Contestations of Gender, Sexuality and Morality in Contemporary Indonesia

Abstract

This special issue explores morality agendas in the recent Indonesian context and in doing so, reveals the dynamism of morality debates as they occur in Indonesia and in broader Southeast Asian perspectives. In this Introduction we illustrate how morality (or the perceived lack of morality) acted in part as the impetus for reformasi (reformation), which forced an end in 1998 to the authoritarian New Order era. Subsequently, we discuss how reformasi influenced morality debates in Indonesia by both opening and foreclosing opportunities for tolerance around gender and sexuality. Specifically, we consider the impact of increasing democratisation and how various moral panics have been articulated in the widening space for social and moral critique. The articles in this special issue make a significant contribution to expanding three key themes – morality and boundaries, moral threats, and morality and subjectivity – and shows how these themes intersect with the conceptualisation and functioning of morality in contemporary Indonesia. We then tease out how the five articles in this special issue engage with these themes. Finally, we comment on our observations regarding the increasing visibility of morality debates in Indonesia in the past two decades, and the increasing social currency attributed to morality issues and debates in the public sphere.

Isu khusus ini membahas tentang agenda moralitas dalam konteks Indonesia baru-baru ini yang, mengungkapkan dinamika perdebatan moral sebagaimana yang terjadi di Indonesia dan perspektif Asia Tenggara yang lebih luas. Dalam Pendahuluan ini kami menggambarkan bagaimana moralitas (atau kurangnya moralitas yang dirasakan) bertindak sebagian sebagai dorongan untuk reformasi (reformasi), yang mengakhiri tahun 1998 sampai era Orde Baru yang otoriter. Selanjutnya, kita membahas bagaimana reformasi berdampak pada perdebatan mengenai moralitas di Indonesia dengan membuka dan menutup peluang untuk toleransi seputar gender dan seksualitas.kami secara khusus memandang dampak peningkatan demokratisasi dan bagaimana berbagai kepanikan moral telah diartikulasikan di ruang pelebaran kritik sosial dan moral. Artikel dalam edisi khusus ini memberikan kontribusi yang signifikan untuk memperluas tiga tema utama - moralitas dan batasan, ancaman moral, dan moralitas dan subjektivitas - serta menunjukkan bagaimana tema-tema ini saling silang menyilang dengan konseptualisasi dan fungsi moralitas di Indonesia kontemporer. Kami kemudian mengkaji bagaimana lima artikel dalam edisi khusus ini terkait dengan tema-tema ini. Pada akhirnya, kami mengomentari pengamatan kami mengenai meningkatnya visibilitas debat moralitas di Indonesia dalam dua dekade terakhir, dan juga ikut meningkatnya ‘social currency’ yang dikaitkan dengan masalah moral dan perdebatan di ranah publik.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• sexuality
• gender
• morality
• family
• citizenship
• democracy

Morality, Family and Religion in Southeast Asia

Following World War II, many Southeast Asian countries released from colonial rule began concerted efforts at nation building. The family became a key site for intervention and was coopted by the state as a vehicle to push development imperatives. Indeed, the ideal of the nuclear family took hold as nations tried to implement development measures aimed at stemming population growth and increasing economic growth (Jones, 1995). The “Asian family” as a bastion of public morality became ingrained in the fabric of many Southeast Asian nations. Countries adhering to so-called “Asian values” were cast as morally upright and embedded in familial and collectivist social structures, particularly in comparison to Western counterparts (Hoon, 2004). State-sponsored pro-natalism in Singapore sought to privilege the nuclear family by, in part, enacting policies that significantly disadvantage unwed mothers (Teo, 2011). In nearby Malaysia, Stivens (2006) showed how similar notions of the family gained traction in nationalist, religious and media discourses. The role of defining and regulating the family to fit state ideals continues in contemporary Malaysia where unmarried couples found in close proximity can be charged with the “moral offence” of khalwat (close proximity to an unrelated person of the opposite sex) (Ismail, 2016). In post-colonial Indonesia, the family also became subsumed into the public sphere as a vehicle for nation building. As Brenner (2011, p. 480) argues, “The Suharto regime [1965–98] … relied heavily on ideologies of gender, family, and morality to promote particular views of national citizenship and development”.

