Papers by carla jones
Culture and Religion, 2011
Book review
Journal Articles by carla jones
In the past fifteen years, urban Indonesian women have increasingly chosen to adopt a form of Isl... more In the past fifteen years, urban Indonesian women have increasingly chosen to adopt a form of Islamic dress called busana Muslim. This shift could be read as an index of two apparently contradictory or mutually exclusive phenomena, a rise in Islamic piety and a rise in consumerism. This article suggests that rather than reducing the popularity of Islamic fashion in contemporary Indonesia to either religion or consumerism, the rise of Islamic fashion should be understood within a context of national debates about modernity and piety. Through a consideration of Islamic fashion as commodity fetish, I argue that the commodification
abstract By attending to ways in which middle-class wives in Yogyakarta, Java, describe negotiati... more abstract By attending to ways in which middle-class wives in Yogyakarta, Java, describe negotiating sentiments among family members (including children, maids and husbands), this article argues that domestic relations in middle-class homes in Java have been importantly inflected by state rhetoric on gender propriety and market ideas of work. As a result, both middle-class women and maids have come to conceive of emotion work as part of an array of domestic obligations central to social reproduction.
Much current scholarship on South East Asia emphasizes political and economic changes in the regi... more Much current scholarship on South East Asia emphasizes political and economic changes in the region. Three new books argue that these changes are also fundamentally about gender, gendered anxieties and gendered convictions. Focusing on different historical spans and different disciplinary lenses, these books contribute to a literature on gender in South East Asia that has informed analyses about gender more broadly, reminding us of the value of the region for debates about global gender studies. Similarly, these authors link the apparently private world of gendered identities and intimate life to the stakes of public political concerns. Each of these books in its own way shows how states, religious communities and activists share and (re)produce a key assumption: that gender matters. In Gender Pluralism, anthropologist Michael Peletz situates questions about how gender diversity can be both admired and stigmatized within a deeper history and on a broader regional scale than most ethnographies. He reveals the transformation of South East Asian societies, mainland and insular, from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. He argues that in that span many of the transgressive gender identities in the region have gone from being religiously and ritually prestigious to marginalized and stigmatized, but not following as simple a route as this might suggest. A key means by which Peletz shows this transformation is through close attention to household formations, kinship patterns and changing notions of rights in marriage. His primary concern is with pluralism, not as tolerance (which can be patronizing) but as legitimacy. He is careful to differentiate pluralism from dualism, the latter risking a (hetero-) normative dyadic view of gendered identity and sexual practices. Peletz traces the arrival of Christian missionizing, colonial bureaucracies and post-colonial governance that have generated contemporary and twinned processes:
The recent and highly visible rise of Islamic consumer culture in contemporary urban Indonesia is... more The recent and highly visible rise of Islamic consumer culture in contemporary urban Indonesia is a source of both pleasure and anxiety for many Indonesians, figuring in debates about the appeal of a new piety there in the past decade. At the center of these debates is the image of the piously dressed woman. Simultaneously a consumer and a sign of piety, modest yet attractive, she seems to blur assumptions about the boundaries between image and substance, and in so doing generates anxiety. A booming Islamic fashion industry and Islamic fashion media traffic in this space, turning virtue into value and vice versa by deploying the image of the pious feminine to incite consumer desire while denying accusations that this is simply capitalism with a religious face. Based on research and interviews with the editorial staff of one Islamic fashion magazine, NooR, this article traces how Indonesia's rising Islamic fashion industry and lifestyle media have placed women at the center of broader cultural debates about the relationship between devotion and consumption.
Through analysis of an increasingly popular phenomenon of courses training feminine comportment i... more Through analysis of an increasingly popular phenomenon of courses training feminine comportment in Indonesia, I argue in this article that the appeal and work of femininity can be analyzed as a form of what Timothy Mitchell has called the " rule of experts. " Building on Mitchell, I suggest that expertise is central to authoritarian projects and postauthoritarian aftermath and is especially evident in zones that masquerade as least public and yet most self-evident. As a result, expertise gains its value from the conditions it claims to alleviate. Placing gender at the center of the analytical frame reveals these effects more clearly and can potentially expose the ideological contradictions that ground their allure.
Islamic consumption promises to correct the ills of consumption yet relies on the logic of consum... more Islamic consumption promises to correct the ills of consumption yet relies on the logic of consumption for its appeal. Fashionably pious women in Indonesia have become figures of concern, suspected of being more invested in the material, and hence superficial, world than their virtuous appearances suggest. Arguing that consumption and religion are interdependent systems of faith, I show that women bear unusual semiotic burdens at the borders of materiality and piety. This approach reveals how pious Indonesian women must frame acts of pious consumption as disavowals of consumption and as expressions of beauty and modesty.
Books and Edited Collections by carla jones
When Hong Kong entrepreneur David Tang opened his Shanghai Tang boutique on New York's Madison Av... more When Hong Kong entrepreneur David Tang opened his Shanghai Tang boutique on New York's Madison Avenue, it was not an isolated example of the globalization of Asian fashion. Further evidence is written on the labels in our closets, and paraded in the form of salwaar-kameez and silk sarongs by the rich and famous of London. The phenomenon merits scrutiny. This vanguard attempt points to the colonial era as the origin of fashion globalization, and describes its development as paralleling the gradual take-over of Asian daily wear by Western dress. From indigenous Batak weavers to Hong Kong designers, and from Indonesian businesswomen's power suits to Korean feminists' national costume, this book explores the sartorial interface of East and West.The globalization of Asian dress needs to be understood as part of an ongoing Orientalism that construes Asia as a feminine Other to the masculine West. The conventional Orientalist definition of fashion as an exclusively Western phenomenon has proved self-fulfilling in both East and West so that the conceptual boundary between the two is continually reasserted by design. Paying close attention to Asians' decisions about what clothing to make, sell, buy, and wear, the case studies in this book challenge Orientalist stereotypes of Asian style as passive and traditional and highlight how these actions are often made invisible by global cultural, rhetorical, and material practices that feminize Asia and the fashion world. This timely book will be of interest to dress and fashion theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, art historians and all those interested in globalization, Orientalism and their effects.
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Papers by carla jones
Journal Articles by carla jones
Books and Edited Collections by carla jones