‘Who is the ideal woman?’: The subjectification of impoverished Javanese working mothers
通过访谈贫困爪哇职业母亲，研究她们如何在性别、贫困、伊斯兰教和爪哇文化的交叉影响下，构建“理想女性”话语，挑战了后女性主义的主流观点。
Abstract This study examines the subjectification of working mothers through the lens of intersectionality by listening to the under‐represented voices of those whose lives are shaped at the intersections of gender, poverty, Islam, and Javanese ethnicity. Drawing on poststructuralist feminist discourse analysis, the subtle subjectification process is observed through conversational interactions in which working mothers construct the ‘ideal woman’. The findings challenge the predominant postfeminist framing in the extant literature by illustrating how here working mothers draw on a specifically local discourse (i.e., moderate‐Islam and Javanese cultural discourses) to construct the ideal woman as embodying the dual wife‐mother identities. Based on these locally dependent discourses, working mothers accentuate their identity as wives while subduing identities as mothers and workers. The emphasis on the underexplored wife identity imbues work with a distinct significance for mothers within this context.