‘Dance drills, faith spills’: Islam, body politics, and popular music in post-Suharto Indonesia

Abstract

In February 2003, a woman’s body became the focal point for public debates about religious authority, freedom of expression, women’s rights, and the future of Indonesia’s political leadership. At the centre of these debates was Inul Daratista, a twenty-four-year-old popular music singer/dancer from East Java, whose dancing was described as ‘pornographic’ and therefore haram, forbidden by Islam. In this essay, I describe how and why Inul’s dancing body became a central symbol in debates about religion, culture and politics in the years following the fall of Indonesian ex-president Suharto in 1998. In the highly mediated sphere of popular culture, ‘Inulmania’ contributed to a new dialogic space where conflicting ideological positions could be expressed and debated. Inul’s body became a stage for a variety of cultural actors to try out or ‘rehearse’ an emergent democracy in post-Suharto Indonesia. A case study of popular performer Inul Daratista illuminates contemporary ‘body politics’, in which human bodies invested with diverse meanings and values have powerful implications for discourses about Islam, pornography, women’s bodies, state/civil relations in Indonesia, and changing forms of media.