Religion, Politics and Gender in Indonesia

Sonja van Wichelen is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Pembroke Center at Brown University, before which she held a Postdoctoral Fellowship with the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University (2007-2009). Her research focuses on cultural politics in the age of globalization and engages with issues of religion, gender, transnational adoption, ethnicity, and multiculturalism.

• Introduction: Disputing the Muslim Body 1. Muslim Politics and Democratization 2. The Debate on Female Leadership 3. Formations of Public Piety 4. Contesting Masculinity 5. Sexualized Bodies and Morality Talk. Conclusion: Negotiating the Citizen-Subject

"This book provides an interesting discussion of the vibrant discourse in the four important cases (current developments of gender, Islam, and politics and their relation to globalization and consumerism in post-Suharto Indonesia) not only between secular and Islamist players but also among Muslims themselves. This in turn underscores the greater role of Islam and Muslims in shaping the public sphere and contributing to the making of the nation-state in post-Suharto Indonesia. This book is able to present interesting data on the making of modern Indonesian citizens. It does so be presenting new images of a rising Muslim middle class made up of modern Muslim women and men, while tracking the shifting notions of masculinity and femininity in the new images of manhood and womanhood developing in post-Suharto Indonesia. This book is recommended for students or those who are interested in Islam, politics, gender and Southeast Asian studies, and provides a general preliminary understanding of the current developments of Islam, gender, politics, and democratization in post-Suharto Indonesia, the biggest Muslim-majority country in Southeast Asia and in the world" - Kurniawati Hastuti Dewi, Center for Political Studies, the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Jakarta.