Kebaya dan Wacana Pelestarian

This article is about Indonesia’s effort to register kebaya to UNESCO as part of the world heritage. The object of the research is the Kebaya Goes to UNESCO website tradisikebaya.id. This website contains media links and information regarding the kebaya movement. This website serves as an entryway to problematize the Kebaya Goes to UNESCO campaign. The content of the website is analyzed in an indicative manner rather than comprehensively. Recurring patterns of representations in the website are sought and then analyzed by using semiotics following Stuart Hall (1997) and Roland Barthes (1972)’ methodology. This article argues that the discourse and ideologies of the kebaya campaign run parallel to the history of the construction of Indonesia’s national identity. The first parallel is the Java centric nature of the campaign which echoes earlier constructions of Indonesia’s national identity where a lot of Javanese identities were conflated with the identity of the nation. The kebaya campaign is run by groups of people predominantly residing in Java and speaking on behalf of Indonesian women. The second parallel is the way women are employed as symbolic cultural identity which is a consistent gendered division for citizens where women represent the nation and men represent the state. However, there is a shift in the representations of women as the cultural face of the nation: they now have more urbanized lifestyles, they are middle class in the own rights (not because of their husbands’ status) and a lot of them have their own careers.