Neo-priyayiism: corporate-driven feminism and gender equality discourses in Indonesian digital spaces

paper written mostly by my wife ♡ i'm the proudest key takeaways: - the concept of neo-priyayiism to capture how Westernised feminist legitimacy is rearticulated through historically sedimented hierarchies of class, ethnicity, and respectability - digital platforms do not simply introduce new feminist possibilities; they selectively rework and re-authorise earlier discourses of respectability, professionalism, and gendered labour, embedding them within globally recognisable feminist vocabularies regarding women’s work and family life. - neo-priyayiism thus highlights how corporate-driven digital feminism does not simply reproduce neoliberal logics, but reworks global narratives through local histories of hierarchy, respectability, and stratification. - feminist co-optation cannot be understood through market logics alone, but must be situated within broader political and institutional conditions. similarly, in indonesia, these dynamics are shaped by longer histories of colonial encounter, nationalist ambivalence, and moral governance, producing a form of feminist articulation that is simultaneously aspirational and culturally cautious - privileges westernised expressions that resonate with the social groups most visible within urban, educated, middle-class users. Platform affordances thus amplify forms of feminism already aligned with dominant cultural and linguistic capital.