Date: August 19, 2024 (Monday)
Time: 2:30–3:30 pm
Venue: Room 4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Speaker: Prof. Chiara Formichi
Chiara Formichi is Professor in Southeast Asian Studies and the H. Stanley Krusen Professor of World Religions at Cornell University, as she serves as Director of the Religious Studies Program. She has also held positions in Singapore (Asia Research Institute and Middle East Institute), the Netherlands (KITLV Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), Indonesia (Gadjah Mada University), and Hong Kong (City University of HK).
Abstract:
Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford University Press, 2025) proposes a decoupling of domestic work from the domestication of women in the context of Indonesia’s quest for modernity. I thus argue that Indonesian women understood, conceptualized, and engaged with putatively traditional domestic tasks as sites and means of gender and political emancipation as well as national progress, engaging in a variety of discursive frameworks which ranged from Islam to nutrition science.
Even while detailing the exploitative nature of women’s involvement in everyday care work, this analysis recovers the political nature and emancipatory, radical potential of such feminized work, which has too often been curtailed within the narratives and active policies of Indonesia’s hypermasculine regimes.
In this talk I delineate how I came to research women’s roles in the implementation of the public health campaigns promoted by the Dutch, Japanese, and National regimes between the 1910s and 1950s as a new vantage point to understand Indonesian Muslims’ aspirations and efforts to merge post/colonial modernity with so-called traditional values. As I map out the book’s narrative, including some salient threads and vignettes, I shall also sketch how this project has opened new lines of inquiry for future research.
All are welcome. For enquiries, please contact us at smlc@hku.hk
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