Mothers of the missing: gendered grief, state violence, and the politics of mourning in Indonesian literature
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67490/ijpl.v1i3.1041Keywords:
counter-memory, gendered grief, Indonesian literature, mourning politics, state violenceAbstract
Background: Enforced disappearance in Indonesian political history has produced unresolved forms of grief in which mothers and female relatives confront absent bodies, incomplete archives, and delayed public accountability. Objective: This study examines how Indonesian literature represents gendered grief, state violence, and the politics of mourning through figures of mothers, sisters, wives, and families of the missing. Method: Using a qualitative corpus-based design, this study applies close reading, gendered mourning narrative analysis, disappearance–state violence memory mapping, and public mourning counter-memory mapping to literary, paratextual, scholarly, and contextual records. Results: This study finds that maternal and familial grief functions as narrative witness by transforming suspended loss into ethical testimony. This study also shows that disappearance is represented not only through coercive violence but through archival silence, temporal rupture, absent bodies, and unresolved accountability. This study further demonstrates that mourning becomes counter-memory when private grief enters public address through repetition, testimony, translation, and refusal of forgetting. Implication: This study reframes Indonesian political-literary criticism by shifting attention from victimhood to gendered agency, and from trauma as content to mourning as narrative structure. Novelty: This study offers an integrated feminist, memory-studies, and literary-counterarchive framework for reading mothers of the missing in Indonesian literature.
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