Afterthought: Vulnerability and Tenacity

Abstract

This closing chapter reflects on the global-local context for the conservative rise in Indonesia, examining artists’ and women activists’ creative strategies in dealing with the return of patriarchies in public and private spheres. The chapter argues that the interface between gender, sexuality, and Islam occurs in a terrain mediated by digital transformation, affected by complicated legal battles and global markets, which can both enlarge and limit women’s space for expression. The battleground is filled with ambiguities and complexities, with no linear direction. Referencing, among others, the activism of KUPI (Congress of Indonesian Female Ulama), the chapter captures the core theme of this edited volume: the tenacity of the collectives and individuals in continuously transcending women’s vulnerability in Indonesia.

It is through being affected—being vulnerable—that we are able to develop myriad capacities for action (Gilson 2016, p. 76)

This quote from Gilson (2016) speaks to the dynamics related to gender, Islam, and sexuality in Indonesia, as discussed in the ten chapters of this book. Juxtaposing these three keywords, one can directly imagine how Islam, the dominant religion in Indonesia, serves as the hegemonic context for constructing gender and sexuality. Given the prevalent general notion (read: stereotype) of Islamic values, their relation to gender and sexuality tends to be perceived or predicted as morally and normatively restricting. The transformation of public and daily life after the 1999 era reformasi (era of reforms)—which accelerated with global capitalism—complicates this binary. The socio-cultural dynamics expose a contentious arena of diverse voices in dealing with rising conservativism and navigation strategies of relating and synchronizing to Islam and gendered/ sexual identity.

Women's Islamic dress codes are one arena to observe this tension and complexity. In the opening of her book, Islamizing Intimacies (2019), Nancy J. Smith-Hefner shares her observation about the ubiquitous spread of female Islamic wear in Yogyakarta. Other scholars (Beta 2020; Rodríguez 2020; Davies 2010) have examined the history and context in which various conservative readings of Islamic doctrine began penetrating public space and everyday life in Indonesia. At the same time, these regulatory values are also mediated, refracted, and embedded in diverse local and social contexts, creating what Smith-Hefner terms as “plural culture, ambivalent selves” (Smith-Hefner 2019, p. 176).

1 Artists’s Engagements with Islamic Dress

Artists have found different ways to engage with Islamic dress. Mujahidin Nurrachman, a Bandung-based artist,¹ has expressed his critique against violence in the name of religion in several exhibitions. He was intrigued by the biography of Leila Khaled, a female airplane hijacker supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) –“a woman who fought when the culture of patriarchy was strong–as though she was two times a victim on the same land” (Mujahiddin 2018). His work included below represents a burqa-clad face of a woman in delicate and beautifully carved decorations, her eyes staring at the viewers (see Fig. 11.1). The ornamentation that decorates the eye area, even the eyes themselves, simultaneously embellishes and veils, complicating notions of visibility and identity.

Fig. 11.1

“Faith” by Mujahidin Nurrachman from his Solo Exhibition “Your Silence Will Not Protect You.” Photo Credit: Mujahidin Nurrachman

In a personal communication, Mujahidin Nurrachman said that he was raised in a conservative Islamic family with patriarchal values and clear regulations about the mandatory covering of a woman's aurat.² Now, apart from his critical stance against the patriarchal use of a woman's body to support violence, he, as a male artist, opts a middle ground in respecting women's personal choices, thus teasing out layers of ambivalence (Swastika 2021). His partially covered women images show a mixture of mystery, respect, beauty, and resistance, which are coloured with a potentially insidious atmosphere.

Female artists and writers have differing positions about this matter. In a personal communication, Alia Swastika, a feminist curator of contemporary art, offers two observations about hijab normalization.³ On the one hand, she notices how her female colleagues, contemporary artists, in their daily activities, among others as mothers picking up their children in schools with a mandatory hijab regulation, feel increasing social pressure to follow the norms. On the other hand, Alia contends that while decades ago, the world of contemporary art was seen as a secular world removed from the religious sphere, now the lines between the two are blurred. Women with strict adherence to Islamic wear mingle and feel at ease participating in the contemporary art scene, which can be ideologically critical and progressive. In a way, the jilbab is embodied and naturalized as one's choice of clothing that is close to one's religious identity.