State interest in the nuclear family as a form of ideal citizenship underscores the powerful role of states in morality projects. As Day (2002, p. 34) reveals, “The state regulates power and morality and organizes space, time, and identity in the face of resistance to its authority to do so”. Day further notes that the regulation of morality at the state level has significant implications not just for citizenship but also for identity – at individual, familial, institutional and national levels. Identities, rendered through bodies – in particular those of women – have been a mainstay of state attempts to regulate their citizens. Colonial powers in Southeast Asia used the explicit regulation of bodies as a means to demarcate populations along racial, ethnic and religious lines (Loos, 2008; Stoler, 2010). Such regulation extended into the post-colonial period, with authors such as Natalie Oswin (2010) arguing that the post-colonial elite perfected the moral regulation around bodies in Singapore, making even seemingly innocuous acts, such as walking around naked in one’s own home, illegal (Tan, 2003).

Alongside projects seeking to define the moral citizen as one embedded in a nuclear family, religion has also been exploited as a mechanism to regulate post-colonial Southeast Asian populations along moral lines. Malaysia’s so-called “morality police” (who are in fact Islamic officials) are a key example of how religious discourse has mobilised morality to meet various ends. Morality police have been vested with power by the state to enforce an “Islamic Moral standard” (Basarudin, 2016). In enforcing this standard, various brigades have arrested women participating in beauty pageants, Muslims gathering at nightclubs, and people socialising with members of the opposite sex (Kraince, 2009). Somewhat ironically, the enforcement of an “Islamic Moral standard” has seen members of the morality police accused of sexually harassing women detained for “immoral acts” (Basarudin, 2016).

Religion has also been utilised by the post-colonial Philippine state to enforce a notion of morality. For instance, the Catholic Church sought to maintain its dominance in defining legitimate sexual and gender moralities by stopping moves to pass the Reproductive Health Law; the law aimed to guarantee universal access for Philippine citizens to modern contraception, fertility control, sexual education and comprehensive maternal care (including post-abortion care) (Parmanand, 2014). Debate over this law saw conservative Catholic morality pitted against other moral discourses including those around human rights, gender equity and women’s rights, and the social costs of not providing adequate reproductive health care. Alongside these morality debates in the Philippines, there was also constant questioning of the role of religious institutions in a secular state, and who should have moral authority in formal politics.

What is clear from the preceding discussion is that morality was at the centre of state efforts after World War II to create a sense of nationhood and to coerce people to conform to what the nation saw as a good citizen in the Southeast Asian region. We start with this general discussion of Southeast Asia to show that Indonesia, the focus of this special issue, is not unique in its moralising projects. Like much of Southeast Asia, morality has been particularly enforced through notions of the family and religion, the two aspects discussed above. So what is meant by the term morality in these contexts? We turn to that now.

In focusing in this special issue on morality we develop a point made by Robbins that one reason the development of an “anthropology of morality appears to be almost permanently stunted [is due] to the anthropological tendency to treat all of culture or collective life as morally charged [and this] leaves morality as a domain of study woefully underspecified” (Robbins, 2007, p. 293). This point is also taken up by Laidlaw, who notes that the “moral means everything and nothing. It does no distinctive conceptual work and therefore it is not surprising that, despite occasional attempts to arouse some interest in it, it keeps going out of focus and fading away” (Laidlaw, 2002, p. 313). We make morality central here by showing explicitly the ways in which it has shaped social and political life in Indonesia since 1998. We also advance another point made by theorists such as Laidlaw and Robbins – that accounts of morality must include elements of freedom and choice, which are not necessarily understood in a Western sense, but rather as entities constructed out of the role “given to choice in various cultures and in various domains within specific cultures” (Laidlaw, 2002, p. 323). We find particularly relevant Robbins’ use of the term “morality of reproduction”, which is a useful way of analysing deployments of morality in literal reproductive terms (e.g. the formation of legitimate families) and in broader terms (e.g. how the nation reproduces itself). We thus take morality to include moral action as routine behaviour and moral action as deriving from some element of cultural choice.

This special issue explores morality agendas in the recent Indonesian context, and in doing so reveals the dynamism of morality debates as they occur in Indonesia and in broader Southeast Asian perspectives. In this Introduction we illustrate how morality (or the perceived lack of morality) acted in part as the impetus for reformasi (reformation), which forced an end in 1998 to the authoritarian New Order era. Subsequently, we discuss how reformasi influenced morality debates in Indonesia by both opening and foreclosing opportunities for tolerance around gender and sexuality. Specifically, we consider the impact of increasing democratisation and how various moral panics have been articulated in the widening space for social and moral critique. The articles in this special issue make a significant contribution to expanding three key themes – morality and boundaries, moral threats, and morality and subjectivity – and show how these themes intersect with the conceptualisation and functioning of morality in contemporary Indonesia. We tease out how the five articles in this special issue engage with these themes. Finally, we comment on our observations regarding the increasing visibility of morality debates in Indonesia in the past two decades, and the increasing social currency attributed to morality issues and debates in the public sphere.

