ABSTRACT This thesis offers a feminist cultural analysis of the popular Indonesian television serial (sinetron) Misteri Gunung Merapi (Mysteries of Mount Merapi). It investigates the television text in relation to its various contexts within the social and cultural transformations of contemporary Indonesia. Misteri Gunung Merapi has been produced since 1998, shortly after the financial crisis and the fall of the New Order regime. Since it was first broadcast by the Indosiar television station, it has ranked among the top-rating television programs in Indonesia, and I am interested in its success in this era of social transformation. The purpose of my study is to examine the significance of this success, including exploring the possibility that it is due to the serial’s engagement with recent issues in contemporary Indonesian culture, in particular the changing roles of women. The discussion falls into three main parts: a consideration of the contexts of socio-cultural change and the globalisation of the television industry within which the sinetron is produced; an examination of the way the sinetron draws on traditional theatrical performance, popular memory and supernatural belief; and a study of its representation of women and gender issues within the action-adventure genre to which it belongs. In the context of the television industry, this sinetron’s production signals the changing character of the industry, from state control to free market. In the socio-cultural context, as state control grew weaker and civil society flourished, the flow of globalization became more visible, foregrounding conflicts between Islamic and secular groups, often over the roles and representations of women. As a sinetron kolosal-laga or epic, the series tells historical and legendary stories in such a way that they speak to contemporary Indonesia as it is in the process of reinventing itself. Misteri Gunung Merapi draws on the narrative and dramatic conventions of both traditional theatrical performance and internationally popular genres of action cinema; it constructs popular memory to raise issues about the present; and it employs popular fascination with the supernatural to invoke the mixture of spiritual traditions that has always characterised Javanese culture, in particular. Focussing on the emergence of warrior women in film and television in both the Hollywood action-adventure and Kung Fu/wuxia genres, the thesis investigates the construction of female fighters on screen. I suggest that the sinetron does not share the same problems of gender representation that feminist criticism has identified in either of these genres. Four areas of analysis - heroism, body, power, and the camera - demonstrate that there is a different concept of gender in Indonesia which is illuminated in this sinetron’s representations of women and gender issues.

This thesis is about the everyday cultural practices of communal television viewing by urban kampung people. It challenges the institutional frameworks and constructs about the television audience. To achieve this, the thesis looks at the cultural context of the television set and its uses in urban kampung households and the neighbourhood system. Studies on urban kampung community in Indonesia so far have focused on the socio-economic and cultural practices of the people in relation to state ideological matters (e.g. Guinness, 1989; Sullivan, 1994; Brenner, 1998). This thesis is an attempt to extend the investigation about the cultural practices of the kampung community in relation to media use in the era of competitive private television in the early 2000s. As those kampung people have existentially engaged in fashioning their own lives neither as rural subjects nor urban/ity subjects, their narratives in responding to televised images and representations (of women in particular) shape the particularity of the cultural scene of these marginalized subjects. Taking up their social economic background and the particularities of socio-cultural circumstances of the kampung, this present study takes a close look into the day-to-day communal viewing practice of the kampung female viewers of the most-watched local program on Indonesian television, that is sinetron (television drama). / Extending the argument of Ien Ang and others into the Indonesian context, the thesis concludes that the national television audience as a unified, atomistic and controllable entity, as is institutionally imagined, does not exist. Rather, watching television, particularly among the urban middle to lower class community, is a discursive practice overwhelmingly showing the diverse, particular, and unpredictable attitudes, which challenge the account of 'the audience' that characterises the industry, the state and, ironically, also the intellectual critical knowledge producers.