Conservative attacks on homosexuality and LGBT in Indonesia have branched out into a broader assault on feminism and the intrusion of the state into previously private spheres of life, Hendri Yulius writes.
In the last year there have been consistent legal efforts to outlaw same-sex practices and LGBT identity in Indonesia. And while religious vigilante groups may be responsible for attacks and raids against queer-related events, it is an Islamic pro-family group, the Family Love Alliance (Aliansi Cinta Keluarga/AILA) that is the spearhead of the current attempt to criminalise homosexuality.
Most of the AILA’s members are women who position themselves as ‘mothers’, and say their immediate concerns about protecting the moral fibre of young generations. In doing so, they appeal to public and conservative public officials and successfully gain support from other conservative groups. Another interesting aspect of the group is their clear anti-feminist stance – something that is worth examining to understand the current landscape of gender and sexuality in post-reformation Indonesia.
On their websites and in a series of tweets, the group argued that lifestyles and thoughts influenced by feminism have caused prostitution among young girls and normalised LGBT and/or homosexuality. The group cited the famous feminist slogan ‘My Body My Rights’ as one of the culprits of youth moral degradation.
Further, as the group plans to build a systematic counter-movement against feminism, they also highlight the vulnerability of female domestic violence victims to being infiltrated by feminist ideas. Apparently, female divorcees can easily become feminists to ‘fulfil their biological/ sexual needs’ and, consequently, the ideas of lesbianism and gender equality easily contaminate these women. To justify the arguments with more empirical evidence, AILA cites the growing number of divorces in Tangerang and Depok that have been initiated by the wives themselves. The morality arguments that have focused on the perpetuation of traditional gender norms and the preservation of heterosexual family principles.
As I argue elsewhere, mother figures have been central to Indonesian society. In contrast to Western feminist strategies, traditional womanhood (or motherhood) has sometimes been used as an effective medium for empowerment and for bringing about social and political change. When mothers protest, it shows that something big and concerning is at stake. This inference is possible because of the long-term glorification of motherhood by the state that promotes the moral superiority of women/mothers, while at the same time domesticates and confines them to their reproductive roles. Intimate and private lives have been treated as fodder for public discourse, with private and public spheres becoming increasingly entangled and blurred.
Given these historical and cultural contexts, the idea of ‘mothers’ offers open-ended and multiple possibilities. They can be utilised by any group, either to improve women’s rights or, as in this case, to reinforce traditional gender norms and condemn particular groups. The messages of the AILA highlight the flexibility of an idea and how it can be translated into different actions and rhetoric from one socio-political landscape to another.
Interestingly, the anti-feminist rhetoric of AILA does not wholly reject ideas about gender equality. Some inherent aspects, such as access to education and women’s participation in public, seem to be permitted through the fact that some leading members of AILA hold higher-education degrees and even important career positions (for example, medical doctor). This paradox demonstrates that some aspects of ‘feminism’ are allowed, while ‘intimate spheres’ are increasingly policed to ‘prevent’ the loosening of traditional gender norms and family principles.
Further, through their assumptions about female divorcees and victims of violence, AILA has also proposed criminalising adultery. To borrow scholar Laurent Berlant’s concept, these moves could be termed as the politicisation of an ‘intimate public sphere’—the triumph of private acts over civic acts to redefine a new citizenship.
Since the collapse of the New Order era, the rising religious conservatism in Indonesia has significantly shifted the political landscape and increasingly targeted and publicly politicised that ‘intimate sphere’—from pornography law, to Shari’ah-based local regulations, to the criminalisation of LGBT. However, the demands to regulate intimate spheres intriguingly come from civil society itself; asking the State to intervene in private lives. These debates and the infiltrations into private spaces inadvertently enables sexuality—previously deemed taboo—to occupy political and public talks. I call it ‘transparent sex’—one of the biggest contributions to the politicisation of sex in Indonesia after the Reformation era.
Hendri Yulius obtained his master’s in public policy from the National University of Singapore, and is the author of Coming Out. He is currently pursuing his Masters by Research in Gender and Cultural Studies at The University of Sydney.
Interesting that Hendri feels comfortable ‘mansplaining’ the situation of feminism in a majority Muslim country when, as far as I have been able to determine by reading around, the relationship between the norms and values that predominate in western feminism and those that infuse Islamic feminism are not only often at odds but fiercely contested.
Perhaps its the male tendency to want to make things absolutely clear that explains this otherwise odd behavior?
And again, Hendri seems to find it “intriguing” that civil society in a predominantly Muslim culture would exhibit an attachment to norms and values that are different from those of western civil society actors.
Perhaps if Hendri was to consider the “local knowledge” end of things instead of constantly assuming the universality of academic liberalism as proclaimed loudly day in and day out across the western world?
As I hope I have made clear before now, my own position on LGBTQ rights and feminism are about as radical/liberal as anyone’s.
I just don’t share the evangelicalism that assumes that cultures that differ from mine are somehow in a state of error.
I also believe that “civil society” in coastal America or Canada is distinct from that in Indonesia or Thailand and that to expect one to be identical to the other reflects a very deep misunderstanding of what the term “civil” in that phrase actually means.
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This is not a matter of pushing Western values on the rest of the world. It is a demographic imperative that women need to spend much less time bearing children and more time contributing to their culture. There are vastly too many people in the world, and unless we change cultures radically, the human plague will end in mass death on an unimaginable scale, just like mouse plagues and grasshopper plagues.