Reformasi – born of moral crisis

At its end in 1998 Suharto’s New Order regime was denounced by many as an utterly immoral regime. There was nation-wide condemnation of the economic and political corruption that had kept the elite in power for four decades. During this period, the ruling elite had denied democratic processes and political participation to Indonesian citizens. The charges of moral failure against the state were manifold and legitimated (Robertson-Snape, 1999). The charges included corruption in political processes and an endemic culture of corruption within the public service. Economic incompetence in state affairs and misuse of state funds and assets were seen by reformers as responsible for perpetuating economic inequality and serving only the interests of the wealthy elite. Added to the general dissatisfaction with economic management and corruption was the knowledge of extreme nepotism and profiteering among elite families aligned with the state. In the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis, the vast chasms in health and social and economic well-being between Indonesia’s wealthy elite and the majority of Indonesian society became articulated as a moral issue (Waters et al., 2003). Morality became the trope of reform.

State abuse of military power and the threat of military violence against Indonesians who publicly denounced the government were seen by reformers as immoral. The mass rape of Indonesian Chinese women and girls in 1998, referred to as the May Tragedy, was interpreted by reformers as an attack on the humanity of Indonesians. Many observers correctly saw this violence as an organised campaign of terror (Winarnita, 2012). At the same time, other sectors of society blatantly denied the occurrence of this sexual violence, claiming that such heinous acts simply could not occur in a morally upright society. The evidence systematically gathered from survivors and their families by the National Commission on Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan) since May 1998 is proof of these crimes, and yet there is ongoing reluctance by the state to take moral responsibility and formally acknowledge this violence. The widespread riots, and the mass rape of Chinese Indonesian women and girls, escalated the political crisis to the point where Suharto, “father of the nation”, was considered an immoral person unable to lead the nation. Subsequently, the moral character of Suharto’s successor became of paramount importance to the Indonesian populace.¹

The person initially elected and trusted to lead the nation into reform was Abdurrahman Wahid (serving 1999 to 2001), a prominent Islamic cleric thought by many to have good moral standing. Wahid promoted religious morality as a key currency in establishing his political legitimacy. He explicitly proposed Islam as a path away from moral corruption. Indonesian Muslims were encouraged to break with the moral laxity of the past by following the example of the Prophet Mohammad and fasting every Monday and Thursday. This proposal to follow Islam as a path to moral selfhood was a significant shift in Indonesian state discourse; President Suharto had been wary of Islamic groups gaining too much power (Hefner, 2000). Calls for more modest Islamic dress, purification through fasting, and adherence to regular prayer were not only signs of growing piety but also indicated a growing personalisation of the political for many Indonesian Muslims.

In the reformasi era more Indonesians than ever became actively engaged in questioning what it means to be a “true” Muslim (Nisa, 2012). This engagement involved a heightened sense of piety and consideration of how many people wished to practise or perform Muslim morality (Savitri Hartono, 2018). This engagement also led to an escalation in surveillance of moral and religious practices. Reformasi thus created a space for increasing Islamisation. The articles in this special issue illuminate the complex ways in which Islam, as well as other changes in the reformasi era, continue to inform, shape and contest key debates over gender, sexuality and morality in Indonesia.

In summary, morality has been a key trope of Indonesia’s reformasi era. As we have demonstrated, the pursuit of morality in political, social and religious domains informed much of the way in which reformasi was understood. Given that morality has been central to the reformation period, it stands to reason that many of the central debates currently occurring in Indonesia revolve around morality, such as increasing religiosity and veiling, and clamping down on non-normative sexualities and genders.

Morality and Democracy

When democratic reforms took hold post-1998, many hoped that a new discourse of human rights would emerge. Events such as film festivals, which showcased excellent cinema being produced in Indonesia, showed a national and international audience that Indonesian citizens could express a moral self, free from overt government regulation (Maimunah, 2008). Freedom of the press laws were introduced (Sen & Hill, 2010). Civil society organisations committed to sexual diversity. For instance, Suara Kita, the Ardhanary Institute, and GAYa Nusantara received funding and technical assistance from international donors that allowed them to advocate for human rights, especially in relation to gender and sexuality. Political reforms enabled the establishment of numerous political parties (Choi, 2004). Furthermore, reformasi was celebrated as providing new platforms for women’s rights. We turn now to look at how morality debates concerning women changed in the reformasi era, noting that reformasi offered the promise of significant progress for women.

