Carla Jones

Fashion and Faith in Urban Indonesia

Abstract In the past fifteen years, urban Indonesian women have increasingly chosen to adopt a form of Islamic dress called busana Muslim. This shift could be read as an index of two apparently contradictory or mutually exclusive phenomena, a rise in Islamic piety and a rise in consumerism. This article suggests that rather than reducing the popularity of Islamic fashion in contemporary Indonesia to either religion or consumerism, the rise of Islamic fashion should be understood within a context of national debates about modernity and piety. Through a consideration of Islamic fashion as commodity fetish, I argue that the commodification of Islamic dress in urban Indonesia has not been a straightforward process, but rather is an arena for Indonesian Muslims to think about the relationship among faith, gender, and materiality.

Whose stress? Emotion work in middle-class Javanese homes

By attending to ways in which middle-class wives in Yogyakarta, Java, describe negotiating sentiments among family members (including children, maids and husbands), this article argues that domestic relations in middle-class homes in Java have been importantly inflected by state rhetoric on gender propriety and market ideas of work. As a result, both middle-class women and maids have come to conceive of emotion work as part of an array of domestic obligations central to social reproduction.

Images of Desire: Creating Virtue and Value in an Indonesian Islamic Lifestyle Magazine

The recent and highly visible rise of Islamic consumer culture in contemporary urban Indonesia is a source of both pleasure and anxiety for many Indonesians, figuring in debates about the appeal of a new piety there in the past decade. At the center of these debates is the image of the piously dressed woman. Simultaneously a consumer and a sign of piety, modest yet attractive, she seems to blur assumptions about the boundaries between image and substance, and in so doing generates anxiety. A booming Islamic fashion industry and Islamic fashion media traffic in this space, turning virtue into value and vice versa by deploying the image of the pious feminine to incite consumer desire while denying accusations that this is simply capitalism with a religious face. Based on research and interviews with the editorial staff of one Islamic fashion magazine, NooR, this article traces how Indonesias rising Islamic fashion industry and lifestyle media have placed women at the center of broader cultural debates about the relationship between devotion and consumption.