue of veiling, a key site of moral contestation over women’s bodies and rights in many Muslim societies. Contributions by Savitri Hartono and Davies respectively address how women’s rights to choose to veil, and to exercise agency through a presentation of self, both represent an explicit Muslim subjectivity. Savitri Hartono (2017) shows how the unmediated space of Facebook, which is not overtly censored by the state, provides a public forum for women to support and encourage each other in choosing to veil. Alternatively, Davies (2018) teases out the conflict between the state’s interest in maintaining the semblance of secularism, and policewomen’s individual rights and desires to enact their personal subjectivity as Muslims by veiling while on duty. She asserts that Indonesian policewomen ultimately won their fight to veil at work precisely because the guarding of their modesty in public (via veiling) was widely accepted as morally legitimate.
The fashioning of Christian youth sexual subjectivities is a theme central to Wijaya Mulya’s contribution. He traces the various influences in Indonesian popular culture and Christianity that urge Indonesian youth to “take up a moral subject position”. Drawing on Foucault, Wijaya Mulya (2018) asserts that despite the dominance of moral discourses that seek to promote abstinence among youth, these discourses of sexual morality in fact do not take effect until they are taken up by individuals. His reading of youth narratives on the sexual self reveals both resistance and agency in the formation of alternative sexual subjectivities that do not conform to the dominant moral paradigm. He concludes that the dominant discourse of youth sexual morality in Indonesia “is not monolithic or uncontested – it has cracks and fissures – and Indonesian youth are not docile subjects” (2018, p. 13). A wider acknowledgment of Indonesian youth as active sexual subjects is indeed necessary for the formal recognition and promotion of young people’s reproductive and sexual rights in a manner that includes them as key agents in defining and pursuing those rights.
In her analysis of the self-perceptions of Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore, Platt (2018) identifies how these women construct different moral categories for themselves and their peers. She identifies the possibility of new moral subjectivities that resist existing stereotypes that label domestic workers either as (immoral) party girls who fall prey to consumerism and pleasure, or as (immoral) neglectful mothers who leave their children behind in the pursuit of economic gain. The alternative moral subjectivity that her informants describe involves having “economic smarts” through earning and saving rather than consumption, and delaying relationships and motherhood until one feels fully prepared. This new subjectivity appears to embody desire, restraint and intention as markers of morality, demonstrating the dynamism of intersections of subjectivity and morality.
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