REPRESENTATION AND SYMBOLISM OF POWER AND SEXUALITY IN JAMU (UTAMI, 2002)

Abstract

In the first decade following reformasi , three main factors fostered the revival and re-signification of documentary film in Indonesia. First, there was resistance to the New Order’s repressive paradigm of censorship which was still imposed, particularly on issues such as sexuality, religion, and ethnicity. Second, there arose wider freedom for individuals to express their creativity due to the zeitgeist. Third, there was a coherence between the spirit of ‘make-your-own-film’ and the increasing popularity of the digital camera to produce independent films. Ayu Utami’s Jamu (2002) provides a subtle and yet excellent example of a documentary film from this period. It is a documentary that might have never had the opportunity to be made in the New Order regime. The film, set in Jakarta, represents the power of jamu - traditional herbal medicine - which pertains to sexuality and its myth. Using an unconventional expository mode, this film explores jamu as a socio-cultural artifact that forces issues relating to power and sexuality to be brought out into the open. I contend that the representation and symbolism of power and sexuality in the film is predicated on challenging the prevailing view that Indonesia is a moralized society as once constructed by the New Order regime. Therefore, the effect of Jamu can be perceived as twofold: a celebration of freedom of expression and the creative resistance to a hegemonic view of sexuality. My analysis is designed from a semiotic and cultural approach, concerning Roland Barthes’ photographic paradox, Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge, Jeffrey Weeks’s inclusive sexuality, as well as Robert Segal’s and Laurie Honko’s concepts of myth. of the human mind, a product of social, cultural, and historical forces, then such an invention, I argue, also converges myth since myth is also a social, cultural, and historical abstract in the guise of a narrative belief. Weeks (2010) further asserts that the subjective and fictional qualities of sexuality are rendered by the fact that throughout human history, the notion of sexuality did not exist, and sometime in the future may not exist again. This underlines the idea that sexuality is invented and narrated. Again this coalesces myth in that narration is the very medium where myth is perpetuated due to its regenerative capacity (Eliade, 1987), and is most frequently embraced as part of the ritual (Honko, 1984). As an inclusive notion, sexuality covers disparate areas such as “marriage and the family, illegitimacy and birth control, prostitution and homosexuality, changing patterns of moral, legal and medical regulation, rape and sexual violence, sexual identities, and sexual communities, and oppositional cultures, reproduction, erotic activities and fantasy, intimacy and warmth, love and pleasure, sin and danger as well as violence and disease” (Anna et al., 2011: p. 3 ). In addition to the subjective and narrative characteristics that both sexuality and myth share, this inclusive standpoint of sexuality is selected and applied because Jamu indicates that some of the areas mentioned above are present in the film, from public morality to consuming jamu as part of ‘increasing vitality’.