Under Suharto’s New Order regime, official notions of femininity were highly circumscribed, with women’s citizenship closely tied to their duties as wives and mothers (Robinson, 2009; Suryakusuma, 2004). Marriage was the mainstay of moral power in Indonesia and heterosexual monogamous marriage was deemed the rightful place for women, with their full worth only realised after they had children (Platt, 2017; Bennett, 2005). Meanwhile, the moral and practical boundaries for men’s citizenship were much broader. Under the New Order regime, the public and political sphere was dominated by men who were subject to little moral scrutiny and there was widespread acceptance of men’s extramarital affairs – a discourse that continues in contemporary times (Nurmila & Bennett, 2015; Suryakusuma, 2004). The New Order capitalised on this notion of maternal citizenship, organising women “as mothers in service of the nation” (Robinson, 2009, p. 68). Thus, reformasi held the possibility of new spaces for political organising and the public expression of new gendered subjectivities and sexualities, with the belief that the New Order’s prescriptive ideals had weakened.

Early political reform in Indonesia offered promising signs that progress was being made with regards to widening the moral framework that governed citizenship in Indonesia. For example, the formation of Komnas Perempuan in the early days of reformasi in response to the May Tragedy suggested that the government was taking the allegations seriously. Furthermore, in 2006 the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity were signed in Indonesia. This signing was another indication of the widening of boundaries in regard to gendered and sexual inclusivity in Indonesia’s social and moral fabric. Concomitantly, freedom of expression in the realm of religion gave space for both more progressive and more conservative voices to be heard.

That Indonesia committed itself to upholding the basic human rights of all citizens, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, placed the nation among the leaders in Asia on the issue of sexual freedom, and represented a progressive widening of moral possibilities with regards to sexuality. Further, Komnas Perempuan and the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) joined with LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) organisations to promote the human rights of all Indonesian citizens. For instance, lesbians, bisexual women and transwomen were recognised as part of Komnas Perempuan’s mandate, a striking inclusion given that transwomen were often excluded from women’s organisations globally. Yet it was not just progressive organisations that used democracy to make their claims known. Other elements of Indonesian society were also able to use democratic principles to advance morality agendas that sought to undermine the human rights of Indonesian citizens. We turn now from looking at progress under reformasi to exploring how moral panic was incited, with some sectors of society worried that social reforms were leading to a lapse in morality.

Reformasi and moral panic

While there were great steps made initially under reformasi, especially in terms of progress for women, as reformasi continued, worries emerged, especially among religious groups, that immoral practices were being condoned. Islam is thus a key focus of this section due to the role it has played in shaping notions of morality within public debates in Indonesia.

Under Suharto religious expression was controlled in a top-down manner in order to suppress Islamic elements that might grow strong enough to challenge his regime. To this end, Suharto kept a tight lid on Islamic organisations (Aspinall, 2009; Hefner, 2000), but as the New Order waned, restrictions on Islamic expression were lifted (van Wichelen, 2010). Islamic groups grew in power and thus were well placed to make vocal demands in the democratic era (Robinson, 2015). The impact of lifting restrictions on Islam has been complex. On the one hand, Islamic groups have been able to support the human rights of Muslim policewomen – in 2013 the ban on policewomen veiling on duty was overturned (Davies, 2018). On the other hand, though, vigilante groups have been able to gain social and political power.

One of the most vocal groups in the democratic era has been the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI). Of particular concern to FPI members is the expression of sexual citizenship. FPI began to pay increasingly violent attention to the activities of anyone they saw as not conforming to their image of heteronormative sexuality (Davies, 2015). FPI members thus began raiding various events, such as the international lesbian and gay conference held in 2010 (Marching, 2007). Such was the power of FPI that many otherwise progressive Indonesians began to either support homophobic rhetoric, or do nothing to force its cessation.

In the early 2000s, the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights began considering a change to the Criminal Code to penalise homosexuality for the first time in Indonesia’s history (Offord, 2011). In 2008, Indonesia passed the Anti-Pornography law which frames transgenderism and homosexuality as impermissible. Regional autonomy – a direct outcome of Indonesia’s democratic reforms – enabled provinces such as Aceh to implement Islamic Criminal Code Bylaws penalising homosexual acts with imprisonment and caning. These abuses have captured the attention of human rights activists in Indonesia and abroad (Human Rights Watch, 2017).

By 2016, moral panic over non-heteronormative gender and sexuality in the Indonesian context had reached an all-time high (Boellstorff, 2016; Human Rights Watch, 2016). High-ranking politicians came out in the media exhorting a legal change that would make homosexuality and transgenderism illegal. Hotels and bars were raided on a daily basis and anyone suspected of engaging in “immoral” practices was taken to a police station, and if the province had enacted by-laws against immorality, they were charged (Katjasungkana & Wieringa, 2016). The ability of provinces to enact their own by-laws is a product of both Indonesia’s move to democracy and its decentralisation. Universities have banned LGBT organisations (Human Rights Watch, 2017). Indonesia has become an increasingly difficult place to negotiate contestations of gender, sexuality and morality.

