State Power and Women's 'Involuntary Voluntary' Labor in Indonesian Development

Women’s bodies have been widely used as a tool and engine of economic development across a variety of political and economic systems. The New Order regime of President Suharto (1966-1998) presents particularly compelling... [ view full abstract ]

Women’s bodies have been widely used as a tool and engine of economic development across a variety of political and economic systems. The New Order regime of President Suharto (1966-1998) presents particularly compelling evidence of how gendered coercion has driven the alliance of capitalist and post-colonial authoritarian development projects.  The New Order came into existence with the violent overthrow (and CIA assistance) of founding President Sukarno in the name of combatting communism and advancing capitalist driven development. The violence and atrocities perpetrated in establishing the New Order are fairly well documented if generally ignored.  Less well-known is how women were attacked and vilified in the effort.  Building on the work of Saskia Wieringa and others, we document how women’s support and bodies were systematically conscripted into New Order politics and policies through official ideology and state sponsored organizations that created “involuntary voluntary” systems of women’s labor. Elements of traditional culture were refashioned into a hegemonic ideology that dictated the parameters of women’s participation in nation building through  top down directives that dictated women’s place in society that were applied in highly contradictory ways but always to advance the development project. 

These ideas, programs, and activities were promulgated by the New Order as an explicit source of development and were very much implicated in buttressing the crony capitalism that prevailed during the Suharto regime. With the overthrow of the New Order in a relatively “soft” revolution, new options and opportunities competed with the older coercive forms of control.  It also gave expression to the contradictions in the former system, including the presumably unintended consequences of the emergence of women leaders whose experience and training came from their forced participation in the “old” New Order mandated activities. We hypothesize that women’s social capital and organizational experience, initially a byproduct of patriarchal state development and pacification policies, are increasingly manifested in new forms of women’s participation.