ABSTRACT
The institution of marriage in many societies plays a fundamental role in individual, cultural and religious identity formation, and consequently is often viewed by states as integral to the process of national identity formation (demonstrated, in Indonesia’s case, by the state’s efforts to legally define male and female marital roles through the Marriage Law, which were explicitly related to the well-being of the nation). Divorce, therefore, may redefine an individual’s identity in a number of contexts. This final chapter, following recurrent issues raised in earlier chapters, examines in greater depth how marriage and divorce shaped women’s and men’s identities, in the contexts of religion, modernity and the nation. In particular, I scrutinize the identities presented by women and men in marriage and divorce negotiations, the identities associated with different types of marriage and divorce in public discourse (print media, fiction) and the state’s efforts to shape gendered national identities through the regulation of marriage. Throughout the chapter, I consider the ways in which the production of identities by different social actors (litigants, the state, religious authority) is influenced by gender. In doing so, I seek to answer a question that requires greater evaluation in the context of the New Order and post-New Order era, namely: to what extent and in what ways did women’s and men’s actions in marriage and divorce contribute to or resist the construction of a national identity? This chapter is divided into four sections. The first section outlines my
reasoning for analysing identity through the case study of divorce, and explains why religion and modernity are particularly important discourses for such an analysis. This leads to the next section in which I define how I will use some of the key concepts in this chapter, including nation, state, community and modernity, and review the literature on these subjects. In the third section, I examine the role of religion in producing identities in marriage and divorce and ask how religious beliefs may have influenced women’s and men’s understandings and presentations of national identity differently. I analyse this issue in two specific contexts: inter-religious marriage and unregistered marriage. In the fourth section, I investigate how the discourse of modernity has informed public representations of divorce and has been used in litigants’ presentations of their cases.
