Whose Stress? Emotion Work in Middle-Class Javanese Homes

Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 2011

This study aims at understanding the emotional milieu of families of psychotic patients, focusing on the concept of expressed emotion (EE). A combination of ethnographic and clinical methodology was employed. During the fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, nine participants diagnosed as having first episode psychosis and their families were followed closely over the course of 1 year in their natural home setting. Through ongoing engagement with families, the researcher was able to gather data on the diversity of family responses to illness. Despite the fact that most families in this research could be considered to have low EE, ethnographic observation provided a more complex and nuanced picture of family relationships. This article discusses four issues concerning EE in relation to Javanese culture: the role of interpretation, the coexistence of criticism and warmth, the interpretation of boundary transgression, and the cultural concept of warmth and positive remark.

The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics, 2018

Gender Equality: International Journal of Child and Gender Studies, 2022

The decision for being migrant domestic workers among Indonesian mothers often creates a dilemmatic situation for them. On the one hand, they really want to secure and save their family's economy and support their children's education. However, on the other hand, leaving their children in the home country for a long period of time produces a guilty feeling; in fact, they are stigmatized as irresponsible and bad mothers. This article discusses how the experiences of transnational migration among Indonesian mothers for being domestic workers abroad contribute to diversify the meanings and practices of motherhood, including mother-child relations. In this study, ten participants were interviewed and asked how the transnational migration enables them to reconstruct the traditional norms, structures, patterns, and arrangements of motherhood. The studies on new motherhood among migrant mothers reveal two distinctive conceptualizations of motherhood and parenthood that center in the role of sending money and gifts, which are the emotionalization of money and the commodification of love. This article elaborates dynamic and heterogenous reasons of being engaged in the commodification and commercialization of love and care among transnational mothers. I argue that through their consumption practices and behavior, Indonesian migrant domestic workers re(produce), negotiate and maintain their personal, familial, and social relationships with their children and their society to fit their motherhood role into accepted social expectations due to their physical absence.

"The author recounts an episode from her ethnographic research in Tana Toraja, Sulawesi, Indonesia, when she was obliged to shed her comfortably familiar ‘fieldworker’ role and stray from a pre-plotted research agenda into emotionally-charged terrain. She explores the serendipitous insights that can emerge only when the classic division between the realm of research and one’s private life is muddied. By recounting some Toraja responses to the news of her impending divorce, the author examines the unexpected and occasionally destabilising understandings that emerge from these personal exchanges. The unanticipated insights concern both Toraja and American conceptions of marriage and its unravelling, and evoke visceral appreciation for the vulnerabilities inherent in violating the borders of acceptable anthropological genres. The story shared here seeks to explore the ways cultural knowledge can derive from a personally revealing approach to fieldwork, embracing rather than fleeing the research side-roads opened up by emotional challenges."

Women's Studies International Forum, 2014

a r t i c l e i n f o s y n o p s i s Available online xxxx This paper argues for an understanding of domestic work as affective labor. It engages with the affective quality of reproductive labor by interrogating the organization of paid and unpaid domestic work in private households. Thus, while it attends to debates on emotional labor, its main focus is on the affective dimension of the social. It does so by focusing on reproductive labor, in particular, domestic work and developing a feminist critique of affective labor through the analysis of the cultural predication of feelings associated with and infused in domestic work. In this regard, the cultural predication prescribing the social meaning attached to domestic work will be explored within the framework of feminization and coloniality. Thus, domestic work will be discussed as affective labor surfacing at the juncture of feminization and coloniality. Following this argument, the article firstly engages with feminist analyses on reproductive labor, feminization and domestic work. Secondly, it looks at private households and affective labor. Thirdly, it examines the relationship between paid domestic work and migration regimes from the angle of the coloniality of labor. Using these insights, the article explores the sensorial corporeality of racialized affect negotiated in and around domestic work. It concludes by arguing for a conceptualization of domestic work as affective labor.

