Patterns of resistance and transgression in Eastern Indonesia: single women's practices of clandestine courtship and cohabitation.
This paper explores how single women in the regional Indonesian city of Mataram express sexual desire in a social, cultural and political climate that idealizes the confinement of female sexuality within marriage. It is based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with single women, their families and health care providers. Success for young women in negotiating sexual desire is dependent upon their ability to maintain a faultless public reputation and mediate between their desires and those of men. Many single women find ways to pursue their desires by bending the rules of courtship conventions, performing sexual purity in public, while resisting from within the hegemonic sexual culture. However, women who visibly transgress dominant sexual ideals (and in doing so offend the status quo) are stigmatized and ostracized. Single women's practice of resistance and sexual transgression in premarital relationships are represented using the examples of pacaran backstreet (clandestine courtship) and cohabitation prior to marriage.
Bennett
Linda Rae
LR
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. L.Bennett@latrobe.edu.au
D003380:Courtship; D003466:Cultural Characteristics; D005195:Family Relations; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007214:Indonesia; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D033262:Narration; D012747:Sexual Partners; D012847:Single Person; D014933:Women's Rights