Challenging Authoritarian Rule - Sea Nip by Ariel Heryanto & Sumit K. Mandal

Author:Ariel Heryanto & Sumit K. Mandal [Heryanto, Ariel & Mandal, Sumit K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136004148
Goodreads: 17765161
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2003-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6 The blessed tragedy

The making of women’s activism during the Reformasi years

Melani Budianta

Introduction: where the women are

In her paper ‘The 1999 Elections in Indonesia: where were the women?’, Susan Blackburn (1999) regrets that Indonesian women’s organizations were slow to support Megawati Sukarnoputri, chairperson of the populist political party Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (PDIP, Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle), when she was nominated as a presidential candidate. Blackburn argues that Megawati’s candidacy was likely to be ‘the main feminist issue’ to emerge from the elections and considers it a ‘feminist coup for a woman to hold this position [the presidency]’ (Blackburn 1999: 5). The tendency to measure women’s empowerment through the political ascendancy of well-known figures is not uncommon. Women leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Chandrika Bandaraneike Kumaratunga in Sri Lanka, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail in Malaysia and Megawati in Indonesia have been viewed as signs of rising feminist power in the region (Business Times 1999).

Malaysian women activists, like their Indonesian counterparts, are hesitant to consider the rise of women leaders of political parties in their respective countries as an indication of feminist advances.1 Rather than judge this reaction as a failure to seize opportunities or a misguided tendency to ‘shun power’ and remain outside the system, as Blackburn suggests, we might question whether the essentialist approach that links high profile women leaders with feminism ignores the complex and multiple discourses in which the women leaders are embedded. The controversy over Megawati’s candidacy highlighted positions on the permissibility of a female president and was, as a result, a feminist issue. Nevertheless, for many activists, Megawati and Wan Azizah represent the patriarchal discourses of Sukarnoism and conservative Islam respectively.

Instead of highlighting prominent women in the battlefield of elitepolitics, we should turn to the less structured but more significant processes that occur among women in various social strata. Such processes materialized in the highly visible acceleration of women’s activism during the Reformasi years in response to the extended economic crisis in Indonesia and Malaysia. Women’s activism in this regard is not a singular movement but consists of heterogeneous and wide-ranging efforts by women to organize themselves formally or informally.

In Indonesia, women’s activism played a significant role in mounting civil disobedience. For example, women organized the first street rally during the heightened economic and political crises in the months preceding the end of Suharto’s rule on 21 May 1998. Despite official sanctions, women worked collectively in support of the victims of the violence of May 1998, organizing the provision of basic foodstuffs to alleviate the impact of the economic crisis or mobilizing logistical and moral support for student demonstrators. In Malaysia, women activists demanded structural reforms through the Women’s Agenda for Change (WAC)2 campaign (see also Chapter 5) and introduced an independent women’s candidate in the elections of 1999.3 I believe that the eruption of wide-ranging activism in the region, rather than the competition within elites, provides more significant evidence of ongoing patterns and processes of women’s empowerment.

The intersection of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.