Examining the development of feminist thought and practice in Indonesian arts and culture since the early 2000s, this chapter argues that new forms of cultural activism are emerging; they are feminist, trans-archipelagic and moving towards a decolonial approach. In the first decade of Indonesia’s reformasi, feminist discourses became visible through high-profile media debates and spectacles from the rise of women writers who write openly about sex and sexuality (writing labelled by the media as sastrawangi or fragrant literature), to the controversial Rancangan Undang-Undang Pornografi (Pornography Bill), which became law in 2008. Women in the arts have challenged traditional gender roles prescribed by the New Order regime by reclaiming their agency as creators and decision-makers in literary, music, film, performance and visual art scenes. The two most prominent trajectories of feminist thought, liberal feminism and Islamic feminism, have shaped the discussions around women, gender and feminism, and these influences have continued to thrive in the subsequent decades. With the prevalent use of digital technology, liberal and Islamic feminist ideas have travelled through digital platforms, circulated by the younger generation of feminist activists, often in response to the increasing religious conservatism that attempts to confine women and discriminate against sexual and gender minority groups.

Yet more feminist directions have emerged. The Joko Widodo (Jokowi) administration, which began in 2014, has led to a new development in feminist articulations that fit more with free market logic. Centred on the idea of kerja (work) within a neoliberal framework, the Jokowi regime flaunts successful female ministers as well as millennial staff and spokespersons—many of whom are women—as the icons of Indonesia’s assertive move towards a global digital economy and creative entrepreneurship. This development, coinciding with global feminist movements, paved the way for the rise of neoliberal feminism that frames women’s struggles as individual endeavours to break the glass ceiling. There has also been an emerging feminist movement that focuses on forging feminist connections across borders in the nusantara (archipelago) while making interventions to the Jakarta/Java-centric feminist thought and practice. This chapter focuses on the latter movement and highlights its trans-archipelagic and decolonial characteristics. My scope is limited to feminist cultural activism, a specific site within the feminist movement in which collectives use culture as a site for political intervention.

Gender ideologies, representation and contestation

The reformasi era of the past twenty years has ushered in many changes that have simultaneously progressed and challenged gender equality. At the end of the Suharto era, gender equality was a major political demand that underpinned democratic reform. Many legislative changes were made, and with these changes the dismantling of the ‘gender order’ that the New Order established began to be disrupted. However, with every legislative change came also contrary moves that sought to challenge progress towards gender equality. The political ideology of the New Order seems difficult to dismantle completely and has found new expressions and contestations.

The ‘gender order’ that underpinned the political ideology of Suharto’s New Order had heteronormative, binary and static understandings at its core. This period saw ‘male’ and ‘female’ defined more clearly according to a specific set of appearances, social roles and spatial distinctions that privileged the family or kekeluargaan as the foundation on which development—pembangunan—took place. Motherhood for example, was the basis of citizenship for women and assumed subordinate to men in what Julia Suryakusuma (2011) termed ‘state ibuism’. Repressive and restrictive representations of women and circumscribed female roles in public life underpinned the political system. Its binary counterpart, bapakism, heralded the construction of fathers of the nation, as well as the household. These binary constructs were underpinned by kodrat (biologically specific nature), assumed to be God-given and sanctioned by Islam.

Kathryn Robinson (2008, and this volume) developed an approach that identified ways in which this gender order mapped on to specific areas of power during the New Order. Drawing on social theory of gender from R.W. Connell, Robinson’s analysis reflected that ‘gender relations are present in all types of institutions. They may not be the most important structure in a particular case, but they are certainly a major structure of most’ (Connell 1987: 120). Gender relations can be understood as foci for the exercise of social, political and economic power in society; as a multidimensional structure operating in a complex network of institutions. As Kathy Robinson updates in her contribution to this volume, these institutions include, for example, marriage, political representation, laws on domestic violence and sexual violence, and employment settings. Changes to these institutions and processes over the past twenty years have provided room for gender equality gains to be made.

Indonesia is committed to combating child marriage as part of the country’s multiple international commitments, from the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child we ratified in 1990 to the Sustainable Development Goals we pledged to achieve by 2030. Joko Widodo’s administration has also identified child marriage as one of the challenges it must tackle in the National Medium Term Development Plan 2020–2024. Most recently, in 2022, the president signed a decree to end violence against children that assigns inter-ministerial priority to, among other initiatives, preventing child marriage. Given over 80 million children will benefit from this protection effort, the impact of such policies is potentially significant.

