This book examines women's activism in the early years of independent Indonesia when new attitudes to gender, nationalism, citizenship and democratization were forming. It questions the meaning of democratization for women and their relationship to national sovereignty within the new Indonesian state, and discusses women's organizations and their activities; women's social and economic roles; and the different cultural, regional and ethnic attitudes towards women, while showing the failure of political change to fully address women's gender interests and needs. The author argues that both the role of nationalism in defining gender identity and the role of gender in defining national identity need equal recognition.

This book examines women's activism in the early years of independent Indonesia when new attitudes to gender, nationalism, citizenship and democratization were forming. It questions the meaning of democratization for women and their relationship to national sovereignty within the new Indonesian state, and discusses women's organizations and their activities; women's social and economic roles; and the different cultural, regional and ethnic attitudes towards women, while showing the failure of political change to fully address women's gender interests and needs. The author argues that both the role of nationalism in defining gender identity and the role of gender in defining national identity need equal recognition.

Presenting dialogues between prominent scholars of and from Indonesia and Indonesian women working in professional, activist, religious, and literary domains, the book dissolves essentialist notions of "women" and "Indonesia" that have arisen out of the tensions of empire.

This book offers a new insight on the intersection between Islam and feminism and the impact it has on Muslim women's self-narratives of equality from its early encounter during colonialism to its emergence in the 1990s in Indonesia.

This collection of essays examines how Southeast Asian women writers engage with the grand narratives of nationalism and the modern nation-state by exploring the representations of gender, identity and nation in the postcolonial literatures of Brunei Darussalam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Bringing to light the selected works of overlooked local women writers and providing new analyses of those produced by internationally-known women authors and artists, the essays situate regional literary developments within historicized geopolitical landscapes to offer incisive analyses and readings on how women and the feminine are imagined, represented, and positioned in relation to the Southeast Asian nation.The book, which features both cross-country comparative analyses and country-specific investigations, also considers the ideas of the nation and the state by investigating related ideologies, rhetoric, apparatuses, and discourses, and the ways in which they affect women’s bodies, subjectivities, and lived realities in both historical and contemporary Southeast Asian contexts. By considering how these literary expressions critique, contest, or are complicit in nationalist projects and state-mandated agendas, the collection contributes to the overall regional and comparative discourses on gender, identity and nation in Southeast Asian studies.

Written by leading international experts, this book provides an overview of the history and current context of feminism in 12 Asian countries. This breadth of coverage, together with suggestions for further study, and an integrated cross-national timeline makes Women's Movements in Asia ideal for use on courses looking at women and feminism in Asia.

Woman and the Colonial State deals with the ambiguous relationship between women of both the European and the Indonesian population and the colonial state in the former Netherlands Indies in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on new data from a variety of sources: colonial archives, journals, household manuals, children's literature, and press surveys, it analyses the women-state relationship by presenting five empirical studies on subjects, in which women figured prominently at the time: Indonesian labour, Indonesian servants in colonial homes, Dutch colonial fashion and food, the feminist struggle for the vote and the intense debate about monogamy of and by women at the end of the 1930s. An introductory essay combines the outcomes of the case studies and relates those to debates about Orientalism, the construction of whiteness, and to questions of modernity and the colonial state formation.

The relationship between social movements and their countermovements is an underrepresented research topic, given the bulk of social movement studies that have been published to date. Moreover, empirical research on this topic primarily covers certain geographic areas of the world, specifically what is commonly called the “global North”. The mobilization of religious and women’s movements against social change, which strive for a preservation of the status quo and can be held responsible for a delayed expansion of reform-oriented interest articulation, is a rare topic of social movement literature, too. The authors of this volume address the issue of women’s movements and countermovements in countries of Southeast Asia and the North African part of the MENA region. They arrive at interesting constellations of coalition and competition between state and non-state actors, and religious and secular movements, as well as within women’s movements. Covering case studies from Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Morocco and Tunisia, the pattern of Islamist movements countering the goals of (Muslim) women’s movements emerges as dominant.

This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to chart how various forms of violence – domestic, military, legal and political – are not separate instances of violence, but rather embedded in structural inequalities brought about by colonialism, occupation and state violence. The book explores both case studies of individuals and of groups to examine experiences of violence within the context of gender and structures of power in modern Indonesian history and Indonesia-related diasporas. It argues that gendered violence is particularly important to consider in this region because of its complex history of armed conflict and authoritarian rule, the diversity of people that have been affected by violence, as well as the complexity of the religious and cultural communities involved. The book focuses in particular on textual narratives of violence, visualisations of violence, commemorations of violence and the politics of care.

In The Made-Up State, Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, who compose one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty. The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.