Although it has been LGBT sexualities that have created the most heated debates about morality, there have been more general panics about sexuality across Indonesia. For instance, there have been more mainstream moral panics in post-1998 Indonesia, particularly about premarital sexual activity and drugs (e.g. Parker, 2014, Wright Webster, 2010a; 2010b). As Parker (2014) demonstrated, in the context of Indonesia, many young people are likely to adopt these moral discourses promoted by authorities, thus reinforcing social conservatism.

In exploring how state and religious morality projects impact notions of gender and sexuality, this special issue takes more than merely a top-down and state-led perspective. As Day (2002) suggests, the top-down morality projects of the state do not come without resistance from society, as individuals and collectives respond to new moral orders. Our contributors thus highlight the varied ways in which morality is relational and propagated and enacted within and by society based on particular “moral” standards. At the same time, the articles in this issue reveal how new forms of moral practice continue to emerge, particularly given recent social, economic and religious shifts in Indonesia.

Contributions of the Special Issue

This special issue investigates the meanings and impact of dominant and contested Indonesian gendered and sexual moralities across a broad spectrum of debates. In doing so, it underscores the pivotal role of moral discourses in shaping power relations and legitimating or negating the identities and practices of Indonesians. The collection demonstrates the growing number of forums for performing acceptable public moralities and for the critique and condemnation of “moral deviance” that have emerged in the face of social, political and technological change over the past decades. There is both considerable scope and overlap in the five articles. A variety of sites feature in the authors’ research, including physically constituted sites and virtual and transnational spaces. Spagnoletti undertook her ethnographic doctoral research with middle-class mothers in urban Yogyakarta, while Savitri Hartono’s doctoral research was undertaken primarily online (via Facebook) with married women who were her peers and mostly resided in Jakarta. Wijaya Mulya’s work with Indonesian Christian youth included participants of diverse ethnicity, who were sampled online, and Davies’ ethnographic work spanned multiple sites including Bali, Bandung, Jakarta, Lombok, Malang and Semarang. The boundaries of Platt’s fieldwork stretch even further to include research with Indonesian women living in Singapore as domestic migrant workers, as well as within a migrant-sending community in rural East Java. This diversity of sites highlights both the expansiveness and multidimensional nature of what constitutes moral terrain for contemporary Indonesians.

A variety of moral stakeholders and moral subjects feature in this issue, with key stakeholders including the government of Indonesia, the Indonesian police force and military, religious leaders, and public health advocates. As moral subjects, women occupy a range of overlapping subjectivities in these articles – as mothers, as wives, as Muslims, as foreign domestic workers, as policewomen, and as recipients of health promotion messages. Wijaya Mulya’s work also offers us in-depth insights into young Christian Indonesians as moral and sexual subjects. Despite the authors’ discussions of the roles of men, and male-dominated institutions such as the police force, in seeking to define and enforce gendered moralities, we note that there is a distinct imbalance in this issue in the greater attention it pays to women. This asymmetry is partly indicative of the higher visibility of public efforts to define and discipline the morality of Indonesian women, as well as the positioning of women in Indonesia as symbols of morality (Pausaker, 2015). We note that there continues to be a dearth of research into Indonesian men’s experiences of and engagement with moralities, and how moralities are enmeshed with masculinities and male sexualities in the reformasi era.

In addition to the close attention paid to investigating morality and its intersections with sexuality and gender, a number of key thematic strands run through the articles, which are useful to outline for orienting the reader to the contributions of this issue in expanding conceptualisations of morality in the contemporary Indonesian context. These thematic strands include discussions of morality and boundaries, moral threats, and morality and subjectivity.

Morality and boundaries

The ways in which morality both functions to mark out boundaries, and operates in accordance with different boundaries, are teased out in this special issue. Both Platt (2018) and Davies (2018) explore how women’s morality, and the surveillance and/or protection of their morality, are conflated with state boundaries and national identity. Platt’s detailed consideration of the Indonesian state’s temporary moratorium on the migration of Indonesian women as foreign domestic workers uncovers a set of gender-specific moralities – simultaneously directed at women. Her analysis traces how women’s migration is “inflected by a nationalist form of morality”, as the protection of women migrants abroad has become conflated with the dignity and pride of the Indonesian state in public discourse. Thus, Indonesia’s regulation of women who literally transgress national borders has become an increasingly moral-laden project. Platt’s critique of how gendered moralities operate between and across borders also highlights how women migrants must negotiate “domesticated moralities”, where physically co-located motherhood in the domestic sphere is prioritised. She articulates that the moral threat is perceived as stemming from women’s increased mobility, and that the potential for greater sexual autonomy (read as immoral) is assumed to be a consequence of this expanding mobility. Platt also notes how dominant forms of domesticated morality can be invoked to depict transnational mothers, who travel across borders to work, as morally complicit in the neglect of “left-behind” children, when such children encounter adversity.

