Attached Paper Annual Meeting 2024

The Woman at the Margins: Violence, Gendered Erasures, and Recoveries in Memories of Java’s Islamization

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This paper approaches the intersection of gender and violence in Javanese Islam by using as a heuristic the historical narrative of a violent murder in early modern Java where a woman, despite her central role, is erased from the story. It examines attempts in contemporary Javanese theater to recover the woman in the story as a strategy of revisionist mythmaking and an avenue for women’s agency and resistance. Specifically, it focuses on a play produced by self-identified Muslim women with a feminist project in which a woman’s courageous intervention prevents the murder, presenting a non-violent historical vision as a normative model of Islamic ethics. Because the play conceptualizes this re-vision as a recovery of a truth that became distorted by colonial scholarship, the feminist and decolonial project are intimately linked in the play’s recovery of early Javanese Islam as a normative vision of Islamic orthodoxy for today.