Papers

• Relearning Faith, Gender, and Selfhood through Researching Indonesian Muslim Women Influencers Annisa Laura Maretha Deakin University

  Researching Indonesian Muslim women influencers initially began as an inquiry into how Muslim women negotiate faith, gender, and religious authority through digital platforms. Yet sustained engagement with their narratives gradually turned the research process into an encounter with the researcher’s own memories, assumptions, and understandings of Muslim womanhood. This paper adopts an autoethnographic approach to examine how researching others can become a process of reflexive and transformative learning. Drawing on Mezirow’s theory of transformative learning, particularly frames of reference, critical reflection, and transformation by accretion, the paper traces this process through three interconnected experiences. First, critical inquiry, particularly through education, gradually brought taken-for-granted assumptions into question and opened them to reinterpretation. Second, accumulated encounters with different social, cultural, and religious contexts through mobility across countries expanded the frames of reference through which faith, gender, and Muslim womanhood could be understood. Third, sustained engagement with Indonesian Muslim women influencers transformed research itself into a continuing pedagogical encounter through which questions surrounding gender, religious interpretation, and everyday life could be revisited and reconfigured. Together, these processes demonstrate how transformation can develop gradually through accumulated experiences of critical reflection, cross-cultural encounters, and research engagement rather than through a single defining moment. The paper argues that researcher transformation can itself become a site of knowledge production. Autoethnographic reflexivity thus reveals research as a relational process in which producing knowledge about others can simultaneously involve continually relearning one’s own relationship with faith, gender, and selfhood.

• Narrating Gendered Violence of May 1998 Across Borders: Displacement and Chinese Indonesian Identity in Indonesian Women’s Diasporic Novels Endang Sartika The University of Queensland

  The gendered violence against predominantly Chinese Indonesian women during the May 1998 riots triggered widespread displacement and forced migration among Chinese Indonesian communities. Despite its historical significance, this violence remains deeply contested and persistently denied. In this context, literature emerges as a crucial cultural space through which silenced histories of gendered violence and displacement can be narrated and remembered across borders. This paper examines how Indonesian women writers in the diaspora narrate the gendered violence of May 1998 and reflect on their own identity. Focusing on Dewi Anggraeni’s My Pain, My Country (2017) and Yusiana Basuki’s The Yellow Dragon (2009), the paper analyses how narratives of violence become a means of narrating the self and articulating memory, belonging, and identity. Through close textual analysis, it highlights how gender, ethnicity, and displacement intersect in shaping the authors’ negotiation of Chinese Indonesian identity in the diaspora. The paper argues that the experience and memory of the May 1998 gendered violence prompted a process of self-reflection, while diasporic distance provided a critical space for this reflective work and enabled new forms of identity articulation. Although the violence of May 1998 forms a critical historical backdrop, these narratives extend beyond the documentation of trauma. Instead, they function as modes of self-narration through which the authors reflect on their fractured yet enduring attachment to Indonesia. Writing from afar enables a reflective re-engagement with the homeland, demonstrating that displacement does not erase attachment but rather reshapes it. This is reflected in the recurring return to Indonesian cultural symbols, language, and memory, as well as a persistent sense of longing for homeland. By situating these novels within debates on mobility and gendered violence, the paper shows how diasporic women’s writing functions as a site of identity negotiation across borders in the aftermath of political violence.

• Transnational Marriages and the Precarities of Family Life: A Decolonial Feminist Perspective Anna Rosita Knoebl Universität Passau

  This paper examines transnational marriages between Indonesian women and German men as sites where global inequalities, migration regimes, and gendered power relations intersect. Drawing on ethnographic engagement and activist work with Ruanita Indonesia, a digital collective supporting Indonesian women in Germany, the paper explores how domestic and relational violence is experienced within cross-border family formations.
  Transnational marriages are often framed as expressions of mobility and cosmopolitan intimacy. However, this paper argues that they also produce “precarities of family,” in which apparently stable familial arrangements are shaped by structural inequalities. Indonesian women in Germany frequently navigate intersecting forms of vulnerability, including legal dependence on residence status, limited access to linguistic and social resources, economic dependency, and exposure to racial and ethnic discrimination. These conditions may intensify their vulnerability to domestic violence and constrain possibilities for exit or protection. The paper adopts a decolonial feminist framework, drawing particularly on Françoise Vergès’ theorisation of violence as structurally embedded in colonial and contemporary global orders. From this perspective, domestic violence in transnational marriages cannot be reduced to individual pathology or private conflict. Rather, it is understood as an expression of broader historical and political structures, including colonial legacies, racialised migration governance, and gendered hierarchies that shape intimate relations across borders. Empirically, the paper situates Indonesian women’s experiences within existing scholarship on migrant vulnerability in Germany, highlighting the role of patriarchal norms (Bennett & Manderson, 2003), racialisation and psychosocial distress (Schröttle & Khelaifat, 2011), dependence on immigration status (Braun & Dinkelaker, 2021), language barriers (Knöbl, 2021), and institutional constraints within welfare and legal systems (Hagemann-White, 2019). By centring the lived experiences of Indonesian migrant women, the paper contributes to debates on transnational intimacy, migration, and decolonial feminist theory, while challenging Eurocentric framings of family, violence, and agency.

