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.