Intersectional masculinism: how patriarchal power adapts across regime changes in Indonesia

Globally, women’s political empowerment remains a resistant frontier of gender equality, particularly in sub-national executive positions. This study introduces intersectional masculinism as a theoretical framework to explain the durability of women’s political exclusion in executive positions, moving beyond static patriarchy accounts. Drawing on 6-month ethnographic fieldwork in Bone Regency, Indonesia, a site maintaining an absolute male executive monopoly for seven decades despite meeting legislative quotas, we identify three adaptive configurations of masculine dominance: feudal-aristocratic (kingdom era), military-bureaucratic (New Order), and capitalist-electoral (Reform era). Synthesizing Foucault’s analytics of discontinuity and technologies of the self with Crenshaw’s intersectionality, we demonstrate that Bugis siri’ (honor/shame) operates as an intersectional technology of the self that disciplines women’s political subjectivity through spatial confinement, internalized self-regulation, and differential operation across class and lineage. Our findings reveal a pattern of “discontinuity without transformation”: while political regimes shift radically from kingdom to republic, from authoritarianism to democracy, male executive monopoly persists through reconfiguration of privilege-conferring intersections (lineage, military affiliation, economic capital). This study contributes a transferable framework for understanding durable political exclusion across the Global South, from Pakistan’s izzat to the Philippines’ maratabat and Turkey’s namus. We argue that democratic transitions alone cannot dismantle gendered monopolies if underlying intersectional barriers remain unchallenged.