Pious Girls: Young Muslim Women in Indonesia

My aim is to point to the different forms female political participation may take and draw our attention to the entanglement between religious practice, market logics, and political life in which these young Muslim women are active participants. Instead of saying that they are victims of conservative doctrines or heroes of progressive dreams, I propose that we really investigate how they have reconfigured young womanhood, recoded the idea of being political, and reinterpreted young women’s citizenship. Although they are rarely included in the political discussions among elites, this new subjectivity represents young Indonesian women’s view of the self and the world around them: a view that can be mobilized during peak political events such as elections; a view that also becomes the foundations of their daily conduct. The pious feminine subjects, I argue, are important political actors who have shifted many of the intimate details of the everyday lives of young women with religious, economic, and sociocultural aspirations that feed the larger changes in Indonesia. This makes them worthy of examination