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. 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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