Reconciling Trends, Representations, and Attitudes Towards Divorce in Post-Reformasi Indonesia

Ariane Utomo, The University of Melbourne
Bagas Aditya, Centre for Population and Policy Studies, Universitas Gadjah Mada

How do the curated portrayals of "the family" on celebrities' social media pages reflect marriage, divorce, and remarriage trends in Indonesia? How can we situate such trends in the context of demographic transition, globalisation, and socio-political change following Reformasi in 1998? We address these questions by juxtaposing data on attitudes to marriage and divorce with the portrayal of selected celebrity families on social media. Drawing on the World Values Survey (WVS) and patchwork digital ethnography, we discuss how the growing visibility of diverse family forms on Instagram might influence attitudes to divorce and align with the second demographic transition theory. We argue that alternative family structures, such as single-parent families, remarriage, and stepfamilies, are becoming more visible on social media after Reformasi. Data from the 2018 WVS suggests that while around 80% of respondents in Indonesia fully objected to premarital sex, abortion, free sex and homosexuality, less than half fully objected to divorce. There was a positive association between social media consumption and agreeing to the statement “divorce is justifiable”. We discuss how our results stand against the argument that the dominant change in marriage patterns after Reformasi is a return to early marriage linked to the ‘conservative turn’.

Keywords: Families, Unions and Households, Population and Development, Gender Dynamics, Mixed methods research

See extended abstract.