Film Islami: Gender, piety and pop culture in post-authoritarian Indonesia

Abstract

Popular culture has become an important arena through which Muslims in contemporary Indonesia constitute and contest ideas about Islam, piety and gender. Despite the broad understandings of gender that are now commonplace in the West, scholarship on gender in Indonesia has tended to focus overwhelmingly on the status of women. This article aims to redress this scholarly lacuna by examining, among other things, representations of men and masculinities in recent Indonesian popular culture, primarily focusing on the burgeoning trend of "pop Islam" films, most commonly known as film Islami. We argue that the popularity - and controversy - associated with film Islami is closely related to the increasing Islamisation of Indonesian society and politics and the emergence of new understandings of what Muslim masculinity should and can be in contemporary Indonesia.