Engendering Justice: Dismantling Essentialisms of Gender and Sexual Violence in Yogyakarta
At the Center: Feminism, Social Science and Knowledge
ISBN: 978-1-78560-079-1, eISBN: 978-1-78560-078-4
Publication date: 21 August 2015
Abstract
Purpose
This chapter critically analyzes the disparity between presumptive theoretical and technical development literatures and local ways of inhabiting gender and conceptualizing justice in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. This study explores local understandings of sexual violence, gender, and justice to capture a picture of gender, victimhood, and agency that destabilizes hegemonic global narratives of widespread violence and oppression.
Research implications
Dominant academic and policy literatures often rely on universalized framings of gender, sexual violence, and justice. Broader critiques of Western presuppositions regarding the lived realities of women’s experiences are necessary to bridge the gap between representation and reality.
Practical implications
Without understanding the lives and experiences of women like those in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, imported programs to improve women’s “access to justice” and to “empower” women fail to render an inclusive justice and, ironically, reinforce essentialized conceptions of gender that are themselves an obstacle to women’s empowerment.
Social implications
The danger of perpetuating hollow myths of oppression and suffering necessitates a re-evaluation of how scholars and development professionals capture the complexity of gender, sexual violence, and conceptions of justice in Indonesia, as well as other countries in the Global South.
Originality/value
This study builds on existing critical literature to problematize global assumptions about sexual violence, and emphasizes how essentialized representations of the feminine as fixed and universally oppressed silence the myriad voices of women of Yogyakarta.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
My wholehearted thanks to Dr Leslie Dwyer, for her guidance, patience, and belief through every stage of this process of discovery, and for inspiring me to fully immerse myself in Yogyakarta. This written work could not exist without the love and nourishment of my family, and the intellectual community of colleagues and professors at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.
Citation
Peck, A.J. (2015), "Engendering Justice: Dismantling Essentialisms of Gender and Sexual Violence in Yogyakarta", At the Center: Feminism, Social Science and Knowledge (Advances in Gender Research, Vol. 20), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 151-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620150000020018
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015 Emerald Group Publishing Limited