ABSTRACT
Dominant gender ideologies are invariably understood and used in divergent ways by different social actors. This chapter focuses on women’s agency in negotiating the gender ideologies embedded within the divorce process. In previous chapters I have interrogated state constructions of gender, two of the discourses (shame, rights and obligations) the state sought to apply to divorce and the ways in which female and male litigants and judges used such discourses. Here, I provide a more detailed analysis of the specific contexts in which women in particular have been able to behave agentively. I am interested in this question because, as alluded to in Chapter 3, passivity has long been posited by scholars as an indicator of power in Javanese society. I have thus far argued that men’s and women’s actions in marriage and divorce also reveal the gendered ordering of social power, and that the regulation of marriage was harnessed by the state to constitute its own power. Building upon this central proposition, the question of agency and passivity in divorce, and what this might indicate about social (and therefore state) power, becomes an extremely important one. In this chapter, I explore this issue through a number of key questions. What constituted agency? What factors constrained or facilitated women’s agency in divorce? How did women’s expressions of agency vary in different geographic and religious contexts, and change over time? Agency is an important concept for feminist scholars, and there have been some excellent studies of this topic in relation to Indonesian women. However, none as yet have examined women’s actions in divorce and their implications for the concept of agency. The chapter is guided by two key aims, both relating to the nature of
women’s relationship with the state. My first aim is to understand how women engaged with the state through the use of state law and the court system, to achieve a level of personal (or familial) benefit or self-determination. Such benefits or self-determination could include obtaining divorce, property or child custody, or protecting status. In pursuing these goals, women’s actions may at different times have constituted an acceptance of or resistance to state, religious and cultural gender ideologies.1 In the Introduction, I asked whether and how the state used the institution of marriage to consolidate power and shape its citizens, especially female citizens. This chapter
examines in detail the corollary of that question: namely, how did women resist, co-opt or acquiesce to the state’s efforts to transform or direct gender relations and were they able to subvert the state’s ideological prescriptions in order to challenge other constraining gender ideologies within their local community? Examining women’s responses to the state project, in this case the outcomes of specific legal negotiations, enables a deeper understanding of the gendered nuances of the penetration of state ideology. The second aim, inextricable from the first, is to scrutinize the extent to
which an apparatus of the state (the court) was an effective forum for women to challenge gender ideologies. In public discourse, the Marriage Law was presented in terms of the legal agency it vested with women. I have already argued that oppressive states such as the New Order attempt to co-opt women to the state project through ostensibly emancipatory discourses and legislation. This conceals the deeper intent of control over women and families, which enables broader state control over citizens. In practice, therefore, was the legal agency the Marriage Law bestowed upon women a ‘guided agency’ that was only effective when it was employed in the interests of the state? And if so, what were the legal consequences of agency that might be considered ‘anti-state’? This chapter takes a slightly different methodological approach to that
used in earlier chapters. In previous chapters I have analysed historical changes in the ways in which litigants presented cases, noting how the meanings and operation of gender within these cases changed. Clearly, women’s actions in divorce were influenced to varying degrees not only by the state gender ideology embedded in the Marriage Law, but also by the religious and cultural values of particular places and times, and the power dynamics of their particular marriage. Acquiescence, co-optation and resistance are not necessarily mutually exclusive strategies, and nor do they necessarily appear in court records as distinct or measurable historical milestones. For this reason, rather than attempt to chronologically and definitively chart forms of women’s agency across time, I have chosen to examine in detail selected examples of women’s agency. In doing so, I intend to provide a deeper understanding of women’s practices of engagement with, and resistance to, the Indonesian state. I have structured the chapter around three different ways in which women
exercised agency in the context of divorce, primarily within the court but also using examples outside the court system. I understand agency to be broad-ranging in its potential meanings (explained below). Therefore, I have broken this category down into some of its specific aspects, and use the terms of acquiescence, co-optation and resistance as organizing headings in the chapter. As a prior assumption, I contend that no action can be categorized as entirely acquiescent, agentive or resistant but may at times incorporate aspects of some or all of these categories. However, for the purposes of heuristic analysis, I have selected representative examples that seem to demonstrate aspects of acquiescence, co-optation or resistance most
prominently. I will explain the reasoning behind the use of these terms in the first section, dealing with definitions and the historiography of women and agency in Indonesia. In the second section, I will discuss women’s responses to divorce that could be deemed acquiescent. This is followed by an analysis in the third section of circumstances in which women co-opted the Marriage Law and patriarchal legal structures to their benefit, which might encompass actions that are either resistant or non-resistant to state, cultural or religious structures of authority. In the final section, I examine responses to divorce and the Marriage Law which clearly demonstrate resistance to state intent. As has been the case with all other chapters, I do not present my case studies as definitive or comprehensive analyses of divorce, but rather use them to investigate the diversity of women’s strategies and responses to the Marriage Law, in an effort to present a qualitative analysis on a complex and underresearched topic. In each of these sections, I base my analysis upon divorce court records,
newspaper reports and oral history sources. As I have suggested in earlier chapters, while court records might reveal the institutionalized facets of women’s agency and the character of their interaction with the state, the motivations and actions of litigants outside the ambit of the court are concealed. Oral history can partly address this gap, although as I have explained earlier in the book (see Chapter 3, and Introduction), the positionality of both interviewer and interviewee can never allow an exchange that is completely transparent in meaning. By selecting this broad range of sources, I intend to illustrate the variety of ways in which women’s actions might be interpreted as agentive as well as the contexts in which they were and were not able to achieve their own goals.