Beyond international and national promises, there seems to be a crossinstitutional consensus that ending child marriage is a worthy cause, as marriages involving an individual or a couple below the age of 18 can cause long-lasting negative consequences on children’s lives, especially girls. In Indonesia, women who marry early are less likely to access health services during pregnancy, and their utilisation of medically assisted birth and antenatal care is limited (BPS 2016; Bruno et al. 2021). Moreover, women in early marriages have weaker decision-making power. They are less likely to have marriage certificates, and their children are less likely to obtain birth certificates (Cameron et al. 2022). In contrast, women who marry after the age of 18 have higher average educational attainment (BPS et al. 2020).

The impact of child marriage is also long term and may be passed on to the next generation. Child marriage poses a risk of poverty to families, which in turn influences girls’ decision to marry before adulthood (SMERU 2013). Among children whose parents were married before age 18, there are higher risks of infant (under 12 months) mortality, stunted growth and being underweight at birth. Children with young mothers have also demonstrated lower cognitive scores (Cameron et al. 2022).

Child marriage has negative consequences for both women and men who marry early. There is a higher chance of divorce in households with underage marriages (Cameron et al. 2022). Additionally, individuals who marry before turning 18 have low participation in the formal labour market and live in households with lower living standards (BPS 2017).

In this chapter, we first discuss the state of child marriage in Indonesia, the progress made through relevant policies, and the challenges to addressing child marriage.

Debates about the place of transgender, gay and lesbian people are a prominent feature of Indonesian political life in the reformasi period. Over the past ten years, same-sex sexuality and gender nonconformity have come to be articulated more explicitly as incompatible with national values. Although initially not the primary targets of the politically motivated violence aimed at gay men following the end of the New Order in 1998 (see Boellstorff 2004), transgender Indonesians have increasingly faced exclusion on the national stage (Wijaya 2019). This is something of a shift, particularly for one transgender population known as warias, who have been a visible and widely acknowledged part of Indonesian society since the late 1960s. While the acceptance of warias cannot be overstated, during the New Order they were able to obtain recognition in proximity to international norms of feminine beauty, as reflected in their established reputation as skilled salon workers and performers. While not every waria is a beauty expert, of course, these fields of work emerged as historically important for claiming acceptance on the national stage. The politically motivated efforts to tie warias to a putatively foreign ‘LGBT’ imaginary during the reformasi period marked a disconcerting shift. Nevertheless, for warias, being seen and valued by others remains an important avenue for achieving official forms of recognition.

Much of the discussion about growing hostility towards LGBT Indonesians has approached these transformations as a problem related to shifting currents of sexual morality at the national level. Often, analyses centre the role played by the consolidation and extension of Islamic norms and morality relative to national identity (Wijaya and Davies 2019: 160). This is certainly one part of the picture. Yet what this focus on morality conceals is the fact that warias have long been addressed in terms of the regulation of public order at the scale of the city and district. Indeed, the initial impetus for the creation and recognition of the term waria, as I describe at length elsewhere (Hegarty 2021), was the desire among city officials in Jakarta to solve the problem of gender nonconformity on city streets. Warias have long chafed against state projects that deploy gender as a component of public order, and have had to negotiate this patchwork of regulations accordingly.

On a breezy Friday night on 12 August 2022, five women wearing all-white dresses walked into a gallery space. They sat on white chairs arranged in a clockwise direction; in the middle of the circle, a digital clock was set on a small stool. A small pile of fabric was positioned on the floor. Each performer then placed a small, portable sewing machine on their lap. For twenty minutes, the performers sewed small pieces of cloth from a small cardboard box next to their chairs and added their contributions to the existing pile in the centre of the circle.

