From ‘kodrat’ to code: Women ride-hailing drivers redefining Javanese womanhood in the gig economy

Digital platforms have reconfigured labor economies in Indonesia, reframing intersections between technological affordances and established gender constructs that have historically circumscribed women’s spatial mobility and economic agency. Contemporary scholarship on technological embodiment offers limited analytical depth of technological integration within cultural contexts where gendered boundaries remain a highly contentious issue. This paper examines how women ride-hailing drivers in Surabaya negotiate and redefine Javanese womanhood through digital platform labor, proposing technological embodiment as cultural negotiation rather than technological adoption – a framework that questions prevailing Western theoretical perspectives. We further point out how women contest economic imperatives through technological appropriations, collective resistance strategies, and identity reformulations that subsequently problematize familial and communal gender dynamics. We extend embodiment theory by interrogating technological integration into gendered corporeality in non-Western contexts; disrupt binary frameworks positioning technology in opposition to tradition; and introduce a critical approach to gender reconstruction as movement from ‘kodrat’ (natural destiny) to code (technological self-determination). This theoretical reframing fundamentally ruptures conventional understandings of how digital technologies both preserve and reconfigure gender relations across contrasting cultural formations.