Feminist Futures and the Unruly Politics of Indonesian Youth
Guest Editor: Dr. Annisa R. Beta (The University of Melbourne)
Submission Deadline: 15 September 2026 

In 2019-2020, Indonesian youth protests grew, involving more young women and gender-diverse participants. By 2025, this dissent spread regionally, influencing Nepal and the Philippines, carrying contradictions. Feminist politics was an undercurrent, visible in participation, demands, signs, online debates, and court battles. The rise of smaller collectives, both online and offline, reflected a shift in activism—more porous, everyday-focused, less heroic, contrasting with 1998 Reformasi legacies. Older activists saw this as failure; their diffuse political horizons and unmet goals persisted, cultivating an unruly vitality. This issue explores that unruliness and its feminist futures. It suggests these futures are shaped through youth culture, digital sociality, and everyday activism, often without formal approval. José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of utopia as a present “forward-dawning” horizon, and Yatun Sastramidjaja’s idea of “connective spaces of radical hope,” frame these ongoing experiments. Amalinda Savirani, Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih, and Inaya Rakhmani show how social media-driven, decentralized youth movements like #IndonesiaGelap and #IndonesiaDarurat resist being dismissed as failure. 

Intan Paramaditha’s 2022 intervention lays the groundwork for this special issue, emphasizing decolonial feminism as a “not-yet' state and urging us to learn from “other resisters’ within the Global South. This approach encourages questions about feminist futurity as a collective practice, not limited to identities but rooted in conditions for just, livable worlds. Tsing’s reminder that we live amid capitalism’s ruins urges us to notice what endures and what’s possible amid ongoing damage, suggesting feminist futures may need salvaging from wreckage. Papers will challenge the use of 'Indonesian youth' as a category, treat 'feminist' critically, and acknowledge differing views of the “future' influenced by region, gender, religion, class, ethnicity, and digital access.

This special issue invites contributions from the humanities and social sciences, including but not limited to media and cultural studies, anthropology, literature, history, philosophy, gender studies, and sociology. We welcome empirical, theoretical, historical, and textual approaches. Interdisciplinary work is encouraged. 

We welcome submissions from early-career scholars affiliated with university, postgraduate students, as well as independent researchers and from those based at NGOs, think tanks, or other non-university institutions. Papers can be co-authored.

Themes

This special issue explores futures created by political subjects outside the masculine heroic norm: those who assert rights through the ordinary, unfinished, fallible, and unruly. It focuses on six non-exclusive inquiry areas, allowing contributions to address multiple themes while maintaining focus.d:

1. Popular culture and political imagination

2. Speculative, creative, and methodologically experimental work

3. Digital publics and emerging political subjectivity

4. Protest, sexuality, and the worlds bodies make

5. Everyday futures, juxtapolitical practice

6. Whose feminist futures? Situated knowledges, decolonial method