Abstract
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.
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APA 7th edition
In-text citation: (Astuti et al., 2026)
Reference: Astuti, R., Suharidadi, F., & Setijaningrum, E. (2026). From
‘kodrat’ to code: Women ride-hailing drivers redefining Javanese womanhood in the gig economy.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 10(1), Article 21.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17996
AMA 10th edition
In-text citation: (1), (2), (3), etc.
Reference: Astuti R, Suharidadi F, Setijaningrum E. From
‘kodrat’ to code: Women ride-hailing drivers redefining Javanese womanhood in the gig economy.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. 2026;10(1), 21.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17996
Chicago
In-text citation: (Astuti et al., 2026)
Reference: Astuti, Reni, Fendy Suharidadi, and Erna Setijaningrum. "From
‘kodrat’ to code: Women ride-hailing drivers redefining Javanese womanhood in the gig economy".
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2026 10 no. 1 (2026): 21.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17996
Harvard
In-text citation: (Astuti et al., 2026)
Reference: Astuti, R., Suharidadi, F., and Setijaningrum, E. (2026). From
‘kodrat’ to code: Women ride-hailing drivers redefining Javanese womanhood in the gig economy.
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 10(1), 21.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17996
MLA
In-text citation: (Astuti et al., 2026)
Reference: Astuti, Reni et al. "From
‘kodrat’ to code: Women ride-hailing drivers redefining Javanese womanhood in the gig economy".
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, vol. 10, no. 1, 2026, 21.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17996
Vancouver
In-text citation: (1), (2), (3), etc.
Reference: Astuti R, Suharidadi F, Setijaningrum E. From
‘kodrat’ to code: Women ride-hailing drivers redefining Javanese womanhood in the gig economy. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics. 2026;10(1):21.
https://doi.org/10.20897/femenc/17996