IKAT: The Indonesian Journal of Indonesian Studies, 2021

Most studies on female migrants as money earners claim that this new context of labor exhibits two distinct realms of either the commodification of love and care or the expression of care where money and emotion intertwine in maintaining family relationships and in creating reciprocity and exchange. I explore different modes of using money and gifts in addition to the major framework of economization of emotion and the emotionalization of money. I differentiate the gifts from money as it refers to non-cash gifts or inkind gifts. This paper investigates other cultural contexts and social-political dynamics that possibly induce the construction of different roles of money and gifts. It assesses the kinship strategies and mechanisms female migrants, and their stayed-behind children develop in response to physical separation by sending money and gifts and their resistance to the state's dominant version of the family and money. This paper elaborates how money and gifts connect to women's identity as transnational mothers to redefine their parenting roles as main economic providers and their identity as transnational family members. It has some bearing on creating a new identity as women that might be not akin to the state's gender politics and the politics of family as well as state maternalism. The study interrogates how sending and receiving money and gifts in a transnational family engenders transformation in the construction of the family and motherhood. I analyze how the practice of sending money and gifts challenges the state's politics of traditional family and gender by examining how sending money and gifts frequently gains legitimacy with the migrant mothers' claim of having a good family even though they do not adhere to traditional family norms.

Rainbow : Journal of Literature, Linguistics and Culture Studies

The characters of a Javanese husband and wife in films are often presented with gender stereotypes, such as Angayani (Providing for Family) for husbands and Manak (Giving and Caring for Children) for wives. This article aims to show the gender stereotypes of a husband and a wife in a modern Javanese nuclear family in film Mudik (2020) by Adriyanto Dewo. Gender stereotypes are established values that have been socialized through the concepts of Dadi Wong (Being a successful person) and Durung Tutug, Jowo, or Rampung (Being an unsuccessful person) in Javanese society. Those who successfully meet these values will be included in Dadi Wong category, but if they are not able to, they will be classified in Durung Tutug, Jowo, or Rampung category. This study uses narratology as an analytical method which is elaborated with the theory of gender performativity and power relations. The results of this study indicate that the representation of the husband in this film is considered unable to f...

The aim of this study is to find out differences in work-family conflict among working mother that come from difference ethnic background. This assumption comes from the characteristics in Indonesia that have many ethnic backgrounds, which is, that ethnic background has different kinship system. Theoretically, kinship system consists of patrilineal, matrilineal and bilateral. In each of kinship system represent by Tionghoa, Minangkabau and Javanese. We assume that kinship systems that adopted by each ethnic will influence how working mothers adapt with their role at home and work. Our respondents are 30 for Tionghoa working mother, 42 for Minangkabau working mother and 40 for Javanese working mother. The result shows that there are no differences for work – family conflict between those ethnic backgrounds. It is interesting because it will generate new question about the rule and any system that hold by an ethnic in Indonesia and that influence to work-family conflict and any aspect of life for Indonesian people in general.

2009

2008, xi þ 217 pp., £85, ISBN 978-0415402880 This book is part of a research series written to unfold the perspectives of women in Asia, in times of particularly rapid change such as now, and how these changes influence the process of re-defining their identities, roles and self-views of their bodies, as part of the bigger process of rebuilding 'Asian womanhood'. Unlike much previous research, this book provides an ethnographic approach to women and their everyday 'work'. This approach is used because approaches such as Marxism or Women in Development (WID) give less explanation of how women see themselves, their lives and their work from their own perspective.

A divorce is closely related to the absence of the husband's responsibility in a family. A wife has no right to propose divorce as long as the husband, as the head of the family, can carry out his obligations materially and non-materially. This paper tries to reveal why women propose divorce and how wives view their husbands' responsibilities as the family's head. This article results from field research in the Ponorogo District and uses data derived from interviews with eight female informants who proposed a legal divorce. As the head of the family, a husband has both material and nonmaterial responsibilities to his wife. This responsibility is the husband's obligation to his wife that must be fulfilled. The husband's material obligations are to provide a living, which includes feeding, providing shelter, and clothing. Meanwhile, the nonmaterial duties are to educate, guide, protect, love, and respect. The results of this study indicate that the wives proposed for legal divorce because their husbands, as to the head of the family, do not carry out their material responsibilities; that is, they do not fulfill their obligation to provide livings for their wife. Husbands also do not meet their nonmaterial duties to their wives.