TUBUH SEBAGAI LOCUS PERLAWANAN

Reinterpretasi Perjuangan Perempuan Adat di Indonesia Melalui Lensa Teologi Tubuh

Abstract

Indigenous women in Indonesia experiencing oppression at the violent intersection of agrarian conflict, capitalist expansion, and extractive industry land dispossession. Yet rather than being reduced to passive victims of structural violence, indigenous women have reclaimed their bodies as sites of protest, instruments of struggle, and living testimony to the defense of land, life, and dignity. This article offers a reflective-theological analysis of how indigenous women's resistance actualizes selfhood and subjectivity through the body. While prior scholarship has examined these movements through the lenses of ecofeminism and feminist body politics, the theological dimension of indigenous women's embodied struggle remains critically underexplored. This study addresses that lacuna through a library-based reflective-theological method, drawing on Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart's theology of the body, elaborated through Margaret Kovach's concept of indigenous relationality. The central thesis of this study argues that the indigenous woman's body is not a passive object subdued by patriarchal and colonial structures, but an active subject a locus of theological experience, a medium of concrete revelation, and an arena of holistic liberation inseparable from its cosmic relations with land, water, forest, and the entire order of creation. The findings demonstrate that indigenous women's resistance constitutes a performative reconstruction of identity that ruptures cultural myths and colonial imaginaries. In this resistance, the body becomes a space of personal and communal redemption, a source of ecological sensuality, and an affirmation of an alternative, relational way of life grounded in the principles of responsibility, ethics, and cosmic reciprocity.