The performance art was titled Rotary. It was performed by an allwomen art collective, Perempuan Pengkaji Seni, based in Surabaya. The venue where they performed the piece was Lawangwangi Creative Space, one of the premier contemporary art spaces in the city, located in the hilly northern part of Bandung. The event was the announcement evening of the seventh Bandung Contemporary Art Awards, a biennial contemporary art prize in Indonesia. Earlier in the evening, the jury comprising FX Harsono (visual artist), Aaron Seeto (director of Museum MACAN), Tom Tandio (founder of IndoArtNow Foundation), Evelyn Halim (CEO of Sarana Global Finance Indonesia) and Wiyu Wahono (entrepreneur) announced that Perempuan Pengkaji Seni had won the money prize of 100 million rupiah. In addition, two other artists, Patriot Mukmin and Victoria Koesasi, were the winners of the three-month art residency in France and travel prizes to Europe (Siswadi 2022; Surya 2022).

The description of the performance work by Perempuan Pengkaji Seni serves as a starting point to discuss a significant shift in the Indonesian art world in the past two decades, namely the production and reception of visual arts framed through the lens of gender activism. Since the fall of the authoritarian regime, Indonesia has achieved some noteworthy progress towards gender equality, such as ratifying all major international conventions that uphold principles of gender equality and empowerment, for example, the 2004 Law on the Elimination of Domestic Violence and the 2009 Law on the Protection of Women and Gender-Based Violence. However, gender inequality remains a systemic problem in the Indonesian art world. Koalisi Seni, a non-government organisation that focuses on arts and cultural policy advocacy in Indonesia, observed that women continue to be under-represented in leadership positions in the cultural sector and in collections and exhibitions in major institutions (Koalisi Seni 2021a).

Women’s participation in the economy has been considered one of the key strategies for achieving gender equality. The reasoning is that by entering the labour market or earning their own money, women will achieve wider opportunities, such as to participate in public life, improve their personal wellbeing, improve their family’s welfare, contribute to the country’s economic development, and have their capability in professional and public works recognised. In the past two decades in Indonesia, women’s labour force participation has slowly but steadily increased. However, this trend has not changed the gendered role of care work at home. Social norms continue to prevail: that care work is women’s natural role and family duty. This chapter explores how women are encouraged to participate in the economy, while at the same time still expected to fulfil their duty in care work in the family. I also analyse that care work has been underappreciated, which is reflected in the marginalisation of paid care work in the domestic worker profession.

Backdrop: The progress of gender equality in economic participation in Indonesia

Since the 1970s, Indonesia has witnessed improving indicators of women’s economic participation. A rapid decline in the fertility rate after the implementation of government-led family planning during the New Order era and increase in educational attainment has resulted in better economic opportunities for women. More women have post-secondary education, and more women in each recent cohort have been working, particularly during the early years after completing school (Dong and Merdikawati, this volume).

Over the past few decades, the female labour force participation rate in Indonesia has remained low, at around 52% in 2019, and still relatively low compared to the East Asia and Pacific region, Thailand and China (all more than 60%) and Vietnam and Cambodia (both nearly 80%) (World Bank 2020: 16). Women’s contribution to household income has, at the same time, increased slowly (Table 9.1). However, whether women’s increased financial contribution to family livelihoods has also contributed to gender equality in the family is unclear. This is because, while women continue to pursue participation in the economy, they also continue to bear the burden of domestic work in the household.

Indonesia’s National Medium Term Development Plan (Rencana Pembangunan Jangka Menengah Nasional, RPJMN) 2020–2024 has set a key development agenda ‘to increase the quality and competitiveness of human resources’.

The rapid pace of digitisation has important implications not only for economic growth, but also for the labour market. Digitisation has the potential to radically transform the labour market by creating new job opportunities, improving access to job searches, changing the future of work, and making the labour market more innovative and inclusive for marginalised groups of workers. However, in the context of developing countries such as Indonesia, several barriers to harnessing the full potential of digital technology exist. Unequal access to information and communication technology infrastructure, poor digital literacy and skills, and social norms that prevent the whole population from participating equally in the digital economy may cause a winner-takes-all phenomenon that could lead to further widening of existing inequalities.

The potential effects of the internet on the labour market are multidimensional. Previous research indicates that high-skilled workers are more prone to experiencing the favourable impact of the internet on the labour market (Akerman et al. 2015; Yang et al. 2023). Meanwhile, negative employment effects for low-skilled workers are also likely as the internet replaces the performance of routine tasks through automation. Specifically for women, internet and digital technologies can offer solutions to workrelated problems such as time constraints from the burdens of child care and other domestic responsibilities (ADB 2014). In patriarchal societies where job segregation is strengthened by cultural stereotypes and educational paths, digitisation might hold a promise to eliminate some gender disparities in the labour market. Evidence indicates that internet availability benefits highly educated and skilled women by providing work flexibility, improving job searches and enabling home-based businesses (Dettling 2016; Masroor et al. 2020; Viollaz and Winkler 2021).