Davies (2018) delves into highly gendered moralities that are undeniably centred on women’s bodies as moral sites, and deploys the concept of “bio-borders” to analyse state control over female bodies and morality. Her critique of compulsory virginity testing for unmarried female police recruits leaves us in no doubt that the female body, and the hymen in particular, is seen as a delineating boundary between moral and immoral women. Again, women are positioned as symbolic of the morality of the larger body corporate – in this case the body corporate of the police force, whose boundaries refuse entry to women who fail to maintain virginity prior to marriage. Davies juxtaposes the competing perspectives on this form of morality testing, including medical views, human rights views, official police views and the ambivalence of Indonesian policewomen themselves. The ambivalence of policewomen towards this procedure, which they clearly experience as unpleasant, reflects the extraordinary influence of dominant moral projects on the subjectivities of individuals.

Interrogating the relationship between morality and public/private boundaries has also proved fertile ground for our contributors. Savitri Hartono (2018) guides us through recent Islamic debate in Indonesia on the potential immorality of social media in the form of Facebook. Here the potential for private or intimate matters to become public, and in doing so threaten the stability of Indonesian marriages, is raised. The threat of breaching the boundaries of privacy has been perceived by some as a potential moral threat to Muslim society. Ultimately Savitri Hartono contrasts the moral concerns of male Islamic scholars, who raised opposition to the corrupting potential of Facebook, with the everyday practices of Indonesian Muslim women who use Facebook as a public expression of their religious piety. In this sense, her work makes a key contribution to unveiling the multiplicity of voices seeking to define morality and moral practices within the spectrum of contemporary Indonesian Islam.

The salience of public/private boundaries in defining moral versus immoral behaviour is also highlighted by Spagnoletti et al. (2018) in their exploration of how breastfeeding mothers in Yogyakarta negotiate increasing resistance to breastfeeding in public. Spagnoletti et al. (p. 31) identify how the “body of the breastfeeding woman transgresses the boundaries and ideals between the maternal body and the sexual body”, and that this partly feeds a collective moral panic about the public exposure of breasts in the Indonesian context. These authors assert that Indonesian women’s right to expect the provision of comfortable, private and clean breastfeeding spaces is a fundamental prerequisite to meeting what is constructed as their “moral obligation” to exclusively breastfeed for six months.

Moral threats

The construction and deployment of moral threats is another theme intertwined in the five articles, one that plays out on multiple levels, from interpersonal relationships, to institutional norms, up to the level of transnational politics. Different authors offer us detailed insights into how particular moral threats position specific actors as at risk of moral dangers, as responsible for creating or enhancing moral threats, and as being responsible for protecting the vulnerable against moral threats.

In terms of discourses of protectionism the articles in this issue illustrate how the Indonesian state occupies a pivotal position as “defender” of Indonesian women against both internal and external moral threats. Platt (2018) names the moral threats identified by the state that female domestic workers are assumed to encounter through their migration and employment abroad. These threats include the threat of physical and sexual abuse, and exploitation and detainment by foreign employers. Less explicit in state rhetoric, but still prominent in popular discourse, is the threat of moral corruption that women are likely to encounter with increased mobility, income and the removal of the moral surveillance provided by their left-behind families and communities. Platt notes the gap between the moral panic that led to a temporary moratorium on sending female domestic workers abroad, and any concrete state action to protect women such as negotiating international agreements aimed at ensuring better working conditions and rights abroad. In doing so, she provides a key example of how moral panics are often temporary in nature, and while the impact may be felt keenly in the short term, long-term structural changes are rarely built on the back of such moral panics.

Davies (2018) identifies how autonomous female sexuality, and most explicitly female sexual activity prior to marriage, is constructed as a potential internal moral threat that could corrupt the police force from within. The construction of sexually experienced women, as opposed to virgins, as a major threat to the morality of the police force is deeply ironic. It conveys women’s untamed sexuality as extremely dangerous, thus in a sense, attributing a great deal of potentially corrupting power to women. In this light, the insistence on virginity testing for female police recruits can be read as a reaction to the fear of female sexuality, albeit a somewhat irrational one. As virginity is only a prerequisite for female police recruits, and not male recruits, it is women who are placed at the centre of this moral threat and made responsible for mitigating it on behalf of the police force.

