Engendering Justice: Dismantling Essentialisms of Gender and Sexual Violence in Yogyakarta

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.