Page 80 - CONFERENCE BOOK OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GENDER, CULTURE AND SOCIETY (ICGCS) 2021

CONFERENCE PROGRAM AND ICGCS 2021

ABSTRACT BOOK

Gender, Language and Literature

Gender Hierarchy as A Colonial Legacy: a critical

view of Kartini as the symbol of Indonesia’s women

emancipation

Desi Dwi Prainti

Universitas Brawijaya

Studies related to gender in Indonesia are primarily (although not exclusively) related to

women’s emancipation or gender equality, men are seldom discussed, let alone

questioned—a dynamic that puts to one side the fact that in Indonesia, women do not
necessarily represent a subordinated, marginalised group in society in either the domestic

or the public domain. A visionary work written by Harsja W. Bachtiar (1990), entitled

Kartini and Her Role in Our Society, prompted a debate on the long-held belief in

women’s inferiority in Indonesian society. Writing in a specifically non-aggressive style,

Bachtiar critically addresses the position of Kartini, a prominent Indonesian nationalist

heroine from Java, stating: “Kartini’s role in fighting for women’s rights in our motherland

cannot be diminished and indeed we do not have to diminish it” (p. 59). Here, he

articulated a powerful critique regarding the national practice of using Kartini as a symbol

of women’s emancipation in Indonesia. He argued that Kartini was intentionally chosen

by the Dutch colonial administration to be exposed in order to give a certain impression

of what kind of job the Dutch colonial administration was doing in Indonesia. The way in
which gender is manifested in Indonesia as well as the example of Kartini both evidences

how colonialism invented and defined gender roles whilst denying the precolonial

conceptions of power both of Indonesian women and men. Women, both white and of

colour, were seen as the submissive inferior class in society, suggesting that colonised

women could only achieve emancipation with the help of the coloniser. Not only did this

function as a self-fulfilling prophecy—in which the colonisers fed their own orientalist

illusion of colonised women (Said, 1979)—it also functioned to sustain the colonisers’ vision

of their own superior masculine characteristics. Importantly, however, in order to do so,

the colonised needed to be feminised. Thus, colonialism not only defined what femininity

means in society, but it also secured the meaning of western masculinity itself. Therefore,

this paper is intended to offer different view in seeing gender hierarchy in Indonesia using
the example of Kartini as its example as well as other colonial practices in Indonesia.

Explaining how colonialism operates, Ann McClintock (1995) elaborated in her canonical

work Imperial Leather that there are three governing themes of western imperialism: the

transmission of white, male power through the control of colonised women; the

emergence of a new global order of cultural knowledge; and the imperial command of

commodity capital.

Keywords: gender hierarchy, colonialism, kartini

Short Biography:

Desi Dwi Prianti is an assistant professor in the communication department,

Universitas Brawijaya Indonesia. She also served as the director of Centre for

Culture and Frontier Studies, Universitas Brawijaya. She obtained her

philosophical doctorate on gender studies from Utrecht University, The

Netherlands. Her research interest covers the topic of media, gender, and cultural

studies. She also considered the postcolonial state of Indonesia society as a

significant factor in foregrounding Indonesia social dynamics. Her current

publication discusses the topics of masculinity, fatherhood, gender relations, as

well as the visual studies that all intertwined with the experience of being

colonized. Now she is also a researcher in the Gender Studies Group Universitas

Brawijaya as well as part of Atgender, The European Association for Gender

Research, Education and Documentation.
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