Tropentag, September 10 - 12, 2025, Bonn "Reconciling land system changes with planetary health"

My tongue, my stories: Women are caring, cooking, planting, to protect the planetary life

Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, Education dan Gender, Indonesia

Abstract

This research draws attention to how women’s stories might negotiate the complexities of positionality and representation in battling ecological injustice under the frame of religious domination. This paper aims to foreground the gender perspectives, initiatives, and worldviews on ecological injustice from women’s own tongue, thus decolonizing the way the gaze being narrated and interpreted within the food security domain. These stories are approached with critical eyes that encourage researcher’s reflexivity. Whereas feminism has tended to regard religion as the main cause of women’s oppression through which practices against women’s well-being and rights are legitimised and naturalised, many Muslim women in Indonesia see their spiritual lives, both individually and collectively, as sites of resistance and liberation. My approach suggests an alternative way of ‘seeing and doing’ method motivated by an ethical commitment to the participants and the desire to respect their knowledge and experiences. This paper is to collate a number of stories told by women from climate change affected communities in Central Java on how their personal lives, including SRHR (sexual & reproductive health & rights), have been affected by religion, social economic class, pollution, and climate change. Implementing this approach in my research found that Javanese women protesting ecological injustice are orientated by indigenous worldviews or respective liberative religious view with which the women respect each other and reclaimed the value of community, where they are at one with the community of the home and the community of the group under the conditions of spirituality, equality, and cooperation. Thus, reclaiming that caring, cooking, planting, telling stories, etc are some of the decolonial methods to protect the planetary life.

Keywords: Decoloniality, ecological injustice, planetary life, positionality, reflexivity, religion, SRHR, women’s stories

Contact Address: Dewi Candraningrum, Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta, Education dan Gender, Jl A. Yani Tromol Pos 1, 57162 Surakarta, Indonesia, e-mail: dcandraningrumgmail.com