# Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025)

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-gender-612984/chiara-formichi-domestic-nationalism-muslim-women-health-and-modernity-in-indonesia-stanford-up-2025
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-gender-612984/chiara-formichi-domestic-nationalism-muslim-women-health-and-modernity-in-indonesia-stanford-up-2025.md
Podcast: [New Books in Gender](https://stenobird.com/podcast/new-books-in-gender-612984)
Published: 2026-06-30T08:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK7653620406.mp3
Audio file: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NBNK7653620406.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/new-books-in-gender-612984/episodes/chiara-formichi-domestic-nationalism-muslim-women-health-and-modernity-in-indonesia-stanford-up-2025
Duration seconds: 4227

## Resource

In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work. While sidelined in the Dutch colonial project of hygienic modernity, women's labor of social reproduction became increasingly visible during the Japanese Occupation and early years of independence. Women from all walks of life were called upon to fulfill domestic and motherly roles for the production and socialization of laborers, soldiers, and citizens. The medicalization of cleanliness, intersecting with multiple patriarchal orders, marginalized women's traditional influence and knowledge. However, leveraging the critical importance of infant care, cleanliness, and nutrition, women pushed against the boundaries imposed on them by the colonial and postcolonial state. Largely absent from government archives, their words and acts are evident in vernacular magazines and visual sources drawn from official outreach, news and lifestyle media, and advertisements. Women writers rearticulated scientific mothering, nationalist maternalism, and Islamic ideals of motherhood to create a public voice through gendered care work. The framework of Domestic Nationalism proposes that as the modern Indonesian nation-state took shape capitalizing on the public function of mothering, so did homemaking become a crossroads of national and international approaches to development, blurring nonaligned self-reliance and global capitalist interests. In this episode Dr. Chiara Formichi (Cornell University) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal…

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