Short story writer Feby Indriani has shown both in her work and in a personal conversation how such an embodiment manifests itself. She has observed how, at a young age, she begins the practice of parents donning hijabs on their female kindergarten children.⁴ In a story entitled “Perempuan yang kehilangan wajahnya” (A Woman Who Lost Her Face), she is also unequivocal about her protagonist's loss of identity. In this surrealistic story, a woman wakes up one day to discover she has lost an important part of her face, her nose. In the story, her panic when she must make do with her current state in completing her daily tasks is mixed with a flashback that tells of her marriage to her husband, who ordered her to wear a niqab instead of a simple head covering.⁵ The story ends with the following grim statement:

She only hopes that she will still be the most beautiful jewellery for her husband, although her face has been partially erased, and it will probably, gradually disappear (Indriani 2017).⁶

The face also features prominently in Restu Ratnaningtyas’s artwork. In her series of works called “Hidayah” (2016), she features faceless dolls, a trend in the Islamic business world, a way to market children's toys in compliance with Islamic norms that prohibit facial representations (see Fig. 11.2).

Fig. 11.2

Artwork “Faceless doll” in the “Hidayah” artwork series on the Islamic doll. Photo credit: Restu Ratnaningtyas

Here, Restu comments on the one hand on how religious values are flowing into business—often under the leadership of businesswomen. On the other hand, the trend also imposes “homogenization which can be used to judge those who do not follow the norms. Thus, wearing a hijab is no longer a personal choice, but a social pressure.” (Ratnaningtyas 2016, p. 1).

Annisa Beta (2020) examines the vast scale of this coupling between business and da'wa activism or “proselytization activities to establish an identity as better Muslims” (…). It urges Muslims, particularly women, to do hijrah, a “transformative moment” to be “more devout, living a proper Islamic life.“ Da'wa business, which includes the sale and promotion of hijab syahri⁷ is distributed through digital networks and social media. Given the high number of social media users in Indonesia (150 million social media users and 350 million mobile phone subscribers), this is a promising business.

2 Exploring the Interface Between Gender, Islam, and Sexuality

The digital revolution is one of the many transformations that inform and shape the interface between gender, sexuality, and religion. Travel (migration, business trips), the cultural flow of popular culture, and the digital media connect different spaces, the rural and the cosmopolitan, New York and Jakarta, and the global-local interface impacts how individuals perform and represent their identities.

The state as a regulating body with its legal products, such as the UU TPKS and RKUHP, is also central in this book (see Chaps. 1–3). The contributions reveal that the state is not a neutral body but a site of contestation of political and ideological interests. However, even within the nation-state, Islam is complex, multiple, and fragmented, from progressive, moderate, or blended groups to the hardcore.⁸ The ten chapters examine various actors, for example, representatives of Islamic mass organizations such as the traditionalist NU and the modernist Muhammadiyah. The activism of Islamic women's groups collaborating with human rights and pro-democracy activists is no less crucial.

The writers in this volume discuss the issue of gender, sexuality, and Islam from various angles, conceptually and methodologically, but in their writings, an intersecting pattern emerges. Islamic “modest” fashion and the designers’ global promotion, female migrant workers’ popular novels about their experience abroad, dangdut and metro pop music on the fate of widows, and online Islamic dating apps encouraging polygamy all point to the “complex web of power …. creating cross points between religiosity and materiality” (Saraswati, this volume, Chap. 4). Indeed, as Watson rightfully points out, stories, writings, and other cultural products cannot be seen as a direct way of accessing empirical, unmediated reality (Chap. 10). However, as Winarnita, Mahy, and Herriman state (Chap. 7), the cultural texts serve as a “pre-existing category” into which people fit reality. An example is one of the migrant novelists in Carlos M. Piocos's contribution (Chap. 8), who writes about her life in the mode of a “Tom Hanks movie.”

