Truth in fantasy in tender trap of RI women

Truth in fantasy in tender trap of RI women

Pace-setting or trend-setting
Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia
Laurie J. Sears, Editor
Duke University Press, 1996
349 pages
A$34.00

JAKARTA (JP): An entertaining read is a rare find in academic
literature. Captivating readers with meticulous research requires
real literary skill.

Maybe this is why the more popular English-language books on
Indonesia, with some notable exceptions, have often been authored
by journalists rather than academics, from Cindy Adams'
authorized autobiography of former president Sukarno, and Hamish
McDonald's 1980 overview of Indonesian politics, to Adam
Schwartz's A Nation in Waiting, and Michael Vatikiosis'
Indonesian Politics under Suharto, both published in the
last few years.

Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, edited by University of
Washington scholar, Laurie J. Sears, presents a recent addition
to the study of Indonesia which successfully combines scholastic
research with a readable style.

The cover has a sepia-colored photograph of demure Javanese
courtesans during the colonial era. This is spliced together with
a more contemporary scene, in grainy photojournalistic style, of
women workers, possibly on their way to take part in a
demonstration.

In Sears' compilation, papers authored by scholars from
Indonesia, North America and Australia contribute lively and
exciting voices to our understanding of gender and sexuality in
Indonesia.

Sears' introduction has a description of her and her
daughter's yearly ritual of being Jewish on the Day of Atonement.
From this anecdote, she draws questions about inherited
identities, about what we choose to keep, or reject, from
tradition, and why. The control and contest of identity
continues as one of the book's main themes.

The volume's cover and title hint provocatively at its
contents. Between the pages, we experience fascinating stories of
workers, farmers, concubines and transvestites alongside those of
mothers and wives.

We visit the lives of women in remote communities in Central
Sulawesi and the Central Meratus Mountains in Kalimantan. We leap
from 19th century classic Javanese poetry to Indonesian TV
soaps, from contemporary factory work to popular fiction.

During the journey, we learn as much about Indonesian society
from fiction and fantasy as we do from fact. This is the clue to
the book's puzzling and awkward title.

Brilliant scholar on Indonesia, Benedict R. O'G. Anderson,
contributes a comic-serious commentary on Bidadari (Heavenly
Nymph) by popular "lady novelist" Titie Said. A condensed
rendering of the novel's hysterically funny plot about "the
happy, modern, sexy, Indonesian married woman as transsexual"
made me want to race out and buy a copy.

Fellow American scholar, Nancy K. Florida, contributes another
entertaining textual analysis of a more esoteric 19th century
Javanese mystic poem, Suluk Lonthang. Florida, who spent five
years working in the royal palace of Surakarta in the early
1980s, focuses on a genre of didactic literature known as
piwulang estri, or "lessons for women".

Florida writes that these texts, which instruct Javanese
noblewomen how to be good wives (and cowives), were most prolific
during the reign of Pakubuwana IX (1861-1893). The ruler, Florida
adds in a titillating footnote, was described in a Surakarta-
composed text to be so sexy that the very sight of him could
drive a prawan kaji (devout Muslim woman) to throw off her veil.

University of Indonesia graduate and cofounder of Kalyanamitra
(Women's Communication and Information Center), Sita Aripurnami,
writes about the contemporary representation of Indonesian women
in TV teleserials known as sinetron. The shows, says Aripurnami,
deal with romance and family life, but also carry messages from
the government.

Aripurnami says she chose to study pacesetting teleserials
because of the huge number of viewers. She quotes a demographic
survey conducted in 1990 by SRI Media Survey, which found 60.1
percent of people aged 15 years and above in six major Indonesian
cities were tuned in to TV on any given day.

Aripurnami's own survey of female characters in the various
series indicated that, despite a minority of interesting
exceptions, women were depicted as dependent, irrational,
emotional and submissive.

Her findings are consistent with Sears' introductory note that
the largest generalization we can make about the position of
women in Indonesia today is that they are defined in relation to
men.

Silvia Tiwon from the University of California at Berkeley
stretches this conclusion further, writing about the "proximity
of women separated by a hundred years".

In a chapter titled "Models and Maniacs", the private
correspondence of the late 19th century Javanese princess, Raden
Adjeng Kartini, is juxtaposed with the narrative of a machine
operator at a plastics factory whom Tiwon calls Ratmi, to expose
surprising parallels and ironies.

Reflections in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia on the
representation of women in Indonesia -- from the 19th century to
the present -- do not reveal an unbroken line toward the
advancement of women. In fact, the contemporary contributions,
dealing more directly with the realities of the constraints and
inhibitions faced by modern women, are often the more
pessimistic.

As a compilation of papers along the broad themes of gender
and identity, Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia holds
together well.

Eclectic characters, topics and viewpoints are woven together
by the authors' desires to unravel inherited and officially
sanctioned representations of Indonesian women and men.

Any attempt to draw essentialist judgments is ill-fated. Each
story offers a tantalizing slice of life from a particular period
in history and place in the archipelago.

What could have been a cacophony of competing voices is
instead a rather exuberant celebration of the heterogeneity of
Indonesia's people, and their often good-humored refusal to be
confined to manufactured identities.

-- Indrawati McCormick

The reviewer is undertaking research for her master's in
Indonesian women and politics at Monash University in Melbourne.