Widespread use of internet and digital technologies might affect lower-educated and unskilled women in the labour market in offsetting directions: obviously it creates new job opportunities, but some jobs will become obsolete since tasks originally conducted by humans face varying degrees of automation risk. Chang and Huynh (2016) estimate around 56% of employment in Indonesia is at high risk of automation in the next couple of decades, a figure that is higher than that of neighbouring countries such as the Philippines (49%) and Thailand (44%). Two sectors with the highest risk of automation are accommodation and food services, and trade (ibid.). These are also the sectors where female workers dominate employment.

Women’s share in public participation in the past two decades indicates promising progress. More and more women in Indonesia have been appointed as members of national parliament (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), cabinet ministers and ambassadors. Such progress is indicated in the United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Inequality Index, which shows a decline from 0.571 in 1995 to 0.444 in 2021 (UNDP 2020). The political domain shows more progress than the two other measures. While the gender gap in politics declined by 12 points between 1995 and 2021, the gender gap in education declined by only 2 points, and labour force participation by 4.7 points. The progress in women’s public participation follows a series of affirmative policies and is strongly in line with the global trend.

However, it is important to note that progress towards closing the gender gap in Indonesia is still low on a global scale. Women’s underrepresentation in politics, among other professions, continues to be a persistent issue in Indonesia. Despite women comprising half the national population and the granting of suffrage in 1945, their share in politics remains insignificant.

The world average gender gap in parliamentary representation has decreased by 26.2 points in the past 27 years, while the gaps in secondary education and labour force participation have decreased by 3.8 and 1.3 points respectively (UNDP 2020). Indonesia’s performance in the Gender Inequality Index has also been the lowest among other Southeast Asian countries, with a value of 0.48, ranking it 121 out of 162 countries in 2019 (ibid.). It can be argued that Indonesia has been doing well in terms of reducing gender disparity in the economic sector. Yet it continues to struggle in pursuing gender parity in politics and in education.

In another measure of the gender gap, under the political empowerment spectrum published by the World Economic Forum (2022), the percentage of women in parliament and ministerial positions in Indonesia ranked 88th. As shown in Figure 5.1, political empowerment is the weakest performing measure as it scores lower than the world average. Indonesia once sat at 41st place for this indicator when it had a female head of state—President Megawati Sukarnoputri—in 2001–2004. Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that Indonesia’s overall rank is 10th in East Asia and the Pacific Region, better than China, Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar and Japan.

The advancement of gender equality is a long-term social change and can be reflected in measurable economic indicators. In the Western world, the improvement of women’s status and freedom in society is accompanied by dramatic changes in economic indicators, including an increase in female labour market participation, an increase in female educational attainment, narrowing of the gender wage gap, an increase in age at first marriage, and a decline in fertility rate (Goldin 2006). Similar changes have occurred in the developing world in the past few decades where there was relatively fast economic growth. Education of girls caught up with that of boys by the mid-2010s; labour force participation of women has increased significantly, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean; and the fertility rate has dramatically declined (World Bank 2012). However, there are still persistent large gender gaps in earnings, health and asset ownership (ibid.).

The trajectory of economic gender equality in Indonesia has been consistent with that of the developing world in many aspects. Since independence, Indonesia has made great progress in increasing schooling, reducing the fertility rate and increasing life expectancy of women. Economic liberalisation in the New Order era created fast economic growth and job opportunities for women, especially in export-oriented manufacturing. The end of the New Order, however, has seen a dramatic decline in the importance of export-oriented manufacturing as a growth engine. The new driver of economic growth has mainly been the resources boom. At the same time, the change from an authoritarian and highly centralised regime to a much more democratic and decentralised regime has allowed different social and religious groups and ideologies, including gender ideologies, to surface.

Against this backdrop, how has gender equality evolved from an economic perspective during the post-Suharto era? In this chapter we will use large-scale economic data to construct trends of many of the economic indicators of gender equality. We mainly use a cohort analysis approach to show long-term generational change. We find that employment opportunities for women have significantly improved during the post- Suharto era. Each new cohort of women is more likely to join the labour force, more likely to be employed in the formal sector, and more likely to be managers and professionals in the years following completion of their education. Educational attainment of women has also caught up and surpassed that of men in recent years.

