5 - Travel to Urban Centres: Nurses and Teachers Mobilizing Selves

Summary

My association with a female teacher, ibu guru, started when, sailing to Flores, I literary bumped into Dami, the teacher's nephew. Later, I was invited to Dami's village to celebrate misa sulung, the First Mass, of a newly ordained Catholic priest and was asked to stay with the ibu guru. The teacher's family welcomed me into their house — a neat three-bedroom brick house equipped with its own bathroom and kitchen at the back, an above-average facility in the area.

The next day, after the great celebration of the First Mass, the teacher took me around to talk to the local women who had gone langgar laut, like herself. Before leaving, she changed her Western style dress to a sarung (sarong), and lent me one to wear as well. Reluctant to offend my kind hostess, I did not ask the reason but just followed her example. And she smiled approvingly when I reappeared in the living room walking rather awkwardly in the sarung matched with a plain blouse. “Oh you look proper, (pantas), just like one of us,” she said as every one including some men in the room agreed. The teacher saw it as important for us to dress in the sarung, to visit local women in their homes, doing things “their way” to achieve our aims.

Performing multiple femininities

In the local gendered space of Flores, our bodily appearance—the material space — and social relations are formed and negotiated as a strategy to achieve a specified aim, as the previous vignette illustrates. Travel to the city in the local context, as suggested by the women's stories in this chapter, involves aligning their body, gender, and sexual behaviours. Why? In the local context, similar to the early twentieth century cities in Europe, women's presence in the cities might be seen as a problem because it symbolized the promise of sexual adventure, “a problem of order” (Wilson 1991, pp. 5–6). In Indonesia, sexual adventure, excessive ambition, and assertiveness for women is seen as a deviation (Hatley 1997, p. 94). Cities represent disorder and ambiguity as far as women's sexuality is concerned, but at the same time they also offer wealth and opportunity, promising liberation (Wilson 1991, p. 6).