In Edwin Wieringa's words, these cultural representations of women—wives, mothers, single women, widows, victims of violence, third gendersare “grappling with questions about identity, gender, and sexual identity” while negotiating with the local and global currents (Chap. 9). The Indonesian fashion designers promoting hijab globally (Chap. 4), the halal cosmetics on Youtube in Manzo's (Chap. 5) and the founder of the Ayo Poligami online dating app (Chap. 6) were riding on the waves of global and local market demands. Similarly, the migrant workers’ love relations with Southeast Asian migrant workers discussed in Chap. 8 would not have happened outside the global capitalist system of transnational work migration.

However, it is not only this system that sets people in motion. The 2020s are a time of great crisis, with refugees and displaced people coming from areas of conflict and war, seeking new homes in safer places. UNHCR “estimates that there will be 103 million displaced persons by 2022, including 32.5 million refugees and 4.9 asylum seekers (UNHCR 2022). Indonesia is not on the list of countries of origin, but the global impact of the crisis, i.e., the rise of right-wing fanaticism, has spread worldwide. (It is interesting to learn in Chap. 4 how Indonesian Islamic modest fashion has benefited from both capitalism and the rise of local hijab culture to stand up to Islamophobic regimes in the US and Europe).

3 The Conservative Wave

Within the nation, the conservative wave is not to be taken lightly. Komnas Perempuan notes that “the number of discriminatory policies increased almost threefold from 154 in 2009 to 421 bylaws in 2016, there were still 305 discriminatory bylaws. Almost 40 percent are targeting women …. Among the 305 discriminatory bylaws, 62 are regulating the obligation of the veil” (Yentriyani, 2022, p.10). Such discriminatory and restrictive control does not affect women only but also sexual minorities. In 2016, KPI (Indonesian Broadcasting Commission) issued a formal letter forbidding men to appear on TV wearing feminine clothes (Erdiansyah 2016). Even after protests and criticism, the circular has not been revoked. In fact, in May 2023, Didik Nini Thowok, a famous transgender dancer, had to refuse an invitation to be interviewed on a national TV station upon learning that he was to dress as male to abide by the content of the 2016 circular.⁹

2016 was indeed a year marked by persecution against sexual minorities. The crisis started with a controversy over a poster by the SGRCSS (Support Group and Resource Center on Sexuality Studies) at Universitas Indonesia. When the poster was made viral on social media, the assault towards sexual minorities in the name of morality and religion came from all directions. State actors, Islamic religious institutions, and conservative intellectuals voiced their concern about the threat of “moral corruption” among the young generation (Boellstorff 2016). The repressive atmosphere was intimidating and depressing for progressive students and lecturers alike. Dede Oetomo, an LGBTQ activist, and a long-time friend, giving personal advice, said that the best thing to do in such a situation is to temporarily “duck the bullets.”¹⁰ As a cultural studies scholar and feminist, this was a demoralizing moment for me.

The moralistic and normative regime seeps into popular music, novels, and writings, which become the tools for socializing and internalizing the norms of piety, disciplining women with the categories of good women versus bad, sinful ones with rigid heteronormative grids. This regime psychologically manifests in effect: shame, guilt, and anxiety. Sharon Lamb, quoted in Gilson (2016, p. 77), explains that “it is shameful to be a victim in our culture” because there is a shame “associated with being overpowered or vulnerable or hurt or unable to come to one's defence.” The negative effect, especially concerning sexual violence, is a part of the victim-blaming culture that Arnez elaborates on in her introduction (Chap. 1). One problem is that vulnerability is seen as a condition of passivity and weakness, lacking agency and effort to resist. The whole social construction of power and its operation needs to be interrogated in the first place, which imposes a sense of vulnerability on individuals, women, widows, singles, and sexual minorities.

