Kamis, 29 Desember 2011

Social and Filmic Construction of Indonesian Women under the New Order


By: Hapsari Dwiningtyas Sulistyani


Introduction
This article explores the way in which Indonesian women were constructed as subjects in both social and filmic contexts in the New Order era. Foucault’s theory of subjectivity suggests that “subjectivity is not a really existing thing, but has been invented by dominant system of social organization in order to control and manage us” (as cited in Mansfield, 2001, p.10). Further, he argues that the notion of the subject is constructed through a constantly monitored and controlled dominant system of social organization (as cited in Mansfield, 2001). This theory is relevant to the New Order’s strategy of controlling the desired social construction of women during that era. As Kathryn Robinson (1994, p. 237) suggests, various institutions and organizations formed by the New Order Regime were intended to promote the notion of the “ideal” Indonesian woman.

While the New Order’s influence over the perpetuation of a particular “ideal” female subject is an important factor in determining the subject position of women in Indonesian society, this paper also considers Gaines’s suggestion that “woman” is not a universal category, and emphasises the importance of understanding the complexity of individual women’s differences that come in to play in female subjectivity. Therefore, I argue that the consequences of the New Order’s gender politics were not necessarily experienced in the same way by all women, but differed among women from different classes or social groups. As Sen (1998) suggests, as with global capitalism, the impact of the New Order’s patriarchal gender politics on Indonesian women was also partly determined by social status and position in the paid workforce. Therefore, the way in which women were constructed in New Order film texts was also determined by these social variations, depending on the class and sector the female characters represented.

Krishna Sen’s analysis of New Order cinema suggests that the New Order State’s gender ideology influenced the dominant representation of women in films even though it did not impose control measures through direct State intervention (Sen, 1994, p. 147). Therefore, the final section of this article looks at how contradictions surrounding the implementation of New Order gender politics manifest in film during the New Order period. Before looking at the way women were constructed in the social and filmic contexts in the New Order era, it is necessary to discuss the gender politics of the regime in order to understand women’s social and political position in the New Order Indonesia.

Indonesian Women and the New Order State

The most significant feature of New Order gender politics was the way in which the regime formed a diverse range of systems in order to maintain women’s subordination in Indonesia’s patriarchal society. As Robinson (1999, p. 237) argues, the New Order programs for women promoted “the homogenous definition of women’s role in a patriarchal family system” through various institutions such as education and the media that downplayed the plurality of gender systems across Indonesian ethnic groups. For example the New Order Government homogenised the various gender systems that existed throughout Indonesia, such as “the matrilineal of Minangkabau, the bilateral peoples of Java and South Sulawesi, and the patrilineal Balinese,” drawing them into a universal gender system that positioned the man as the head of the family (Robinson 1999, p.259).

As the head of the family men wielded the power in the household, with the result that women were relegated to menial tasks centred in the domestic realm. Ratna Saptari (2000, p. 18) says “the domestication of women has been quite a strong feature within state ideology and programmes.” As a result, women were constrained within State gender ideology by what the state called “women’s inherent nature” particularly in relation to their domestic responsibilities (Oey-Gardiner 2002).

The notion of the domestication of women in the New Order era is in line with Julia I. Suryakusuma’s (1996) concept of “State Ibuism.” In Indonesian, ibu means mother, but the meaning in the context of State Ibuism implies much more than merely the role of Indonesian women as mothers. Suryakusuma (1996, p. 101) suggests that “State Ibuism defines women as appendages and companions to their husbands, as procreators of the nation, as mothers and educators of children, as housekeepers, and as members of Indonesian society.” Thus, in keeping with “State Ibuism,” control over women in Indonesia involved constructing the “ideal” woman as embodying all of the above characteristics. They were expected to give their labour freely, “without expectation of prestige or power” (Suryakusuma, 1996, p. 102). This gender ideology can be seen as reflecting the paternalistic character of the New Order State.

