IBU or the Beast: Gender Interests in Two Indonesian Women's Organizations

Abstract

One of the most stimulating attempts to develop a theoretical framework for the analysis of women's organizations is that of Maxine Molyneux, who makes the distinction between organization for practical and strategic gender interests. Part of the attraction of the distinction is that it promises to be a tool in efforts to assess the performance of women's organizations. However, these concepts are widely, and generally uncritically, used in discussions which deal with 'women and development' issues, particularly in relation to women's organizations in the South. I have various analytical and conceptual problems with the concepts of practical and strategic gender interests. In the space of this article, I will not be able to spell these out in detail. Instead I will use the example of two mass organizations of Indonesian women to focus on some of the ambiguities in these concepts. Molyneux has suggested that it might be useful to differentiate between women's strategic and women's practical gender interests in assessing the 'success' of certain policies regarding women, specifically addressing the performance of the socialist state of Nicaragua. Strategic gender interests she defines as being 'derived from the analysis of women's subordination and from the formulation of an alternative, more satisfactory set of arrangements to those which exist'. Practical gender interests, on the other hand, 'are generally a response to an immediate perceived need and they do not generally entail a strategic goal such as women's emancipation or gender equality' (Molyneux,