Gender, Class, and Customary Oppression: The Virginity Myth as an Intersectional Apparatus in Faris Al Faisal’s Short Story “Gadis Bermahkota Tiga Kembang yang Layu”

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the intersection of gender, class, and customary oppression operating simultaneously upon the character Karyati in Faris Al Faisal’s short story “Gadis Bermahkota Tiga Kembang yang Layu.” Prior studies have tended to read the oppression of women through a single axis and have therefore not yet revealed how these three forms of oppression interweave within a single character. Using a single short story as its corpus, this study employs an interpretive feminist literary criticism framed by Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Collins’s matrix of domination. Textual excerpts were selected through close reading, coded against these two frameworks, and interpreted hermeneutically. The data, in the form of textual excerpts, were obtained through close reading and subsequently interpreted using a hermeneutic reading technique. The findings demonstrate that Karyati’s suffering arises not from a single cause, but from the convergence of three forms of oppression. As a woman, her body is objectified; as the daughter of impoverished tenant farmers, she is powerless to refuse the authority of the landlord; and as a member of a customary community, she is in fact punished by the ngarot ceremony that makes virginity the measure of honor. These three reinforce one another until the narrative leaves Karyati with sex work as a constrained means of survival rather than a free choice. The novelty of this study lies in showing how the story reworks the virginity myth attached to a local ceremony so that it turns against a survivor of sexual violence, thereby enriching intersectional readings of Indonesian literature set within local cultural contexts.