“Is It Time to Make Men Powerless?”
Carnivalesque and Deconstruction Reading on
A Narrative of Women Resistance
Ikwan Setiawan
Faculty of
Jalan Kalimantan 37 Jember 68121
ikwansetiawan@gmail.com
Abstract
This article discusses women resistance as the main narrative in Suami-suami Takut Istri (The Husbands Who’re Afraid of Their Wives, hereafter SSTI), a situation comedy (hereafter sitcom/s) which gains vast popularity among the viewers of one of the Indonesian television programs. However, among others, SSTI is a distinct program, since it represents women resistance to their husbands in domestic life; onething which is rarely found in the Indonesian context where most women still experience many difficulties and violence, both psychological and physical. This sitcom in its gendered narratives always articulates some ‘super women’ that can control their husbands in domestic life. In SSTI, we will find contextualization of some critical thoughts about popular media and their genre as the site of struggle in the process of articulation and negotiation which put women culture as resistance toward patriarchal hegemony as explored by postfeminist thought. Using Bakthin’s carnivalisque concept, this writing shows theoretical underpinning a carnival text or practice as site of resistance, despite the fact that through Derridean and Foucauldian reading there is still stereotypical problem of positioning women as the negative subject or as the other from which the resisting women seems afraid of loosing their husbands.
Keywords: carnival text, postfeminist, women culture, resistance, deconstruction.
