Patriarchal Language Evaluation of Muslim Women’s Body, Sexuality, and Domestication Discourse on Indonesian Male Clerics Preaching

Abstract

This nested case study (multiyear research critical discourse analysis—in this case, the first year) aims to provide support in the form of linguistic recommendations to the law reform, particularly on the issues of Muslim women’s bodies, sexuality, and domestication based on the textual analysis of the patriarchal language used by different Islamic strands: Muhammadiyah’s, Nahdlatul Ulama’s and Salafi’s clerics in their preaching in Indonesia. This is significant because such a study is relatively limited in Indonesian cases. However, it also shed light on how discrepant linguistic manners of these male clerics were deployed to voice their noblesse oblige about Muslim women’s body, sexuality, and domestication as regulatory discourse. The data—six videos of the respective clerics’ preaching—were taken from YouTube1 using purposeful stratified sampling. It is found that Muhammadiyah’s cleric delineated this discourse based on the segregation of dubious religiously correct and incorrect propriety, whereas Nahdlatul Ulama’s cleric, the apparent religious normality, and Salafi’s cleric, the plausible religious propriety.