Lyn Parker

The subjectification of citizenship: student interpretations of school teachings in Bali

(2002). The subjectification of citizenship: student interpretations of school teachings in Bali. Asian Studies Review: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 3-37.

Adolescents in Contemporary Indonesia

1. Introducing Indonesian Youth 2. From Pemuda to Remaja 3. The Worlds of Young People in Solo, Central Java 4. The Moral World of Minangkabau Adolescents in West Sumatra 5. The Meaning of Education For Young People 6. Free Seks, Moral Panic and the Construction of the Moral Self 7. Leisure and Socializing: Maintaining the Moral Self in Gendered Leisure 8. The Hopes and Dreams of Young People 9. Conclusion

Problematic Conjugations: Women’s Agency, Marriage and Domestic Violence in Indonesia

Abstract: This paper examines women’s experience of domestic violence within marriage in Makassar, South Sulawesi. It analyses the meaning of marriage for men and women, the roles of men and women within marriage, shifts in marriage practices – particularly the shift from arranged to “love” marriage – and unequal gender positions within marriage. We discuss some salient issues in the “margins of marriage” in Indonesia: polygyny and constructions of masculinity that condone the practice of polygyny/affairs, and attitudes towards divorce, particularly for women. We then examine women’s perception of the causes and triggers of domestic violence as revealed by fieldwork data, using the lens of women’s agency. Our findings are that women perceive that their expressions of agency – for instance in challenging men’s authority, moral righteousness and adequacy as breadwinners – are the most common triggers for male violence within marriage. Finally, we discuss the difficulty for women of escaping domestic violence, thereby getting some purchase on the relative capacity of women to resist, deflect or deal with the violence.

Democratizing Indonesia through Education? Community Participation in Islamic Schooling:

In 1998, Indonesia embarked on a journey to democracy. This journey involved the decentralization of education from 2002. The new school-based management (SBM) system required greater community and parental participation in schools—thereby, it was hoped, contributing to a deepening of democracy. Islamic schools (madrasah) also adopted this policy reform. Here we present the findings of our research into community participation in madrasah in Indonesia. One of our principle findings, and concerns, is the low level of parental and community participation in madrasah governance. Parents feel they have no place in school governance or in teaching and learning. There is a concentration of power in the hands of principals, teachers and school founders (of private madrasah). In general, participation by teachers in madrasah governance is increasing. Also, there are examples of excellent madrasah, where the principals devolve power and responsibility to other teachers, cooperate with parents and community leaders, model exemplary behaviour and institutionalize a clear vision. The decentralization of education in Indonesia has not uniformly empowered citizens to become more involved in Islamic schools. The question remains how to extrapolate from practices at excellent madrasah to effectively articulate community enthusiasm for Islamic schooling and school governance nationwide.

Secularity, Religion and the Possibilities for Religious Citizenship

Abstract Scholarly predictions of the secularization of the world have proven premature. We see a heterogeneous world in which religion remains a significant and vital social and political force. This paper reflects critically upon secularization theory in order to see how scholars can productively respond to the, at least partly, religious condition of the world at the beginning of the twenty first century. We note that conventional multiculturalism theory and policy neglects religion, and argue the need for a reconceptualization of understanding of religion and secularity, particularly in a context of multicultural citizenship — such as in Australia and Indonesia. We consider the possibilities for religious pluralism in citizenship and for “religious citizenship”. Finally, we propose that religious citizenship education might be a site for fostering a tolerant and enquiring attitude towards religious diversity.

Religion, class and schooled sexuality among Minangkabau teenage girls

This paper examines the meanings attached to sexuality and femininity by Minangkabau teenage girls in schools in West Sumatra, Indonesia. Schools in West Sumatra communicate a hegemonic, normative understanding of womanhood, and a moral consciousness of the female sexual body, to students. Different types of schools – academic, vocational and Islamic senior high schools – have a different ‘curriculum of the body’ (Lesko 1988) and differently discipline bodies and shape sexuality. School girls articulate their understanding of and practise their sexuality in ways that are characteristic of their class, gender and religiosity, mediated by their schools.The schools articulate a religiously-ordained and gendered social order, and impose social control. The different types of school render girls chaste and virtuous to varying degrees. Through everyday practices, this curriculum effects girls’ embodied experience of sexuality. Minangkabau teenage girls have a highly developed sense of their own sexuality, but, far from experiencing a sexual revolution as a result of globalization, most have developed a sexual awareness that is weighted with cultural and religious burdens. Minang female adolescent sexuality is a moral sexuality based on Islam and adat.

