Gender, power, and resistance in indonesian women’s fiction: Multimodal critical discourse insights from textual and digital narratives

This study investigates how Indonesian women’s fiction constructs and negotiates discourses on gender, power, and resistance across textual, visual, and digital domains. It seeks to demonstrate how literature functions as discourse, not only as artistic representation, but also as an ideological and multimodal site of feminist resistance. Drawing on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this study examines a purposive corpus of novels by Ayu Utami, Intan Paramaditha, Leila Chudori, and Djenar Maesa Ayu. The data sources include primary texts, digital reception (Goodreads reviews, TikTok/BookTok content, online media articles), and visual paratexts (book covers, posters, promotional materials). Analytical procedures combine textual critical discourse analysis (CDA), corpus-assisted keyword analysis, and multimodal analysis of visual and digital materials. The analysis reveals a dual movement in Indonesian women’s fiction: the reproduction of patriarchal ideologies through metaphors of purity, obligation, and morality and the articulation of feminist counter-discourses through bodily agency, fragmented narratives, and intertextual mobility. Digital reception amplifies these dynamics, with global readers celebrating empowerment and local audiences expressing moral contestation. Visual and digital paratexts further encode resistance through fragmented typography, empowering slogans, and participatory hashtags, thereby positioning the novels within global feminist networks. This study expands CDA by integrating literary texts, visual paratexts, and digital reception into a hybrid analytical framework. It contributes to Feminist CDA by demonstrating how resistance is constructed multimodally and digitally and updates paratext theory for the platform era. This research highlights Indonesian women’s fiction as a significant contributor to global feminist discourse, situating Global South literature as an epistemic site of discursive transformation.