Teoría de la Personalidad

In this section, I provide a brief overview of Indonesia’s official gender order and its hegemonic masculinity. While acknowledging Indonesia’s diversity, I shall demonstrate that there is a macro level patterning of gender relations which is sanctioned by the state and major cultural institutions in Indonesia. Understanding the social construction of Indonesia’s gender order will help map the crisis tendencies born within each of the structures of gender relations. I argue that Indonesia’s gender order is discursively constructed in a familial model which guarantees the dominant position of men who espouse bapakism, the subordination of women and other men adopting subordinated

masculinities.

Indonesian studies scholars generally agree that ‘the family principle’ was vital in the consolidation and sustenance of the New Order. According to David Reeve (1985: 359), there was no theme more frequently articulated by the regime’s leader, Soeharto, than ‘the family principle’ in addition to Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution.2 The family principle was an ideal used to create an organic unity of state and society which fostered harmony and consensus, rather than open debate and majority decision making (Reid 1998: 25). David Bourchier and Vedi Hadiz (2003) use the term

‘organicism’ to refer to this official New Order ideology. They argue that ‘Soeharto and many of his closest political allies promoted the idea that authority within the

Indonesian state should reflect the patterns found within traditional families and orderly village societies’ (2003: 8).

2 _{In Indonesia, the principle is known as azas kekeluargaan.}

Chapter 2. A Gender-Order Crisis

This family principle is inseparable from the idea of centralised power, as was prevalent in Javanese culture (Anderson 2007). It was partly reflected in the ‘steeply- ascending pyramid’ political structure of the New Order, in which the apex was dominated by the presidency (Liddle 1985: 71). The presidency, the centre of the oligarchic network of state leadership, linked and oversaw all key institutions and state management, including policy making, resource mobilisations and security

(Suryakusuma 2011: 5). The legitimised centrality of presidential power thus rejected the standard elements of liberal constitutionalism, including the separation of state power and individual rights, and eventually sustained the reign of the New Order for more than three decades.

The intimate trope of family also provided the basis in the fashioning of the official gender order under the New Order. The principle is both hierarchical and gendered. Michael van Langenberg (1986) and Saya Shiraishi (1997) agree that this principle has naturalised the authority of the male leader of the family, in a unit as small as a nuclear family, to a larger one such as the nation. In fact, the principle is based on the paternalistic relationship in the kawala-gusti (Javanese for patron–client) model; a

family state with the ‘wise father, the caring mother, and their children who know their places, duties and responsibilities’ (Shiraishi 1997: 84). The father figure, in this patterning of the family, becomes the natural leader of the family, under whose

authority other members are subject. The regime shaped the gender order in such a way partly for the sake of legitimising its grip on state power (K. Robinson 1998: 67). The regime devised itself with state policies and programs which enshrined men’s authority and leadership status as well as women’s domestic roles. The policies include, for instance, the Marriage Law 1974, which is still valid. The law clearly stipulates that men are the leaders of the households and they are responsible for providing livelihood and protection for the members, while women are homemakers.

Evi Eliyanah

The valorisation of male authority within Indonesia’s official gender order produced bapakism as the hegemonic masculinity. Bapakism is a configuration of

gender practices, personality and culture, which legitimises men as authoritative patron leaders of the family collectivity. The ideal fits perfectly with the patriarchal gender order. According to Julia Suryakusuma, bapak, or literally father and protector,

connotes ‘the authoritarian, patron leader of the family collectivity’ (2011: 5). Bapakism

combines paternalistic and authoritarian masculinities. The paternalistic masculine ideal of the Javanese aristocrats, which also resonates with the colonial Dutch’s idealisation of the nuclear family, particularly informs the paternalistic features, while the

militaristic masculine ideal informs the authoritarian features of the configuration. The most common gender practices associated with this configuration include, but are not limited to, breadwinning, protecting, authoritative patron leadership and

heteronormativity. These gender practices are translated in various personalities, institutionalised in various cultural institutions and inscribed on the subjects’ bodies in particular ways that are not necessarily uniform across Indonesia. As I will discuss in the next section, bapakism was at the heart of New Order’s bureaucratic structure. Male

senior bureaucrats became patron leaders of official organisations of state employees, civilian and military. Bapakism became the culturally idealised configuration of

masculinity which embodied the most accepted strategy in the defence of ‘the refashioned gender order’ (K. Robinson 1998: 67).

The dialectic relations between the New Order and bapakism were also apparent.