The Nature of the New Order Gender Politics

The New Order as an authoritarian regime was “in full control of the country and dictating what was good for the Indonesian people – including what was good for women” (Oey-Gardiner, 2002, p. 102). Gardiner argues that the regime’s political machineries also controlled the role of women in the process of national development. The New Order Regime mainly used the rise in net national income, the decrease in population and the decrease in infant mortality as progress indicators to monitor Indonesia’s rate of development. Those indicators were closely related to women’s traditional responsibilities – to bear the children, to support the husband’s career, to take care of the family. Therefore, in order to achieve the desired progress of the development project, the New Order tried to reinforce the domestic responsibilities of women by attempting to restrict them to the traditional roles of wife and mother.

As previously mentioned, many organisations especially for women were formed by the government in order to justify the reinforcement of women’s traditional roles. These new institutions, which sprang from the New Order’s development programs that were supposedly designed to improve women’s position in Indonesian society, instead reinforced women’s subordinate roles in the family and in society. The organisations that women were channelled into in the New Order era attempted to coerce women into fulfilling responsibilities that were deemed by the Government to be suited to women’s feminine nature (Blackburn, 1999). Consequently, although the New Order Regime’s development projects seemed to position Indonesian women as “modern” subjects, in reality the women were being encouraged to maintain their traditional roles, and thus, their subjugated position in society.

Class-differentiated Consequences of New Order Gender Politics

As previously discussed, it is arguable that New Order gender politics can be seen as a single patriarchal order that maintained women’s subordination in Indonesian society. Even so, the consequences for women of their involvements in domestic work, including their role as the main carers of the children, differ depending on the class of society to which they belong. According to Sen (1998), in middle and upper class Indonesian families the domestic work is usually carried out by servants. Because of the extent of poverty, and the massive unemployment figures in Indonesian society, salaries paid to domestic servants are very low. Consequently, most middle class families in Indonesia can afford to hire one or even two full-time servants. Thus, for many middle and upper class women the domestic work is not an issue, but for the majority of lower class women the domestic work for their entire household is still mainly their responsibility. Ironically, the majority of domestic servants are also women. Domestic work in middle and upper class families, therefore, is still carried out by women who receive very little appreciation for their efforts, which is reflected both in terms of payment for their work and in the status the work offers them.

Another example of how the implementation of state-wide gender politics frequently impacts differently at the local level for specific groups of women is in the concept of the nuclear family and the loyal housewife (Benda-Beckmann cited in Saptari 2000). Saptari (2000) suggests that those concepts are far more sustainable for the wives of village officials than for the wives of the common village people. This is due in part to the expected involvement in public ceremonies of village officials’ wives, whereby they are placed on display as suitable role models in the public sphere, which is one way the state monitors their behaviour (Saptari, 2000). The state’s close surveillance of state officials and civil servants is more obvious when we look at the way in which marital relations were dictated by the New Order Regime in an attempt to control sexual conduct of the Indonesian people, and particularly that of civil servants.

The control of marital relations was one of several “official” methods the New Order employed to promote its patriarchal order. A more elaborate discussion of the features of New Order patriarchal gender politics is significant to this thesis in order to highlight relevant features of the gender policies and how they operated in constructing the subjectivity of Indonesian women.

Indonesian Women and the Institution of Marriage

Susan Blackburn (1999) argues that the marriage laws of 1974 failed to change the subordinate position of women in marriage. She describes how the New Order left personal and family law “to religious and adat (customary law) courts, involving varying methods of discrimination against women such as polygamy, and making it easier for the husband to procure a divorce, which clearly placed women in a more disadvantaged and controlled position than their male counterparts, given that they had no means of earning a living and had children to care for.

However, the way in which the regime controlled the married lives of Indonesian people was different for Indonesian civil servants. As Suryakusuma argues, for civil servants the government added specific laws regulating sexuality. Peraturan Pemerintah 10/1983 (Government Regulation number ten, 1983), the law that regulated Indonesian civil servants sexual conduct covers the regulation of “marriage, divorce, polygamy, and concubinage” (Suryakusuma 1996, p. 105). The government’s central rhetoric behind this specific rule promoted the main obligation of civil servants of representing a good example of the “ideal model’ of married life to the rest of Indonesian society, and to protect civil servants’ wives from polygamy and divorce. However, the existence of this law also suggests that the government assumed the right to control their employees’ most personal affairs, including their sexual lives. The most obvious example is demonstrated by one of the rules in Peraturan Pemerintah 10/1983, which prohibited civil servants from living together before marriage. The maximum penalty for breaking this rule is dishonourable discharge from the service.

