reconstructing self and society: Javanese Muslim women and “the veil”

Abstract

In Java the growing trend among women toward wearing Islamic clothing (“veiling”) challenges local traditions as well as Western models of modernity. Analysis of Javanese women's narratives of “conversion” to veiling against the background of the contemporary Islamic movement reveals that veiling represents both a new historical consciousness and a process of subjective transformation that is tied to larger processes of social change in Indonesia. In producing themselves as modern Muslims, veiled women simultaneously produce a vision of a society that distances itself from the past as it embarks upon a new modernity. [Islam, modernity, social transformation, veiling, women, Indonesia]