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Purpose
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.
Research implications
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.
Practical implications
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.
Social implications
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.
Originality/value
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.
The series encourages and engages with empirical and theoretical gender scholarship worldwide. It furthers the understanding of gender and promotes the application of this understanding to the solution of social problems and the achievement of equality locally and globally.
Advances in Gender Research recognises that gender intersects with other social structures, including, but not limited to race/ethnicity, sexuality, citizenship, social class, age, and (dis)ability; and with various institutions, including, but not limited to the family, the state, the economy, the media, and education. The series seeks manuscripts that explore these intersections.
Advances in Gender Research seeks well-written articles that place current or historical data in context, critically review the literature in gender-related subfields, provide new theoretical or methodological insights or assess the impact of social actions, programs or movements. The series includes articles that are theoretical, empirical or applied, dealing with any nation or region, or taking a comparative perspective.