While PP/10/1983 considers the sexual needs of the husband, it does not cover that of the wife. For example, a husband can take a second wife if his first wife cannot engage in sexual relations because of terminal illness, yet the statute provided no such regulation to cater for the fulfilment of a wife’s biological needs should their husband be terminally ill.

The State controlled the way the wives of civil servants conducted themselves as loyal and obedient wives far much more strictly than among the general population. One method of monitoring their conduct was through Dharma Wanita, an organisation that was specifically for them. All the wives of civil servants were obliged to become members of Dharma Wanita. According to Binny Buchori and Ifa Soenarto (2000, p. 140), initially, Dharma Wanita was an informal organization, and membership was voluntary. It’s central aim  was to improve the welfare of its members (Buchori and Sunarto, 2000). The directive behind Dharma Wanita changed when the New Order government saw the organization as a way to exercise control over civil servants and their families in an attempt to ensure support for the regime’s political agendas. After this, the main purpose of this organisation became to construct the wives of civil servants as faithful companion of their husbands. According to Suryakusuma (1996, p. 99) the meaning of faithful in this New Order context is “to support the official duties of her husband by creating a harmonious atmosphere, avoiding anti-Pancasila  behaviours, in order to create a state official who is authoritative and clean.”

An indication that one of the main aims of this organization was that women should support their husbands’ careers was signified by the way Dharma Wanita was structured. The position of a member in the organization was determined by her husband’s position in the bureaucratic structure. Thus, no matter how brilliant a member was, if she was not the wife of a high ranking bureaucrat, she would not attain an important position in the Dharma Wanita organisation. Because the leader of Dharma Wanita was the wife of her husband’s superior, a civil servant’s wife would obediently follow the rules of the organization.

Therefore, both PP/10/1983 and Dharma Wanita were mediums for establishing and maintaining New Order gender politics. They were established because the government wanted to create “an image of a stable, harmonious, prosperous society built on a foundation of a moral, apolitical, middle-class family” (Brenner 1999, p. 14). According to Suryakusuma (1996), it was more feasible to control the 4 million civil servants, both in terms of their sexual and political behaviours, rather than more than 100 million Indonesian people (aged 15 to 50+). The government used the families of civil servants as an example of the “ideal” Indonesian family that supported the Government’s effort in “developing” Indonesia.

Conversely, the presence of PP/10/1983 also meant that civil servants’ wives had specific rules to protect their rights as wives. In contrast, for non-civil servant wives, as previously mentioned, the New Order left personal and family law to religious and adat (customary law) courts (Blackburn, 1999). That meant most wives had no government protection, particularly from the practice of polygamy.

While the State had no official laws for protecting the rights of married women other than those married to civil servants, the State endeavoured to control women by establishing certain organizations that dictated their domestic and public responsibilities, particularly the reproductive roles of women in Indonesian society.

Women’s Reproductive Body in Indonesian society

The New Order aimed to reduce population growth as a part of its development program necessarily implicating the government in the control of women’s reproductive function. Family planning centres (BKKBN/the National Family Planning Coordinator Agency) were established in order to promote the concept of the small and prosperous family. The New Order instituted BKKBN from local to national levels. The main tasks of this organization was to integrate Family Planing programs at every level of society, to educate the people about family planning doctrines, and to monitor the implementation of the program in order to control the growth of Indonesia’s population. Thus, as Sylvia Tiwon (2000, p. 74) argues, BKKBN encouraged the concept of the small and prosperous family “to be spread throughout society in an endeavour for it to become part of the culture of the entire nation.” This New Order program was highly successful, with statistics showing that population growth in Indonesia fell from 5.61 in the early 1970s to 2.78 in 1997 (Parawansa, 2002).

