Engendering the Public Sphere

Engendering the Public Sphere: Globalization, Islam, and Women's Activism in Indonesia

Speaker: Rachel Rinaldo, Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco

Thursday, December 4, 2008
208N – Seminar Room, North House
Munk Centre For International Studies
1 Devonshire Place

Register online at http://webapp.mcis.utoronto.ca/EventDetails.aspx?eventid=7034

Indonesia's Islamic revival has coincided with democratization, an expanding middle class, and the growing involvement of women in many aspects of public life. Recently, divisive debates about issues like pornography, abortion, and polygamy have become distinct features of Indonesia's still-emerging public sphere. While women are often positioned as symbols in debates about moral behavior, pious Muslim women in Indonesia are increasingly active participants in these struggles over the future of the Indonesian nation-state. Their activism begs the question: how is it that just a decade after the fall of a secular military dictatorship Muslim women have gone from being politically marginalized to becoming legitimate actors in the public sphere? My research shows that global processes, including the Islamic revival, have helped to empower women in the Indonesian public sphere. Women activists draw on global discourses of Islam, as well as feminism, to construct and deploy their own moral visions of modernity and Indonesia's future. In this way,the global Islamic revival provides new possibilities for women's agency in the public sphere, including the opportunity for women to produce themselves as modern political subjects.

Dr. Rachel Rinaldo is a Kiriyama Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Pacific Rim, University of San Francisco. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago in 2007. She is currently working on a book about women, Islam, and the public sphere in Indonesia.