Tenacity in dealing with vulnerability

The book's contribution lies in complicating vulnerability by showing how the subjects of their chapters, female fashion designers, lesbians, women activists, widows and divorcees, wives, and migrant workers with love lost or regained–creatively face their adverse conditions. They try to find loopholes, collaborating and corroborating with other agents, negotiating, subverting, and finding strategies to deal with the power relations around them, be it their family, the law, the police, or the law.

In Edwin Wieringa's chapter (Chap. 9), we read about Eni Martini's bold literary initiative to use the name Kartini, the national hero of women's empowerment, as the name of her lesbian protagonist in her novel. The cosmopolitan widows in the novel discussed by Winarnita, Mahy, and Herriman in Chap. 6 convince each other that they could “exist without men.“ The confession stories in the Sundanese tabloid Galura in Watson's chapter (Chap. 10) convey “women's expressions and strategies to cope with the husband's infidelity.“ In Arnez and Nisa's contribution (Chap. 2), we follow the struggles of Indonesian women ulama as they hold their annual congress to transform the existing male-centric understanding of Islamic teachings with a feminist perspective.

These actors are presented in their complexity and ambiguity, not as mere rebels who can transcend the world they live in. Like Anniesa Hasibuan in Chap. 4, some are winners and losers in their game, or like Sisyphus, in constant uphill and downhill struggle asserting their identity. Anwar Kholid's Chap. 3 showcases how two major Islamic mass organizations, nationalist and moderate, manoeuvre their standing on the LGBTQ + issue, not tacitly condemning but diplomatically refraining from defending. These actors are not beyond but part of the very social structures that have made them who they are, the structures that uphold patriarchal values. They are interdependent and interconnected with them. The stories, lyrics, and actions of the subjects in the chapters are transgressions of the homophobic and sexist culture, which still bears some imprints in their articulation.

Put together. These chapters construct diverse initiatives, activism, and expressions of Indonesian people grappling with issues of gender and sexuality within their cultural contexts, in which Islam occupies a central position. Or is the position of Islam too much taken for granted here? Interestingly, Islamic morality is not evident in the Sundanese women's confession letters in Watson's chapter. Whether this absence relates to their lower-middle-class world or that they are already so ingrained in it that it is no longer an issue–is still open to discussion. Anwar Kholid brings about another compelling issue of diversity (Chap. 3) in his observation about the different strategies adopted by the Yogyakarta branch of the same Islamic organizations compared to the national ones. Grounded in local realities and having daily interaction with the LGBT communities in their neighborhood, these “regional” branches opted for the practice of care towards sexual others rather than holding on to dogmatic norms to judge them.

Further reflections are needed to evaluate the implications of this finding. We need to examine how distance and affinity from local grounding affect policymaking and what we can learn from this to educate the public about tolerance and care. The chapter recalls Rodríguez work (2020), which underlines the importance of contexts in queer religious identity, albeit differently. Rodriquez connects queer identity positioning with space and place, thus showing the flexibility of performing queerness through “commuting” and “integrating” between spaces and places.

Still connected with local grounding, we must interrogate the global–local interplay in using terms like LGBTQ + , LGBTQ, and LGBT in the public discourse. These terms directly connote a cultural import, which alienates them from local history. Throughout Indonesia, different locally grounded terms are known to refer to gender diversity, such as the five genders of the Bugis society (makunrai or woman, oroane or man, calabai or feminine man, calalai or masculine women, and bissu, the androgyngist with a spiritual role).¹¹ In Java, terms such as banci, wandu (manly women) global and universalised English terms, a cultural distance is established.

The chapters of this book allow the readers to have a close encounter with textual and cultural expressions, as well as empirical assessments of gender, sexuality, and Islamic religion in differing contexts in Indonesia. Given the right-wing direction of the global-local pendulum, the issues raised in the book are bound to be relevant in the coming future, although hopefully, the right-wing swing will not prevail too long. While normative and homophobic policies and praxis are still robust, emergent activism among various actors like KUPI (Kongres Ulama Perempuan Indonesia/Congress of Indonesian Female Ulama) is gaining momentum (Rohmaniah et al. 2022).