• Embodied Authority: Muslim Feminist Autoethnography and the Knowledge Practices of Female Ulama Arifah Millati Agustina Agustina University of Bonn

  As a female ulama cadre in the Rahima association (a non-governmental organization that focuses on upholding women’s rights from an Islamic perspective), I’ve met the Fatwa of Indonesian Female Ulama (KUPI) as manifesting in various forms of religious legal decisions that focus on gender justice, women’s experiences, and public welfare. These are formulated through a specific methodology based on women’s experiences, the state constitution, and Islamic values. This inclusive perspective shapes the authority of female ulama not as supreme rulers, but as partners in society in addressing religious and social issues. The Muslim feminist autoethnography approach offers a reflection of personal experiences with an Islamic feminist perspective to analyze issues of gender, religion, and culture. In this study, I focus on how female ulama in Indonesia construct, negotiate, and articulate their authority in society so that it is embodied in social movements such as; reading hadiths on equality; reading women’s fiqh using the KUPI methodology; becoming a reference in Islamic dormitories in terms of creating safe spaces; sexual education and actualizing explanations of classical manuscripts; the establishment of the authority of female ulama embodied in concrete actions is the reform of Islamic family law regulations in Indonesia regarding the age limit for marriage and the law on crimes of sexual violence No. 12 of 2022. In the context of the formation of authority, Maurice Merleau Ponty’s view on the phenomenology of the body (embodiment) provides a strong theoretical framework for viewing the authority of women scholars who are no longer only seen as textual-intellectual authority, but as an authority entrusted to the lived experience and experience of the women’s bodies themselves, (Ponti: 1955)

• Rebordering Aspirations: Indonesian Muslim Women’s Educational Mobility and the Making of Transnational Subjectivity Nor Ismah National University of Singapore

  This paper examines how Indonesian Muslim women pursuing doctoral education in Europe, the United States, and Australia reimagine their social worlds as they move across shifting cultural, political, and epistemic borders. While their experiences have often been narrated through developmentalist frames of mobility and empowerment, this paper shows that their trajectories illuminate broader transformations in Asian societies, particularly how gendered, religious, and educational aspirations are renegotiated within transnational circuits. Drawing on interviews and narratives from a recent anthology of women’s educational journeys titled Sekolahlah Tinggi-Tinggi (Study as High as You Can) (Jakarta 2025), the study explores how these students reconcile pesantren-based moral worlds with the individualism, productivity norms, and intellectual cultures of Western universities.
  The presentation addresses three questions: (1) How do these women negotiate gendered and religious expectations at home while adapting to Western academic institutions? (2) How does international study transform their perspectives toward Indonesia and Asia more broadly? (3) What new forms of transnational identity emerge from their mobility?
  The paper argues that these women’s educational journeys function as sites where Asia’s shifting social landscapes become visible. Their mobility destabilizes the notion that traditional religious milieus are incompatible with global academic aspirations; instead, it reveals how Islamic ethical sensibilities travel, adapt, and acquire new significance abroad. At the same time, their return gazes toward Indonesia reflect changing perceptions of family, community, and national futures.

Abstract

Keywords

• Chinese Indonesian identity
• Educational Mobility
• Embodied Authority
• Female Ulama
• Germany
• Indonesia
• Indonesian Muslim Women
• Indonesian women
• Indonesian women’s literature
• May 1998 violence
• Muslim Feminist
• Muslim womanhood
• Muslim women influencers
• Transnational Subjectivity
• Transnational marriages
• coloniality
• decolonial feminism
• diasporic women writing
• digital narratives
• domestic violence
• feminist autoethnography
• gendered norms
• gendered precarity
• gendered violence
• intersectionality
• migrant vulnerability
• migration regimes
• mobility
• piety
• researcher reflexivity
• transformative learning