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.