The theory and context of the stigmatisation of widows and divorcees (janda) in Indonesia

ABSTRACT This article theorises and contextualises the stigmatisation of janda (widows and divorcees) in Indonesia. It firstly reviews the social science literature on stigma in society, showing a shift towards the study of stigmatisation as an exercise of power by a dominant group in society. It argues that the content of that stigmatisation works best when it is culturally relevant, useful to the dominant and hurtful to the stigmatised minority. Secondly, it surveys the social and cultural context in which widows and particularly divorcees are stigmatised in Indonesia. It argues that the apparent acceptability of divorce in the 1950s and 1960s shifted through the period of the New Order (1966–98), and divorce became much less common and more stigmatised. An education revolution contributed to more elaborate courtship patterns, later age of marriage and a trend to marriage by choice rather than parental arrangement; the patriarchal gender system and nuclear family ideology of the New Order state, and its reconstruction of marriage and divorce, along with other features of its development agenda, contributed to social transformations that include the stigmatisation of divorce for women. Finally, the article suggests other promising areas for future research on the stigmatisation of janda in Indonesia – among them are representations of janda in popular culture, a study of the ‘broken home’ phenomenon, and the class dimensions of janda stigmatisation.

The stigmatisation of widows and divorcees (janda) in Indonesia, and the possibilities for agency

ABSTRACT This article explores the discourses and practices of stigmatisation that shape the experience of widows and divorced women (janda) in Indonesia. The conceptualisation of stigma allows us to see that the experience of being a janda is a gendered, moral experience. The article examines the construction of ideal marriage in Islam and in Indonesia, divorce, and the construction of gender and sexuality. There is a dominant discourse that divorced and widowed women are sexually available and promiscuous; the result is often that men prey upon janda. In turn, wives feel threatened by the competition that janda represent. This article is based on ethnographic and interview data from two field sites: Bandung, West Java, and Wawonii island, off the coast of Southeast Sulawesi; both are Muslim communities. It also explores the possibilities for womens agency and destigmatisation, through the mobilising of social networks and the emphasising of their worth as good mothers to achieve social respectability.

Introduction: The Everyday Agency of Women in Asia

This issue of Asian Studies Review includes a themed section that addresses agency in relation to womens everyday lives and experiences in Asia. Four papers follow this Introduction: Siti Aisyah and Lyn Parker (2014) study domestic violence in Makassar, Sulawesi, Indonesia; Laura Dales (2014) explores singlehood for women in Japan; Tamara Jacka (2014) challenges stereotypes around older rural women in China; and Wanning Sun (2014) examines literary representations of rural migrant women in southern China. Building on a discussion begun in the edited collection, The Agency of Women in Asia (Parker, 2005), this collection revisits theoretical questions and explores some of the issues posed in that volume, but with a special focus on ordinary, everyday social practice in contexts of work, marriage, singlehood and maternity. In particular the papers in this collection contribute to the theorisation of agency, exploring not only the ways in which women express agency, but also feminist expectations of agency, the repercussions of the exercise of agency, the effect of negative representations of women on womens agency, and the ways in which scholars can understand and assess agency. Acknowledging the important theoretical work that already exists on agency (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 1997; Mahmood, 2001 and 2005; Ortner, 2001 and 2006), and the minor spate of edited books on womens public activism in Asia recently (e.g. Burghoorn et al., 2008; Iwanaga, 2008; Roces and Edwards, 2010), this collection takes a different tack. Womens everyday lives, on the ground in lived situations, have been neglected in this new scholarship. In this collection, we focus on womens relational and emotional lives, their experience of domestic practices and daily social and sexual interactions, on the way they build relationships, and their involvement in forms of interdependence and mutual aid. Some pictures are intimate and intensely personal; oth- ers are of public behaviour - of women shouting out, or publishing on the internet. Some agency is transient, as when women are carried along with the ebb and flow of family relationships or economic ups-and-downs; some is more permanent in its effects,

WHERE ARE THE WOMEN IN MULTICULTURALISM

Abstract This article discusses the need to re-imagine multiculturalism and feminism in order to better accommodate women in minority cultures who are religious. It begins and ends with comments about multiculturalism and ‘difference feminism’ in Australia. In the body of the paper I use anthropological field-work in Indonesia, first to show that culture and religion are not separate and immutable, and secondly to show how Muslim women in the womens movement in Indonesia are using Islam to build a multicultural discourse. Finally I apply my findings about Muslim women activists in multicultural discourse in Indonesia to multiculturalism in Australia.