According to Kathryn Robinson (1999, p. 249), controlling the rate of Indonesia’s population growth was a prime achievement of the New Order, and the family planning program was the main contributor to that success. Robinson suggests that the family planning program primarily targeted “couples of child-bearing age” (pasangan usia subur), using this as the official phrase for promoting it. However, in actual practice, “married women” were the real target of the program. The phrase “couples of child-bearing age” was government propaganda developed to create the impression that the New Order’s family planning program was targeting both men and women in its efforts to reduce population growth.

However, the campaign messages of the Family Planning program encouraged women to understand that spacing children and limiting family size were part of being a good Indonesian citizen (Robinson, 1999). In contrast, the New Order Regime did not actively project the same level of responsibility for having children on men. The policy of reducing the birth rate was clearly being promoted as the responsibility of women, with the modern contraception methods being shown in a desirable and positive way for them, suggesting that they allow the woman to be “ever ready for sexual relations and [. . .] wholly responsible for controlling her own fertility” (Robinson 1999, p. 250).

Even though, in its implementation of family planning programs, the state emphasised contraception as being mainly a female responsibility, this did not prompt the government to treat women as valued citizens by providing good quality contraceptives and comprehensive information on the various methods available. According to Smyth (as cited in Blackburn 1999, pp.196-197), “poor women [were] obliged to accept a limited range of contraceptives with minimal information about side-effects and little or no after-care.” Women from higher classes of society, on the other hand, had more choices than poor women. They had money to go to a general practitioner or midwife and, therefore, get adequate information and the contraception that was appropriate for them. This situation can be understood as not only demonstrating that women were regarded merely as a medium through which the State achieved its goal, but also how the consequences of the New Order’s gender politics were not the same for women of different social classes.

Universally, women’s biological function of reproduction serves to construct them as “natural” mothers or carers of children. To further this essentialist notion the New Order used women’s organizations to construct what it meant to be an “ideal” mother in Indonesian society. yy One of the largest women’s organizations was PKK (Pembinaan Kesejahteraan Keluarga - Family Welfare Guidance). This institution monitored women from all levels of society—from local to national. The purpose of establishing the PKK organisation at every level of society was to enable its ideology to reach all of the various groups of Indonesian women. According to Lies Marcoes (2002, p. 187), PKK was “an important vehicle for implementing the New Order’s development program in rural areas.” Marcoes (2002, p. 187) says that in order to enhance nationwide participation, PKK established Posyandu (Integrated Health Posts) in almost all villages “for new mothers, babies and children.” Posyandu had the power to monitor Indonesian women, ensuring they fulfilled their roles as mothers. Citing Douglas and Wieringa, Blackburn (1994, p. 174) suggests that “the women’s organization has come under government control, ensuring the full coordination of women’s efforts on behalf of development according to the government guidelines.” As a State sponsored organization the main aim of PKK was ‘improving the standard of living of families and households in rural areas’ (Marcoes 2002, p.188). That aim was relevant to the state’s development program, which was also attempting to increase the net national income. PKK supported this development project by enhancing the notion that a modern Indonesian woman not only had the responsibility of taking care of her family, but also of participating in the work force in order to improve her family’s standard of living. This practice also encouraged women to have fewer children in order that they would more easily be able to enter and remain in the work force.

Women’s Productive Roles under the New Order

The control of women’s productive role was included in the State Development Program through the GBHN (General Outline of State Policy) in 1983. According to Mayling Oey-Gardiner (2002), this 1983 State policy expanded the mainly domestic role of Indonesian women to include a dual role (peran ganda). Citing Wageman, Oey-Gardiner (2002, p. 103) also argues that the dual role that Indonesian women had to fulfil consisted of their domestic duties and the development of “women’s potential in the economic and socio political arenas—while still couched in terms of benefiting the family.”

However, in practice it was difficult for women to keep up with these double responsibilities. And the government’s policy itself was not without contradictions. As noted by Saraswati Sunindyo (1996 p. 125), in order to encourage the participation of women in the work force in the 1980s, the government “promoted the sending of women [both married and unmarried] to work in the Middle East.” This policy contradicted the dual role of women, due to the fact that if a married woman was working in Middle Eastern countries she could not fulfil her domestic responsibilities, including that of being a good mother and taking care of her children.

