Gender, State and Social Power in Contemporary Indonesia: Divorce and Marriage Law by Kate O'Shaughnessy

Author:Kate O'Shaughnessy [O'Shaughnessy, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, Social Science, Political Science, Women's Studies, Regional Studies, General
ISBN: 9781134023561
Google: eeFPVMbPv1EC
Goodreads: 17474655
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Women co-opting the state: conformity or subversion?

Although the New Order state constructed women as legally and socially subordinate, at times women may have been able to co-opt such constructions, and the legal frameworks provided by the state, to advance their own (or their family’s) interests. This may also have enabled them to contest religious and cultural gender ideologies. In this section, I ask what particular aspects of Indonesian state policy or discourses women co-opted, how this changed over time and whether women’s actions can be characterized (as Bain has described some Indonesian women’s actions in the context of theatre) as a form of non-resistant agency. I approach these questions from two angles. In the first part of the section, I look at the ways in which women garnered legal knowledge in order to resolve marital conflict, through the use of legal education programmes and newspaper legal advice columns. I base this analysis upon informant testimony from judges and NGO activists as well as newspaper and NGO records. By examining the questions women posed before they entered the court, I wish to demonstrate what expectations women might have had of the legal system, and how the impetus for legal action may be rooted in women’s lesser marital and social power. In the second part, I scrutinize a selection of case studies from various Religious and State Courts, examining the discourses women employed in court, their demands, the success or otherwise of these demands and their convergences with state gender ideologies. I have selected both Muslim and non-Muslim cases in order to demonstrate the similarity of strategies employed in formal legal forums, which I believe demonstrate the transcendence of particular gender ideologies over the specificities of religious doctrine.

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