Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia

Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia

  • Author: Sears, Laurie J.
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822316848
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822396710
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 1996
  • Month: February
  • Pages: 368
  • DDC: 305.42/09598
  • Language: English
The stories of Indonesian women have often been told by Indonesian men and Dutch men and women. This volume asks how these representations—reproduced, transformed, and circulated in history, ethnography, and literature—have circumscribed feminine behavior in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia. 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.
The contributors examine the ways in which Indonesian women and men are enmeshed in networks of power and then pursue the stories of those who, sometimes at great political risk, challenge these powers. In this juxtaposition of voices and stories, we see how indigenous patriarchal fantasies of feminine behavior merged with Dutch colonial notions of proper wives and mothers to produce the Indonesian government’s present approach to controlling the images and actions of women. Facing the theoretical challenge of building a truly cross-cultural feminist analysis, Fantasizing the Feminine takes us into an ongoing conversation that reveals the contradictions of postcolonial positionings and the fragility of postmodern identities.
This book will be welcomed by readers with interests in contemporary Indonesian politics and society as well as historians, anthropologists, and other scholars concerned with literature, gender, and cultural studies.

Contributors. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, Sita Aripurnami, Jane Monnig Atkinson, Nancy K. Florida, Daniel S. Lev, Dédé Oetomo, Laurie J. Sears, Ann Laura Stoler, Saraswati Sunindyo, Julia I. Suryakusuma, Jean Gelman Taylor, Sylvia Tiwon, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Diane L. Wolf

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction. Fragile Identities: Deconstructing Women and Indonesia / Laurie J. Sears
  • Part I. Structures of Control
    • Models and Maniacs: Articulating the Female in Indonesia / Sylvia Tiwon
    • A Sentimental Education: Native Servants and the Cultivation of European Children in the Netherlands Indies / Ann Laura Stoler
    • The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia / Julia I. Suryakusuma
    • Murder, Gender, and the Media: Sexualizing Politics and Violence / Saraswati Sunindyo
    • Javanese Factory Daughters: Gender, the State, and Industrial Capitalism / Diane L. Wolf
    • Quizzing the Sphinx: Reflections on Mortality in Central Sulawesi / Jane Monnig Atkinson
    • On the Other Hand? / Daniel S. Lev
  • Part II. Contested Representations
    • Sex Wars: Writing Gender Relations in Nineteenth-Century Java / Nancy K. Florida
    • Nyai Dasima: Portrait of a Mistress in Literature and Film / Jean Gelman Taylor
    • A Feminist Comment on the Sinetron Presentation of Indonesian Women / Sita Aripurnami
    • Gender and Sexual Orientation in Indonesia / Dede Oetomo
    • "Bullshit!" S/he Said: The Happy, Modern, Sexy, Indonesian Married Woman as Transsexual / Benedict R. O'G. Anderson
    • Alien Romance / Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

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