Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Amorisa Wiratri, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

PROGRAMME

ABSTRACT

This roundtable examines how gendered and changing bodies shape women’s participation in religious and public life, including the roles they perform, the authority they exercise, the networks they build, and the knowledge they produce. Bringing together research on women’s bodies, performance, and female Islamic authority in Southeast Asia with feminist, ethnographic, and autoethnographic perspectives, the roundtable approaches the body as integral to how authority, relationships, and knowledge are formed.

The discussion explores how gendered expectations and bodily conditions shape women’s mobility, community engagement, professional and religious roles, and their possibilities for action. These dynamics become particularly visible through experiences of illness, reproductive surgery, ageing, chronic pain, disability, recovery, fatigue, and sustained physical discipline. Rather than understanding the body only as a source of constraint, the roundtable considers how bodily experiences and transformations can also generate new forms of agency, religious experience, relationships, and ways of knowing.

The roundtable develops this argument through three interconnected perspectives. Nor Ismah examines how gender and embodiment shape Muslim women’s religious authority, activism, public roles, mobility, and networks across Southeast Asia. Yuyun Sri Wahyuni explores hysterectomy and post-reproductive womanhood in Indonesia, challenging assumptions that equate reproductive capacity with womanhood and foregrounding healing, slamet, and bodily well-being. Katia Chaterji examines female performers of Islamic arts in West Sumatra alongside her own experience as a devotional dancer living with chronic pain, asking how movement, discipline, pain, and physical limitation become modes of spiritual and ethnographic knowing. As discussant, Sahana Ghosh brings a feminist ethnographic perspective to these interconnected cases, reflecting on how women’s embodied experiences shape authority, knowledge production, and everyday ethical life.

Together, the papers show that bodies can both enable and constrain women’s participation while also generating new forms of agency, relationship, religious experience, and knowledge. By bringing religion and gender studies into conversation with feminist approaches to embodiment, the roundtable proposes the body as a central analytical site for understanding authority and knowledge production in Southeast Asia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Nor Ismah is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender studies, women’s knowledge production, media, and Islam in the Indonesian context. Her forthcoming Edinburgh University Press book Women Issuing Fatwas: Female Islamic Scholars and Community-Based Authority in Java, Indonesia, is anticipated to make a significant contribution to the field.

Yuyun Sri Wahyuni is a gender studies scholar and theorist of decolonial transnational Islamic feminism at Yogyakarta State University, Indonesia. Her research examines Islam, gender, political economy, international gender policy, the state, religion, and local culture through feminist, postcolonial, decolonial, social reproduction, and critical race perspectives. She develops inclusive and socially engaged pedagogies in gender and Islamic studies and teaches Gender, Religion, Postcolonialism, and Decolonialism at the Center for Religious and Cross-cultural Studies, Gadjah Mada University.

Katia Chaterji is Assistant Professor at the Loyola Marymount University. She is also an interdisciplinary scholar of maritime Southeast Asia whose research draws on oral history, performance ethnography, and historical archives to examine the embodied histories of Islam and the performing arts in West Sumatra, as well as the lives of Minangkabau performing artists in the diaspora. Her ongoing research explores Islamic dakwah arts in relation to shifting narratives of permissibility, belonging, and remembrance. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Asian Music, Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, and Lembaran Antropologi.

Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore. She is a scholar whose research focuses on gender, migration, borders, intimacy, and social inequalities in South Asia. Her work explores how institutions, mobility, and everyday experiences shape social life, with particular attention to marginalized communities. Through ethnographic research, she contributes important insights into embodiment, care, vulnerability, and the politics of everyday life.