The effect of peran ganda—the dual role—was not the same for women of all social classes. As previously mentioned, women from the middle and upper classes could hire domestic servants or nannies to help them with their domestic responsibilities. Women from the lower classes, on the other hand, had to find their own ways to best deal with their double responsibilities. Childcare was not a common institution in Indonesia at the time and the government did not fund childcare for low-income families. Therefore, many lower class women who worked in the informal sector, for example, selling groceries in the traditional market, took their small children to the market with them. Women who worked as factory labourers usually asked their relatives or parents to take care of the children while they were at work. After finishing their paid work, most women who worked in factories still had to fulfil their domestic responsibilities.

According to Oey-Gardiner (2002) some Indonesian women activists began to question and protest against the policy of women’s double responsibilities. Oey-Gardiner (2002, p. 103) goes on to suggest that as a result of this protest, the government made some changes in the 1993 GBHN and “women were declared mitra sejajar (equal partners) in the development, but remained constrained by male-imposed concepts of women.”

The Role of Educational Institutions in Supporting the New Order Construction of Indonesian Women

The New Order used the education system to establish and maintain the notion that women had different citizenship responsibilities from men. As Lynette Parker argues (as cited in Blackburn 1999, p. 197):
The government’s main goal in providing primary education is to create good Indonesian citizens [. . .]. Through teacher’s behaviour, school curricula and institutional routine, the government assigns the genders the following goals: girls have responsibilities for virtue, moral education, and service, principally within the family, and boys are responsible for economic development.

Thus, the meaning of good citizenship has different connotations for both Indonesian women and men. During the New Order, both men and women were interpellated into specific gender stereotypes through education institutions, beginning with primary schools. The content in the textbooks Indonesian primary schools used promoted the unequal position of men and women in Indonesian society as the “norm.” These texts books promoted “a domesticated, middle-class image of women as mothers who stay at home to look after the house and children while men go out to earn a living for the family” (Longsdon as cited in Blackburn 1994, p. 176).

In his research on patriarchy in Indonesian primary school text books, Jupriono (1997) observes that the content of some Indonesian language text books constructs particular stereotypes for both men and women. He cites the examples of ayah memperbaiki mobil (father fixes the car), ibu menjahit baju (mother sews clothes), and ibu memasak di dapur (mother cooks in the kitchen). Jupriono argues that the official book of Indonesian grammar (Tata Bahasa Baku Bahasa Indonesia) also contains some examples of sentences that support patriarchal ideology. One such example is “I really like that woman as a secretary, and she is really fun as a friend, but it is obvious she is very difficult to live with” (Aku suka kepada wanita itu sebagai sekretaris, dan dia sangat menyenangkan sebagai kawan, tetapi jelas akan menyusahkan sekali sebagai kawan hidup). This sentence implies that the ideal wife would be a more “domestic” woman, and suggests that women who choose to have a career do not make suitable wives. Such criteria for being a “good” wife can be linked with the notions of the disciplining of wives and the unequal power relations in Indonesian households. As Foucault (as cited in Mansfield, 2001) suggests, subjects are subjected to specific rules and disciplines that determine what is “normal” or acceptable behaviour for them, and this can be seen clearly in the case  of Indonesian married women.

In a “normative” Indonesian household a husband heads the family and the wife is responsible for the domestic affairs, which includes being loyal to her husband and  taking care of her children. Therefore, if a wife has a successful career in the public sphere, she is not considered a “normal” or good wife. This is not only a matter of how working outside the home affects the fulfilment of her domestic responsibilities, but it also related to the notion of a dependent wife as the “ideal.” A wife is also responsible for contributing to the household income, but any money she earns should only supplement the family income and not provide the main source of income. However, this creates somewhat of a paradox for Indonesian married women, because when a woman joins the paid workforce she becomes less dependent on her husband and this upsets the balance of power in the family, making it difficult for her husband to exercise his authority as the head of the family, yet she is expected to contribute financially to the family while remaining subordinate to her husband as she fulfils her domestic roles. 

