SEMINAR: Asian Studies Seminar

This paper explores the experiences of Muslim married women in their marital sexual relationships with their husband. It encompasses women’s expectations, desires and practices of marital sexual relations with their husbands based on ethnographic research on Islam and women’s sexuality in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. Data suggest a strong tendency wherein women considered their sexual relationships in marriage as their duty. In this situation it was problematic for some women to refuse it. Religious (and cultural) discourses seem to justify and support this view. Men often seem not to care about or understand women’s desires. This paper examines Islamic (and cultural) constructions of sexuality which tend to give privilege to male sexuality over female sexuality. The paper also explores the possibility of women’s sexual agency through various strategies: to excuse them from sexual engagement, to negotiate their sexual preferences and to seek pleasurable sexual relations.