Fighting in the shadows of masculinity: An ethnography of women’s gender performativity in the practice of pencak silat in Indonesia

Abstract

This article examines how women athletes of pencak silat in Indonesia negotiate gender expectations through their engagement with a traditional martial art. Rather than treating gender as a fixed role, the study focuses on how socially embedded norms—particularly those circulating within Indonesian religious and cultural contexts that associate femininity with modesty, restraint, and passivity—are enacted, negotiated, and reworked through bodily practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and Butler’s framework of gender performativity, the article shows how women’s bodies, including those wearing the hijab, do not simply conform to these normative expectations but participate in producing alternative ways of being women within the silat arena. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with female pencak silat athletes at an Islamic university in Jakarta, the analysis demonstrates how training sessions,   competitions, and everyday interactions transform silat into a symbolic and social space in which strength, discipline, and moral legitimacy are continually redefined. In this sense, silat practice becomes not only a form of physical training but also a site of cultural negotiation, where dominant gender norms are neither wholly rejected nor  passively accepted, but actively rearticulated through embodied practice. By approaching pencak silat as a field of inquiry into bodily politics and gender performativity, this study contributes to broader anthropological discussions on gender, religion, and power in contemporary Indonesian society.