The notion of the loyal wife is another aspect of the “ideal” that is subverted by the career woman. For example, the accepted behaviour for a “good” Indonesian woman suggests that  she should stay within the domestic sphere, and not be seen to be too outgoing in public. The example mentioned above suggests that the secretary is an outgoing woman (“she is really fun as a friend”) and the fact that she is a secretary suggests that she has the capacity to communicate well and to mix well with people in the business community. The implication is that an outgoing woman, particularly one who has many male friends, is probably not a good candidate for the role of a loyal wife. Thus, the sentence in the example cited suggests the text promotes State gender ideology that constructs female dependency and loyalty as ideal characteristics for women (Suryakusuma, 1996).

While educational institutions began the process of indoctrinating girls into their “expected” roles in society, the New Order media, as another of the state’s ideological devices, continued the process of encouraging women to maintain the characteristics of the “ideal” Indonesian woman.

Indonesian Women and the New Order Media

Close monitoring of mass media by the New Order government was another important move by the regime to reinforce the desired role of women in the process of national development projects. Krishna Sen and David T. Hill (2000) suggest that in the New Order, the Indonesian media were legally and institutionally under surveillance by the Department of Information. Faruk and Aprinus Salam (2003, p. 313) suggest that in the early years of the New Order, the regime picked one of the best experts on political strategy, Ali Murtopo, not as the chief of the army but as the information minister. Right from the beginning, the New Order had been aware that media was very important in establishing the hegemony of the state.

Even though the government did not have absolute control over the content produced by the media, the Department of Information was able to shut the media down if the content was considered to be overly critical of the regime. That meant that the content of “press, television, radio, film and the internet and related forms of digital communication” were relatively constrained within the Government’s political boundaries.

In terms of the representation of women in Indonesian media, Barbara Hatley (1999, p. 451) argues that the emphasis of the New Order gender ideology on the concept of “women’s inherent feminine nature and role as wife and mother … inspire[d] literary and media images of women as modest, virtuous and compliant, dependent upon and supportive of men.” In this sense, mass media was part of the New Order’s political  machine, which was significant in determining  general acceptance of the State’s gender ideologies. The New Order media, for example, had a tendency to emphasise the superiority of men and the subordination of women (Purbani as cited by Aripurnami 1999, p. 2). Sita Aripurnami (1999) suggests that the points of view expressed by the New Order media were based on men’s or on patriarchal interests. Thus, this would suggest that “most media content used the male gaze to signify women’s issues and interests” (Aripurnami 1999, p. 2). That is, women’s matters were reported strictly from a patriarchal point of view.

Ironically, it was not only male journalists who demonstrated the New Order’s patriarchal ideology in their story coverage; female journalists also wrote from this perspective. This was not only related to their fear of losing their job  in a male dominated Indonesian mass media industry, but is also due to the overwhelming effect of New Order gender ideologies in Indonesian society. Women, including women journalists, had internalised and lived the ideology.

The content of women’s tabloids and magazines was also determined by New Order gender politics. The way mainstream women’s magazines covered their stories indicated that their position on women’s issues concurred with New Order gender politics. For instance, if they represented a story of a successful woman, they would provide details about what strategies she used to maintain a balance between her career and her feminine nature, or kodrat. The implication behind this type of story is that kodrat of women refers to women’s’ roles as mothers and wives. As Suzane Brenner (1999) argues, even though women’s magazines were not considered an official media for government propaganda, the way they constructed women and the notion of family supported the New Order’s policies regarding  women’s development. According to Brenner (1999, p. 14), this state oriented representation of women was a result of the way in which “the policies and the practices of the New Order regime set the tone for what could or could not be said—and even what should be said—in print as well as in other forms of mass media.” Thus, even though the state did not directly order the media to construct women in certain ways, the Regime’s gender ideology influenced the way in which the media represented women in its texts. And as one form of mass media in the New Order era, the way in which Indonesian women are represented in New Order films is to some extent influenced by New Order gender politics.