Spagnoletti et al. (2018) reveal how the moralised rhetoric of popular breastfeeding promotions represents women’s failure in their moral obligation to exclusively breastfeed as a direct threat to the development and health of infants and toddlers. Moreover, this moral failure on the part of mothers is further interpreted by breastfeeding advocates as an ongoing lifelong threat to children who are not breastfed, who if we are to believe this moral rhetoric are more likely to engage in drug use and other socially transgressive behaviours. In this moral dynamic, mothers are situated as “the moral guardians of their children’s future”, and the moral failure of women who do not (or cannot) breastfeed is directly linked with the moral risks for their children. The careful social construction of this particular moral threat, and the authors’ convincing deconstruction of the moral discourses currently surrounding exclusive breastfeeding, provide another example of how this special issue exposes the extraordinary significance of gender ideals in fashioning and deploying moralities in Indonesian society.

In Savitri Hartono’s (2018) exploration of Facebook as a medium with ambivalent moral potential, she reveals how particular threats to Islamic morality are projected onto the medium of Facebook. Longstanding Islamic traditions of avoiding behaviour that is considered haram, or believed to be likely to invoke immoral behaviour, are refashioned in the objections of conservative Islamic scholars cited by Savitri Hartono. Her analysis reveals both the continuity and the recycling of moral threats propagated by religious conservatives. In particular, the threats of fitnah (dissension) and ghibah (slander), and violating the privacy of marriage are understood as moral threats to be avoided by pious Muslims. In addition to Savitri Hartono’s description of the progressive use of Facebook by communities of Indonesian Muslim women to affirm their faith, the official response of Nahdlatul Ulama (The Indonesian Council of Islamic Scholars) that Facebook itself does not pose a moral threat is particularly impressive. This is impressive because the response distinguishes between a person’s actual moral behaviour and the medium through which such behaviour is enacted, and does not seek to restrict freedom to communicate via social media in the name of a moral threat that cannot be controlled.

Wijaya Mulya (2018) zeroes in on young people’s internalisations and negotiations of the moral threat to the individual in the form of sin. His work with young Christian Indonesians offers an important perspective from which to think through the significance of religion in shaping perceived moral threats. He reveals how the very act of being sexually active, or even acknowledging one’s sexual desire, is interpreted as a dire moral threat for young Indonesians outside the context of marriage. While he identifies the inherent moral dilemma for young people created by a rigid moral dichotomy that insists premarital abstinence is the only valid path to avoiding immorality, he also opens a new dialogue that moves beyond this dichotomy. In a nuanced exploration of how young people negotiate the moral threat of premarital sexuality, his article reveals several alternative possibilities for thinking about sex among his young informants, including casting off religion, reinterpreting religious morality and practising a double morality. He makes a crucial contribution to acknowledging and theorising the sexual agency of young Christian Indonesians, and firmly acknowledges sexually active young people as moral subjects in their own right.

Morality and subjectivities

Contributions to this issue explicitly privilege the interrogation of morality as it is lived and internalised in the personal subjectivities of Indonesians. This attention to the ways in which sexual and gendered subjectivities are formed through particular moral lenses challenges the assumption that morality necessarily operates in a top-down fashion, and acknowledges a variety of ways in which Indonesians can and do exercise agency in enacting their own moral subjectivities. Both Spagnoletti et al. and Savitri Hartono explore maternal subjectivities and how they are aligned with morality. Savitri Hartono (2017) identifies how her informants are actively pursuing specific forms of subjectivity as both mothers and Muslims, by sharing on Facebook their views and experiences of what constitutes appropriate mothering for Muslim women, which is infused with their roles as the moral teachers of their children. Spagnoletti et al. (2018) explore how the moral discourses that surround and promote the imperative of exclusive breastfeeding can create a struggle for women in achieving maternal subjectivities that are both personally and socially acceptable. This contribution illuminates the need to consider how morality discourses embedded in state policy and health promotion messages can impact both negatively and positively on women’s subjectivity. The authors conclude that less moralising and more informative and supportive breastfeeding messages and education are needed so that women who encounter difficulties breastfeeding do not necessarily experience themselves as subjective moral failures.

