ABSTRACT
Recent studies of gender politics in the Asia-Pacific region have indicated the limitations of viewing gender identity as a space from which women act in clear and easily specified ways (Butler 1990; Ong and Peletz 1995; Sen and Stivens 1998). Gender politics are produced, negotiated and re-visioned through a complex web of power relations out of which new subjectivities are hewn, drawing on representations from the past as well as the globalised present, that concern communal, national and class identities. This complexity is especially visible when analysis is directed to the politics of locality: to settings where, on a day-to-day basis, women are embroiled with the local implications of wider processes of change and where their actions (and passivity) are guided in complex and often contradictory ways by their multiple positionalities as mothers and daughters, farmers and factory workers, wives and citizens, and so on. This chapter draws upon feminist theorisations of agency and identity to examine the intricacies of gender politics in one particular setting: the Indonesian government’s transmigration resettlement programme in North Lampung, Sumatra. As a space in which two cultures – migrants and ‘indigenous’1 people – confront one another in the context of Indonesian nation-building, Indonesia’s transmigration programme provides a lens through which to view some of the ways in which gender politics are played out in one particular Asia-Pacific locality. The study reveals how gender politics are embedded in cultural politics in ways which negate the possibility of female agency and compromise the position of women in transmigration areas as gender issues become subordinate to issues of identity for both transmigrants and local people.
