ABSTRACT
This study explores the conditions that lead to the participation of rural women in protest. Drawing from a case study in Indonesia, it finds that gender relations are integral to shaping the motivations and political opportunities that lead to women’s decisions to participate in protests around land. It also argues that gender relations are not fixed. Individual actors play an influential role in opening up new political opportunities for women, who are discursively cast as apolitical. Despite dominant gender relations that tend to exclude women from politics, the presence of women in protest opens up the possibility that rural struggles around land and dispossession, though ostensibly free of explicit gender concerns, may simultaneously serve as sites of struggle over gender as well.