KUPI is a significant breakthrough in dealing with the conservative turn towards gender and sexuality in the name of Islam. While many constraining structures such as bylaws and regulations come from state actors and institutions, the women Islamic leaders work from the bottom-up, reaching local communities. They strategically chose an Islamic university and pesantren (a boarding school for Islamic teachings) as the location for their congress and involved Islamic youth from various local groups. The first and second congresses have gathered over 1000 women (Badriyah 2022). What is most promising, the congresses issued fatwas (decrees established by religious authorities) which gained the approval of the Indonesian Islamic Council. The fatwas include critical issues on gender and sexuality, such as female circumcision, child marriage, and sexual violence.¹² The process is democratic, with dialogues involving diverse groups, informed also by perspectives from religious leaders from other Islamic countries. Concerned about the way Indonesian politics and state actors have been using identity politics to gain votes in anticipating the presidential election of 2024, progressive activists put their hopes not on the State institutions and actors but on the bottom-up, grounded, and democratic processes initiated by KUPI to navigate the waves of repressive conservativism.¹³ Certainly, KUPI is not a cure-all for the challenges against the rising conservativism, which impinges on the rights of women and sexual minorities. This is not a linear struggle, but a tug of war complicated by multi-dimensional global-local factors such as national and local politics, the pandemic, and ecological crisis.¹⁴

At this point, a word is due on what we have not covered in this book. We have not covered in the book the cultural and geographical areas of Indonesia where Islam is not a major religion. Instead of Islam, Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, or a combination of major and minor religions could be the reference for morality in these areas, each with their normative perspectives on gender and sexual minorities. Nor have we illuminated how COVID-19 has been reflected in cultural productions within our subject area, a topic that deserves further research.

Finally, this book can be considered a reference for further discussions on the dynamics of power relations and the expression of gender and sexuality in contemporary Indonesia.

Notes

• 1. I thank Monika Arnez for alerting me to his work.

• 2. Personal communication with Mujahidin Nurrachman, May 28, 2023.

• 3. Personal communication with Alia Swastika, May 27, 2023.

• 4. Personal communication with Feby Indriani, May 28, 2023.

• 5. Different terms are used here for head coverings. Niqab refers to clothing that covers the whole body, including the face, except for the eyes; hijab and jilbab are often used interchangeably today in Indonesia, although hijab refers to clothing that covers the aurat or genitalia and parts not to be seen in public, including hair. In contrast, jilbab refers to loose clothes that do not show body shape; the burqa covers all body parts, including the eyes, with some transparent fabric over the eyes that enable women to see through. See Generasi Milenial (2021).

• 6. See: https://indonesienlesen.com/2020/10/25/perempuan-yang-kehilangan-wajahnya/. Accessed 18 December 2023

• 7. Hijab syahri is a term that has been used to refer to the kind of clothing, which is in accordance with Islamic law, Sharia. It refers to clothing which does not show a woman’s body shape, and covers all parts of a woman’s body, except for the face, and hands. See note no 2.

• 8. Diversity of Islam in Indonesia is not limited to ideological position but also to other factors, such as transnational influences, schools, syncretic groundings, and others. See Kersten C (2017).

• 9. Didik Nini Thowok, personal communication, May 27, 2023.

• 10. Dede Oetomo, personal communication, January 2016. See Boellstorff (2016) and Ferdiansyah, T (2018) on the LGBT controversy in 2016.

• 11. See Davies, SG (2010) and Kersten, C (2017).

• 12. See the results and process of the KUPI congress at https://kupipedia.id/index.php/Hasil_Kongres. Accessed 18 December 2023.

• 13. Kamala Chandrakirana, personal communication, May 27, 2023.

• 14. The KUPI congress also issued a decree on environmental degradation. See: https://kupipedia.id/index.php. Accessed 17 December 2023.