The Female Body as a Field of Power: Sexism and Performativity in Contemporary Indonesian Novels

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-613-0_33How to use a DOI?

Keywords

contemporary novel; female body; politics of sexism; performativity; subversion

Abstract

This study examines the female body as a field of power in contemporary Indonesian novels by analyzing how sexism operates through affective discourse, moral regulation, and reproductive control. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the research explores literary representations of the body as an ideological space where patriarchal norms are produced, negotiated, and challenged. The analysis reveals that sexism is not only articulated through overt violence, but also through romanticization, moral domestication, and biomedical intervention that naturalize women’s subordination. At the same time, the female body emerges as an active site of resistance, where performative gestures such as refusal, mobility, and deviation disrupt normative expectations surrounding femininity, love, and motherhood. These embodied practices transform bodily experience into a form of critical consciousness that contests patriarchal authority. The study concludes that the female body in contemporary Indonesian literature functions not merely as an object of domination, but as an epistemic space in which power relations are exposed and reconfigured through performative subversion.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Suarni Syam Saguni
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/04
TI  - The Female Body as a Field of Power: Sexism and Performativity in Contemporary Indonesian Novels
BT  - Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Linguistics and Cultural Studies (ICLC-6 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 415
EP  - 428
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-613-0_33
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-613-0_33
ID  - Saguni2026
ER  -