The Construction of Women in Indonesian Cinema under the New Order

The New Order government’s policies and practices set boundaries on images of women that were circulated to Indonesian audiences through mass media, including film (Sen, 1994, Brenner, 1999). One of the main policies of New Order gender politics was to promote the notion of Indonesian women as primarily belonging in the domestic sphere. The emphasis on women’s domestic role was represented in many Indonesian films in that era. The internalisation of this New Order’s construction of gender roles in Indonesia is apparent in Krishna Sen’s (1994) analysis on productive men and reproductive women in Indonesian cinema. Sen (1994) argues that the way gender roles are constructed in New Order cinema signifies that the domestic role is the only “proper” role for women. New Order cinema constructed Men, on the other hand, as incompetent at housework. Sen (1994, p. 137) also suggests that the way in which these constructions are depicted in Indonesian cinema is founded on the idea that domestic work is naturally and socially inappropriate for a husband to perform.

Karl G. Heider (1991), on the other hand, argues that many Indonesian films actually frequently depict strong images of women. In responding to Heider’s argument, Sen (1994, p. 135) suggests that in analysing the depiction of women as strong and vocal we should consider the following question, “when the woman is represented as powerful or vocal, to what effect and whose interest is this strength mobilised in the text?” In Indonesian film texts when female characters are depicted as strong it is usually related to motherhood or their domestic roles. In one of the New Order films, Zaman Edan (Crazy Time), for example, the depiction of the husband as miserable in his domestic role, and his wife as successful in her paid job as she is in her domestic one, is not a representation of women’s strength (Sen, 1994). Rather, it reinforces the notion that men do not belong in the domestic sphere. Thus, when the female protagonist moves beyond the domestic sphere it will usually lead to the emergence of conflict in the film (Sen, 1994). The conflict is resolved by placing the women back within the “normal” domestic construction of women.

In New Order film texts the notion of the “normal” woman was also constructed by a set of behavioural boundaries used to differentiate female characters as either good (normal) women or as bad (abnormal) women. Commonly, Indonesian films use popular psychology to explain female characters’ “abnormal” behaviour (Sen, 1994). For example, if the female character hates men, does not want to get married, or behaves like a man, the film text implies that she is behaving that way because of such things as childhood trauma or other previous traumatic experiences. Therefore, Indonesian films seldom, if ever, represent the female protagonist as making the decision not to get married, for example, simply because she does not want to. The use of psychological reasons also signify that all “normal” women choose to marry unless they suffer a particularly traumatic experience that makes them decide not to become involved in personal relationships with men. Thus, by repressing the discourse of gender equality and placing more emphasis on psychological experience, the film texts reinforce the idea that a “normal” Indonesian woman is one who wants to get married.

However, as Raymond Williams argues, dominant cultural texts are also influenced by the emergence of new meaning and values that are continually being created. In the context of the representation of women in New Order cinema, there were a few films in that era that proposed an “alternative” way of representing women in their texts. For example, the representation of female characters in Garin Nugroho’s film Cinta dalam Sepotong Roti (Love in a Slice of Bread) was put forward by Tadao Sato (2004) as the representation of the “new woman” in upper middle class modern Indonesia. David Hanan (2004, p. 149) also suggests this film offers “insight about what a man or a woman might want or need at different stages in their life, rather than man’s opinion and point of view being privileged.” However, this film still represents the role of women as the primary caretakers of their children  to some extent. For example,  the film implies the main male character’s (Harris) fixation on his mother’s sexual infidelity is one of the main causes of his impotence and of his disharmonious relationship with his wife (Hanan, 2004). Even though this film represents many values that subvert New Order gender ideologies, it still encodes the idea that as the main caretaker of the children, a mother must be particularly careful of her conduct because she has a significant psychological and moral influence on them. Nevertheless, this film posited an alternative look at women which included the public articulation of female desire through dancing that potentially subverts contemporary constructions of female characters in New Order Indonesian film (Hanan, 2004). I

Conclusion

Based on the discussion of the way New Order cinema constructs women, it is apparent that New Order gender politics marked film texts of the period. The New Order acknowledged that women were an important element in the success of its development programs, and so created particular boundaries in order to control the construction female subjectivity in such a way as to promulgate the desired picture of the ideal Indonesian woman. The emphasis the New Order regime placed on the domestic value of women in Indonesian society led women to perceive that a good or “normal” woman is one who is married, loyal to her husband, bears and takes care of few children, supports her husband’s career, and helps her husband by providing supplementary income for the family. These kinds of female images were also reflected in the way women were represented in Indonesian film texts.

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