ABSTRACT
The sexualization of culture and reconstitution of sexuality that has occurred over the last four decades in Indonesia expresses the contradictions and tensions in the gender effects of New Order policies, and the contestations over gender and sexuality that have emerged post-Suharto. While Indonesian women of the current generation are increasingly likely to wear the jilbab (tight veil) as an expression of their Muslim identity, in recent years, Inul Daratista, a young entertainer from East Java, has become a national sensation, drawing crowds in the thousands to enjoy her raunchy stage performances of the rhythmic popular music known as Dangdut.1 Her sensual hip grinding (ngebor) attracted censure from other male Dangdut performers. These contradictory expressions of the feminine indicate variety in gender performance, and the influences on the performance of gender by the competing cosmopolitanisms of Westernization and Islam. Contestations over national identity and national morality converged around the pole of female sexuality in political conflict over a 2006 draft bill outlawing pornography and ‘pornographic action’. Inul’s gyrations assumed iconic status for Islamic radicals supporting the bill and protesting the perceived Western-influenced degradation of national morality, a mood that has been growing since the 1990s. This concern is linked to the claims of masculine authority: the 2006 draft legislation coupled public concerns about the free availability of pornography with an attack on women’s freedom to socially participate on equal terms with men, especially in clauses outlawing ‘pornographic action’ and imposing dress codes for women which purported to reflect Islamic moral norms (Chandrakirana 2006). The populist strategy by the newly empowered Islamic parties to link women’s freedom to pornography was not successful, and the bill is currently as at (2008) stalled. Debates around the draft bill make claims for gender practices that subordinate women to men, place limitations on their freedoms as public actors and elevate masculine power over women. Men’s
conduct and behaviour (for example, dress codes or hiring prostitutes) is not addressed in the legislation and men dominate the campaigns in support of the bill. In 2006, on Kartini Day (21 April), women paraded the streets of Jakarta in boisterous and colourful protest marches against the bill, proclaiming that Indonesian womanhood encompassed the ‘beautiful and sexy’. Their public performance of a free and assertive femininity was countered several days later by an angrier, male-dominated protest in support of the bill.2
