Introduction | 8 | Gender, State and Social Power in Contemporary Indo

ABSTRACT

On 2 January 1974, Indonesian President Suharto ratiﬁedMarriage Law 1/1974 (Undang-Undang Perkawinan). Under the provisions of this law, all marriages were required to include a religious ceremony and state registration, and all divorces were to be ratiﬁed by a court. Women and men were declared to have equal rights to ﬁle for divorce, and equal social status. However, husbands were deﬁned as ‘heads of the family’ (kepala keluarga), and wives as the ‘mothers of the household’ (ibu rumah tangga, sometimes translated as ‘housewife’, although this term does not exist in Indonesian). These disparate components of the law were indicative of a range of interests. The emphasis on religious rather than civil marriage accommodated Muslim groups, who had protested against the bill in 1973.1 As the ﬁrst uniﬁed state regulation on marriage, it marked the culmination of ﬁve decades of campaigning by Indonesian women’s groups.2 Despite this inﬂuence, the law also reﬂected the conservative gender ideologies of the New Order state. This major piece of legislation had numerous implications for women’s and men’s experience of marriage and divorce, as well as for the formation of both state and citizen. The Marriage Law has frequently been cited in passing in feminist scholarship, but there have been few studies which analyse its impact upon Indonesian society in depth. This book addresses this gap, using divorce as an entry point to analyse contestation of the Marriage Law. In particular, it examines how the state attempted to use the Marriage Law (and related legislation) to shape Indonesian society from 1974 to 2005, and how citizens, women especially, responded to this state project. The regulation of marriage by both the colonial and the post-colonial

Indonesian state has always been an exercise of state power. Under Dutch rule, a tripartite system of laws regulated the marriage of ‘Europeans’, ‘Natives’ and ‘Foreign Orientals’ diﬀerently. This eﬀort was directed towards deﬁning individuals, and by extension families, as either citizens or subjects of the colonial state. The family was understood as a site where state values might be instilled and reproduced, and has therefore been deemed essential to the state-formation process in Indonesia throughout the twentieth century.3 This was in part because the concept of an Indonesian nation was a consciously created, artiﬁcial entity. It was delineated by the Dutch as the

colonial Netherlands Indies and later by nationalists as an independent republic, and has been contested ever since. Familial loyalty to a new nation is one way of ensuring the perpetuation

and unity of that nation. However, state regulation of marriage (and therefore of families) has always co-existed with familial, religious and customary (adat) processes and obligations. Thus, individual negotiations of marriage, which may have resisted or supported state prescriptions on marital behaviour to diﬀerent degrees, may be understood as expressions of social power, which also have gendered dimensions. In other words, the extent to which women and men can obtain their goals in divorce (whether that be in terms of obtaining the divorce, or ﬁnancial or custodial settlements) also reﬂects the degree of power they may hold in any given (and usually overlapping) social framework (which includes the family, religious community, village and nation). I further contend that all personal actions have a macro-political dimension and consequence, even if social actors engaged in these actions do not have such explicitly political intentions. Thus, for example, while a woman engaged in a court-mediated divorce suit in the late 1970s in New Order Indonesia may indeed have been using the court exclusively to obtain a divorce, her actions (whether unconscious or otherwise) nonetheless opposed emergent New Order discourses about ideal femininity. This, I will argue, reveals both the nuances of women’s power in social, non-political contexts (that is, a lack of social power for certain women in religious or community contexts necessitates seeking the assistance of the court), and the gendered complexities of state power (which is predicated on macro-political control of parties and parliament, and micro-political control of families). In the New Order context, the role of gender in determining how marriage and divorce might mediate the distribution of state and social power has been little interrogated, and forms the basis of my inquiries. The New Order’s implementation of a marriage law which applied to all

Indonesian citizens is worthy of close study, in particular because it succeeded where the colonial and Sukarno-led states had failed.4 The role of the state in regulating marriage had always been a point of contention for Muslims, at least since women’s groups ﬁrst posited the issue of a uniﬁed marriage law in the 1920s. While colonial legal divisions between ‘Native’ subjects and ‘European’ citizens were abolished through the 1945 constitution, a range of disparate colonial marriage laws were retained.5 Sukarno’s newly formed government was able to pass only basic legislation on the registration of Muslim marriage and divorce in 1946 and 1954.6 But these laws still did not regulate marital age, spousal maintenance or custodial and marital property settlements, or require a court’s permission to divorce. The Marriage Law addressed all of these issues to varying degrees, but also contained clear ideological prescriptions on the roles of wives, husbands and the family within the Indonesian nation. Diﬀerent social actors may have used these prescriptions diﬀerently, thus inviting analysis of the success or otherwise of state projects.