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“Michael Wilson” , if you are such a “radical” or “liberal” – you seem confused, what is it – supporter of LGBT rights, why do you feel compelled to write a critical commentary under every article about LGBT in Indonesia which gets published by New Mandala?
I don’t believe you one word. I don’t even believe you are a liberal Canadian. No liberal Westerner I know would say that it’s okay to outlaw homosexuality, if the majority of people in, e.g., Indonesia, after years of religious-political brainwashing thinks, one should outlaw homosexuality. Yet that’s exactly what you suggested in your commentary below another article by Hendri Yulius. A democracy without the rule of law and the protection of minority rights, e.g. LGBT rights in Indonesia, or the protection of religious rights of Muslims in the West to be able to follow their religion in a non-radical way , is not a democracy but mob rule.
Of course you would know all that if you would really be a liberal, pardon me, radical Westerner. You are not. So all I can say is: Some people are gay, “Wilson”. Get over it. And spare us your pseudo-multicultural philosophy. Nobody here is interested in your propaganda
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To my way of thinking, Marc, what “nobody here” is interested in is the growing conflict between liberalism and democracy that is very much behind the rise of various populisms that threaten to destroy both of them, pretty much everywhere on the planet.
I, on the other hand, am.
You, like so many unreflective cultural imperialists, automatically conflate “democracy” with “liberalism” and want to pretend that if a society such as the Indonesian does not manifest liberal values when they act to create a government in a manner of their choosing, then they are not “being democratic”.
You, as is the white man’s way, would only call their system democratic if it reflected what apparently you think are “your” values, although I suspect that what we are dealing with here is something imposed through “brainwashing” rather than a personal value system. Values, in my reading, do not reside in a jerking knee.
I’m also interested in how this website reflects the unchanging pattern of white folks hoisting the white man’s burden like a flag and continually lecturing their little brown brothers on how it is they should be conducting their politics.
In some cases, as in the non-stop defense of Thai “democracy” that involves absolving an elected PM of human rights abuses because he was elected and therefore the UN was not his father, the NM rabble opposes liberal values to electoral democracy and democracy is held to be the superior value. So “death squads good, juntas bad” is the chant at the Hate Week forum that this website hosts.
In the case of a Muslim majority society manifesting values that were operative in western liberal societies a mere 5 decades ago, of course the opposite is true. If the values of a given electorate do not reflect one of the more fashionable liberal values du jour, then liberalism trumps democracy.
As to whether or not I am a radical or a liberal, I can only say that when the kneejerk liberal position in North America was that homosexuality was a mental disorder, I opposed that fascistic position. And when AIDs was giving the reluctantly converted “liberals” second thoughts about their support for “gay liberation”, I shaved my head and moved my earring into the “gay ear” in an act of symbolic solidarity. Good friends of mine were activists prominent in the protests against the bathhouse raids and as things started going our way I even converted to opera.
And as someone schooled in a more radical version of feminism than has been on display in the “liberal” media of late, I find it hilarious that a man is making pronouncements on what is surprising or unusual in the discourse of Indonesian women and what constitutes a “feminist” position and what does not. To simply gloss over the very real conflicts taking place between white liberal feminists and the Muslim women they tend to talk down to in an article that apparently wants to look at aspects of women’s rights and women’s roles in a Muslim society is astounding really.
So for me, Hendri’s article brings up questions: one regarding the “mansplanaton” of what is or is not a feminist position and another about how a supporter of liberal human rights, which last time I checked involved not only sexual/gender-orientation provisions but guarantees of political freedoms as well, can so blithely deny an electorate the right to have its values reflected in its legal system.
Refusing to consider the very real dichotomies and self-contradictions that are separating the democratic horse from the the liberal carriage and tending toward the creation of loveless populist marriages of convenience between the masses and their would-be masters is not how we do things on the liberal/radical side of the fence. Sticking your head in the sand or in another convenient hole is really not our way.
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1. The first thing you should do “Michael Wilson”, is admit who you are and who you are not. You are not a liberal Canadian, that’s for sure. So who are you and why are you so much – and exclusively – interested in Indonesian affairs if you are not an Indonesian or living in Indonesia?
2. There are many young Indonesian feminists influenced by Western feminism. Either because they educated themselves by reading books, reading on the internet, or in study-groups etc, after having made their experiences in a very male-dominated culture. The majority of Indonesian feminists are not “Islamic feminists” and even many of the minority who are, are at least as inspired by Western feminists as they are by the Koran.
3. If there has been cultural imperialism in Indonesia in the last decades it was not Western but Salafist and Wahhabist cultural imperialism, financially supported, mainly, by Saudi Arabia. This foreign, alien influence has already changed Indonesia in the last twenty, thirty years beyond recognition. It Is now threatening to turn Indonesia into a new Pakistan – as, among others, the general secretary of (Muslim mass organization) NU has warned.
Only a fool or an ideologue would call this a “democratic” development. And no matter how big the amount of your logorrhea you are both.
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I think the writer is confusing what Indonesian values are and what feminism is. Basic Indonesian values include: no intercourse before marriage, uphold a marriage (no extra marital affairs, never even entertain such notion), and LGBT are bad for you. Looking at it from this perspective, obviously feminism in Indonesia doesn’t adhere to the idea of “my body, my rules” other nation feminist adhere to. But that doesn’t made them any less feminist, they just follow different values.
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