Gender Equity Antipreneurship: Resistance to Gender Equitable Policy Reforms in Post-Democratic Transition Indonesia

Opposition to gender equality projects has been on the rise globally over the past decade. This paper investigates this phenomenon in post-democratic transition Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority democracy, where Islam has a central role in shaping social and political life. It specifically examines resistance to a sexual violence bill by Islamist actors, prominently women, inside and outside formal political institutions from 2016 to 2020. Resistance to the bill resulted in the Indonesian national parliament dropping the bill from the national priority legislative agenda in 2020. In the same year, the same actors proposed a family resilience bill. Drawing on norm antipreneurs literature and a feminist institutionalist approach, I propose ‘gender equity antipreneurship’ as an analytical tool to provide an agent-centric account of resistance to gender equitable policy reforms. Gender equity antipreneurship elucidates the ways in which actors opposing gender equitable policy reforms inside and outside formal political institutions interact with gendered ideas and institutions to legitimate not only their resistance but also the promotion of their alternative gendered policy reform. This paper demonstrates how Islamist actors inside and outside formal political institutions interacted with their gendered ideas of “Islamic Worldview” and existing gendered institutions regulating gender-based violence and marital relationship to legitimate their resistance to the sexual violence bill and promotion of the alternative family resilience bill aiming to formalise a patriarchal and heteronormative gender and sexual order. Three institutional strategies of resistance employed by these actors are identified: institutional remembering, forgetting, and sharing. In the context of post-democratic transition Indonesia, this paper shows that, while this resistance jeopardises the equality principle at the heart of liberal democracy and puts women and gender and sexual minorities at risk, it is part of the post-transitional politics of Indonesia’s democracy.