Twenty-five years of reformasi has seen progress in the development of policies towards various types of gender inequality. The most recent was the Sexual Crime Law, after twelve years of rigorous advocacy facing ferocious objection in the name of religion and morality. Nevertheless, more than two decades of reformasi has also seen regression and stagnation that hinder more advanced progress towards the fulfilment of women’s human rights. This chapter will discuss the conflicting policy frameworks where progress towards gender equality, as well as the gaps, contradictions and setbacks, are all consequences of deficits within the reformasi process, while contestations around gender equality, sexuality and sexual violence also serve as a focus of the perennial struggle for power in Indonesia. It will also highlight the role of women’s groups, their challenges and future priorities in their efforts to promote fulfilment of women’s rights.

The breakthrough of the Sexual Crime Law

The Sexual Crime Law, the first of its kind in Indonesian history, was passed by the Indonesian parliament in April 2022. Issuance of the Sexual Crime Law has been highly commended by national and international communities for its adoption of a victims-centred perspective. The law was passed amid a background of continuously increasing reported cases of sexual violence. According to Komnas Perempuan’s annual report, at least 26,117 cases of sexual violence were reported between 2017 and 2021 (Figure 10.1). The increase of sexual violence cases reported to Komnas Perempuan from 2017 to 2021 is almost sixfold, from 369 cases in 2017 to 2,204 cases in 2021. Rape, which includes marital rape and incest, is the main type of sexual violence reported.

The Sexual Crime Law addresses gaps in the 1946 Penal Code, and in legal provisions regarding sexual violence in general. It is noteworthy that rape (perkosaan) according to the 1946 Penal Code is limited to acts of forced sexual intercourse through vaginal penetration by male genitals. Other acts of forced sexual intercourse are categorised as molestation (pencabulan). There is also a category of intercourse (persetubuhan), defined as sexual intercourse perpetrated against a woman who is unconscious, or towards girls. While these three acts are all indisputably rape, due to their different classifications, perpetrators of persetubuhan will get the lightest punishment, while pencabulan is lighter than perkosaan.

The 1946 Penal Code doesn’t have any provisions regarding sexual harassment or many other kinds of sexual violence experienced by women in Indonesia.

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Indonesia was recovering from multiple crises. It struggled to recover its economy after the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998. When the economy stabilised, the COVID-19 pandemic hit hard in 2020–2021. The global health disaster led to crises in various sectors, including again in the economy, with businesses dwindling and many people losing their jobs due to mobility restrictions. The period also saw the country re-establish itself as a democratic country after the demise of the New Order (1966–1998) authoritarian regime. The democratisation of the public sphere led to the flourishing of civil society movements and an intensifying Islamisation. Among the civil society movements were feminist and LGBTQI movements, which previously had been carefully controlled by the authoritarian regime. In addition, Islamisation became the most striking feature in politics, the economy and culture of the period. Interactions between these movements triggered major changes and debates within Indonesian gender politics. They partly called into question the patriarchal gender order (see Robinson, this volume) and thus the legitimacy of bapakism, which is mainly premised in men’s breadwinning, leadership in family and society, and heteronormativity as the official and dominant ideal of masculinity (Suryakusuma 2011: 5).

During the period, Indonesian cinema flourished, with emerging filmmakers seeking to engage with various sociocultural transformations in the post-authoritarian landscape. Indonesian cinema was reinvigorated by the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers (Sasono 2012) who were eager to take part in the country’s democratisation process through cinema. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the film industry was also affected. Production and consumption declined due to mobility restrictions. Yet, alternative screening methods through on-demand platforms flourished. Once the restrictions were eased in 2021, production increased, albeit with new rules in place to prevent the spread of the disease among crew. Consequently, Indonesian cinema became one of the most important arenas for gender politics, including the struggle to secure a new form of ideal masculinity in Indonesia. Filmmakers who were critical of the patriarchal gender order and hegemonic masculinity experimented and innovated with alternative ideal masculinities in their works.

My study examines the nexus between gender politics and cinema. I look at commercial filmmakers’ roles in the broader struggles to steer the gender order through the cinematic representation of ideal masculinity.