A New Direction of Feminism in Indonesia, Lecture at Harvard University Asia Center

A New Direction of Feminism in Indonesia

April 20, 2022|7:00pm

Location: Virtual Event

Sponsor: Harvard University Asia Center

Intan Paramaditha, Author and Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney

Via Zoom; registration required at https://bit.ly/HVDSEAPARAMADITHA

What does Indonesian feminism look like? Scholars interested in post-authoritarian Indonesian public cultures have focused on liberal feminism, a movement centred on individual rights and body autonomy that aligns with Reformasi rhetoric of "freedom of expression," or Islamic feminism, emphasizing on women's struggle for authority within Islamic organisations and its potential to counter the mainstreaming of conservative Islam. In this lecture, I draw on my experience being part of a collective and a larger network of feminist cultural activism in Indonesia. While liberal, Islamic, and neoliberal feminist ideas continue to circulate, I argue that we are witnessing a new direction of feminism in Indonesia, which I call the trans-archipelagic decolonial feminist trajectory. This feminist strain is not part of the mainstream national imagination, but some feminist collectives have nurtured spaces and linkages that challenge universalizing views of feminism and the coloniality of both the West and Java, interrogate the (geo)politics of knowledge production, and connect feminists across the archipelago by foregrounding solidarity that confronts rather than erases difference and borders.

Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian author and a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her fiction works in Indonesian language have been translated into English by Stephen J. Epstein and published by Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK. Her novel The Wandering was longlisted for Australia’s Stella Prize and awarded the Tempo Magazine’s Best Literary Fiction and the English PEN Translates Award.

She is currently completing her manuscript on film, activism, and sexual politics in Indonesia. She co-organises Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan and the feminist festival ETALASE to discuss and celebrate women’s thought across the Indonesian archipelago.