Material feminism and multi-local political ecologies: rethinking gender and nature in Lampung, Indonesia

This chapter revisits gender by exploring how it is entangled in the dynamics of displacement and everyday mobilities associated with changing natural resource governance in Lampung province, Indonesia. Whilst there has been much critical attention paid to dispossession associated with conservaton and resurgent capital investment in large scale agriculture in Indonesia, analysis has tended to sidestep questions of gender: critical narratives tend to render the dispossessed as disembodied, and by default, male. Yet at the same time, ideas about gender and gendered bodily practices are prominent in key public debates in Indonesia (e.g. around pornography, veiling, polygamy, homosexuality), each of which reveals efforts to secure a gendered moral order for public and private life. The centre of gravity for this public discourse appears to be largely urban and middle class: much less is known or understood about how gender is being remade in poor rural communities, particularly as enclosure and dispossession undermine the possibility of successful gendered moral orders (where masculinities are premised on success as a farmer, femininities on modesty and familial success). The chapter considers the ways that gender is reconfigured in the context of dispossession, as the remaking of everyday practices for ‘getting by’ are entangled in the re-making of environments.