PAPER:The stigmatisation of widows and divorcees (janda) in Indonesia, and the possibilities for agency

Title     : The stigmatisation of widows and divorcees (janda) in Indonesia, and the possibilities for agency

Writer : Lyn Parker, Irma Riyani and Brooke Nolan

Reference:

Lyn Parker, Irma Riyani & Brooke Nolan (2015) The stigmatisation of widows and divorcees (janda) in Indonesia, and the possibilities for agency, Indonesia and the Malay World, 44:128, 27-46, DOI: 10.1080/13639811.2016.1111677

Lyn Parker is a Professor and anthropologist in the School of Social Science, University of Western Australia. Her most recent book is Adolescents in contemporary Indonesia (Routledge, 2013), co-authored with Pam Nilan. Email: lyn.parker@uwa.edu.au

Irma Riyani

Irma Riyani is a PhD student in Asian Studies, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia. Email: riyani.ime@gmail.com

Brooke Nolan

Brooke Nolan is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology and Asian Studies, in the School of Social Sciences, University of Western Australia. Email: borneobrooke@gmail.com

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ABSTRACT This article explores the discourses and practices of stigmatisation that shape the experience of widows and divorced women (janda) in Indonesia. The conceptualisation of stigma allows us to see that the experience of being a janda is a gendered, moral experience. The article examines the construction of ideal marriage in Islam and in Indonesia, divorce, and the construction of gender and sexuality. There is a dominant discourse that divorced and widowed women are sexually available and promiscuous; the result is often that men prey upon janda. In turn, wives feel threatened by the competition that janda represent. This article is based on ethnographic and interview data from two field sites: Bandung, West Java, and Wawonii island, off the coast of Southeast Sulawesi; both are Muslim communities. It also explores the possibilities for women’s agency and destigmatisation, through the mobilising of social networks and the emphasising of their worth as good mothers to achieve social respectability.

Concluding remarks

 The strength of marriage as both the ideal way to live and the bedrock relationship in Indonesian society means that the end of marriage, either by death or divorce, is traumatic. The position of the single, once-married woman – single by virtue of death or divorce – is anomalous in Indonesian society and constitutes a deviation from the norm of the ‘peaceful, calm and loving’ family (KHI). The stigmatisation of janda compounds the difficult experience that divorce and death of a spouse bring, but it is only women, not men, who experience this stigma. Many janda have internalised the stigma discourse, and prefer to keep their marital status secret – sometimes for the sake of their children, who will also be stigmatised. Divorcees typically experience more shame and more sexual innuendo than widows, but young and middle-aged janda of both types are subjected to frequent and remorseless sexual harassment. Gossip about the sexual impropriety of divorced and widowed women is often triggered by men’s assumption that sexually experienced women want to have sex with anyone. Married women in turn see janda as a threat to their marriages. Women develop strategies to avoid stigmatisation, drawing upon and deploying social, cultural and symbolic capital in the exercise of agency. Perhaps most commonly they draw

upon the support of extended families, a form of social capital that refutes the hegemony of the New Order nuclear family. In joining religious study groups, and thus creating social and cultural capital, and very deliberately avoiding gossip, they build respectability, a form of symbolic capital.

In Wawonii, the lesser status of janda is made obvious in the sharply reduced amount of bride price that janda receive when they remarry (10 coconut trees), compared to that received upon first marriage (30 coconut trees). This starkly quantifies the value of virginity and expresses the notion of janda as ‘used goods’. It also reinforces the idea of marriage as an exchange: the bride price is awarded to a wife in exchange for the husband’s sexual access. However, in Wawonii janda are not seen as a source of social destabilisation which must be contained by a hasty remarriage, as in other parts of Indonesia. If women in Wawonii are relegated to the fringes of their communities in social or economic terms following divorce or the death of their husband, they are commonly re-integrated through becoming, or taking on, an anak angkat (adopted child) or via the social and economic support of their families and neighbours.

Janda re-frame the moral category of janda-hood by emphasising their status as mothers rather than as sexual beings. Unlike in other parts of Indonesia, in the small villages in Wawonii, this message appears to have gained acceptance as the dominant framework through which janda are socially integrated. Perhaps this is because the socioeconomic hierarchy in Wawonii is much less elaborate than in Bandung, and it is a much ‘flatter’ society, with most people living at or near survival level. Certainly the isolation of Wawonii means it is less influenced by government and popular culture messages; and Bandung is much influenced by resurgent, fundamentalist and more puritan strains of Islam, which have a very socially conservative tone. The stigmatisation of janda in Indonesia can only be understood in relation to the norm of marriage, the ideal of the ‘peaceful, calm and loving’ family, the construction of the ideal woman, and the construction of female and male sexuality. Female sexuality must be contained within marriage – if that norm is transgressed, or perceived to have the potential to be transgressed, the woman is judged immoral. However, by emphasising their success in playing women’s traditional role as mothers, by replicating ‘family’ through adoption, through remarriage, and through religious service, janda can re-establish respectability.