Discussions of female subjectivity in this special issue also engage with the issue of veiling, a key site of moral contestation over women’s bodies and rights in many Muslim societies. Contributions by Savitri Hartono and Davies respectively address how women’s rights to choose to veil, and to exercise agency through a presentation of self, both represent an explicit Muslim subjectivity. Savitri Hartono (2018) shows how the unmediated space of Facebook, which is not overtly censored by the state, provides a public forum for women to support and encourage each other in choosing to veil. Alternatively, Davies (2018) teases out the conflict between the state’s interest in maintaining the semblance of secularism, and policewomen’s individual rights and desires to enact their personal subjectivity as Muslims by veiling while on duty. She asserts that Indonesian policewomen ultimately won their fight to veil at work precisely because the guarding of their modesty in public (via veiling) was widely accepted as morally legitimate.

The fashioning of Christian youth sexual subjectivities is a theme central to Wijaya Mulya’s contribution. He traces the various influences in Indonesian popular culture and Christianity that urge Indonesian youth to “take up a moral subject position”. Drawing on Foucault, Wijaya Mulya (2018) asserts that despite the dominance of moral discourses that seek to promote abstinence among youth, these discourses of sexual morality in fact do not take effect until they are taken up by individuals. His reading of youth narratives on the sexual self reveals both resistance and agency in the formation of alternative sexual subjectivities that do not conform to the dominant moral paradigm. He concludes that the dominant discourse of youth sexual morality in Indonesia “is not monolithic or uncontested – it has cracks and fissures – and Indonesian youth are not docile subjects” (2018, p. 13). A wider acknowledgment of Indonesian youth as active sexual subjects is indeed necessary for the formal recognition and promotion of young people’s reproductive and sexual rights in a manner that includes them as key agents in defining and pursuing those rights.

In her analysis of the self-perceptions of Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore, Platt (2018) identifies how these women construct different moral categories for themselves and their peers. She identifies the possibility of new moral subjectivities that resist existing stereotypes that label domestic workers either as (immoral) party girls who fall prey to consumerism and pleasure, or as (immoral) neglectful mothers who leave their children behind in the pursuit of economic gain. The alternative moral subjectivity that her informants describe involves having “economic smarts” through earning and saving rather than consumption, and delaying relationships and motherhood until one feels fully prepared. This new subjectivity appears to embody desire, restraint and intention as markers of morality, demonstrating the dynamism of intersections of subjectivity and morality.

Concluding Remarks – The Heightened Currency of Morality

Taken together, the contributions in this special issue demonstrate the historical specificity of recent morality agendas in Indonesia and establish that morality debates have been a key trope of post-reformasi Indonesia. Democratisation, along with the social, economic and technological changes brought about by late modernity, has meant that the technologies used in moralising projects have become more nuanced and layered. By technologies here we are thinking of technologies as including both knowledge and machinery. The technologies, or “machinery of moralisation” as we might call them, have become all the more complex and pervasive in people’s lives via social media and through people gaining ideas of transnational lives involved in migration. Other machineries of moralisation are seen through old and new iterations of gender ideologies. These ideologies are either reinforced (for instance, through the gendered lens of the police or through breastfeeding education) or negotiated through moral binaries, for instance those espoused by Christianity. Indeed, it is important to stress here that while most work and focus on morality revolves around Islam, Christianity also has its own particular moralising projects. Decentralisation has also enabled provinces to implement highly restrictive laws that have not yet passed at a national level. For instance, various provinces have made both prostitution and homosexuality illegal.

The five articles in this issue trace both the continuities and key departure points in dominant moral agendas, revealing the dynamism of moral debates. Collectively, the authors have advanced thinking in the Indonesian context on how moral boundaries are being defined and policed, on how moral threats are being named and resisted, and on how moral subjectivities are formed and reformed in response to society. We believe that these contributions demonstrate that morality projects concerned with defining and disciplining gender and sexuality have become more intensive and more visible in the public domain than they were during the New Order period. This increased focus on morality is not to suggest that the focus of the debate is entirely new; as the contributions show, enduring moral dilemmas have cast a long shadow over new and emerging contestations around gender and sexuality in Indonesia. What appears to be different in this era is the heightened currency that moral debates have been given in public spaces, in formal politics, in government institutions and processes, and in the everyday lives of Indonesians.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Despite the moral downfall of President Suharto, there was a national outpouring of grief upon his death in 2008. Furthermore, the popularity of his son-in-law, General Probowo Subianto, who was a key contender in the 2014 presidential election, underscores the nation’s ability to forget the moral implications of Suharto’s rule. This complexity around the morality of political leaders is all the more apparent given that Probowo himself was ousted from office at the beginning of the reformasi period in 1998 and was suspected of involvement in the killing of political dissidents in the lead-up to the fall of Suharto’s government (Mydans, 1998).