Theoretically, R.W. Connell argues that ‘hegemony is likely to be established only if there is some correspondence between cultural ideal and institutional power, collective if not individual’ (2005: 77). The New Order’s state power was a resource used to raise

bapakism to the status of hegemony, and bapakism hegemonic masculinity was a

Chapter 2. A Gender-Order Crisis

New Order state ensured men’s position in the family collectivity. I have already mentioned men’s position as heads of households, guaranteed by the Indonesian marriage law. The law, legalised under the New Order, sanctions men’s superior position in relation to women in the household. This gender arrangement was also reflected in the state’s bureaucracy, where heads of state departments and bureaucratic offices, as well as local governments, generally male, were patrons to the official organisation of wives in their respective institutions, Dharma Wanita (Women’s

Duties). Members of Dharma Wanita were indoctrinated to become subordinate to their husbands; their main duty as bureaucrats’ wives was to support their husbands’ duties as state bureaucrats (Blackburn 2004: 152; Saroh and Hasan 2016; Suryakusuma 2011: 18–22). There is no male counterpart of this organisation. The male-dominated

bureaucracy and the official organisation of bureaucrats’ wives prove the New Order’s commitment in sustaining male supremacy, which eventually strengthened the

hegemonic position of bapakism.

Furthermore, in consolidating and sustaining its power, the New Order also benefited from the cultural exaltation of bapakism. For instance, hegemonic masculinity

supports the conventional gendered division of labour which relegates men to the public sphere where they become the family’s breadwinners, while women are relegated to the domestic sphere where they take care of the unpaid domestic and caring duties. Among the implications of this officially sanctioned gender relations of labour was the murky gender politics of the late 1960s, in which a progressive left-wing women’s

organisation, Gerwani, that was affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party, was purged following the transition of power from Soekarno to Soeharto’s New Order. The purge of Gerwani further resulted in the withdrawal of the mainstream Indonesian women’s movement from state politics to the conventional women’s domain—the home—leaving the politics to men (Katjasungkana and Wieringa 2003: 64). In the years

Evi Eliyanah

that followed, the New Order barely endorsed any women’s organisations which undermined its gender ideology. In short, the valorisation of bapakism and its

accompanying ibuism was at the heart of the birth of the power consolidation of the

New Order.

Certainly, I do not propose a reified image of bapakism. As much as its impact is

real and widespread across Indonesia, including in Papua (Munro 2017), bapakism is a

social construction which could be embodied by only a minor proportion of Indonesian men. Not all Indonesian men are able to be the main breadwinners of their families; not all Indonesian men can be patron leaders of family collectivities; and there are men who do not conform to heteronormative ideals. Indeed, bapakism is an ideal to which many

Indonesian men aspire. They are its ideal subjects and are complicit to its cultural exaltation. Many men have to negotiate the ideal with their living conditions. For instance, based on her ethnographic research in rural–poor areas in East Nusa Tenggara, Kathryn Robinson (2009: 16) underscores the reality of many poor men in the area. These men compromised their sense of masculinity by taking up domestic work, generally associated with women, in order to cope with their wives’ employment abroad. Yet, the men’s compromise does not necessarily mean fluidity in the structure of the gender relations of production between them and their wives. Although they were unable to perform the normative feature of hegemonic masculinity, these men were still legally and culturally considered to be the authoritative figures in the family

collectivity. It is them, rather than women, who were legally listed as the heads of the families. In such a case, as argued by Madelon Djajadiningrat-Niuwenhuis (1992), men retain the ultimate power in the gender relations. Thus, the hegemony of bapakism is

sustained. The women’s involvement in employment overseas was seen as part of their submission to their husbands and their defence of their husbands’ authority in the public sphere.

Chapter 2. A Gender-Order Crisis

Reflecting on the official gender order and the hegemony of bapakism, it makes

sense that the dominant representations of ideal masculinity in Indonesian cinema, as well as other popular-culture products during the New Order period, barely

problematises men’s roles as family breadwinners and leaders of households. Krishna Sen (1994), based on her study of the representations of women in Indonesian cinema, confirms that the emphasis on women’s domestic and reproductive roles eventually supported the idealisation of bapakism on screen. The hegemony of bapakism is

strongly depicted in state-sponsored propaganda films, such as Pengkhianatan

G30S/PKI (The Treachery of G30S/PKI, 1984, Arifin C. Noer). As Intan Paramaditha

has explained (2007), the father figures represented by the Indonesian revolution heroes are visual representations of superior authoritative patron leaders not only for their respective nuclear family but also for the nation.

The maturing of crisis tendencies in the structure of the gender