Producing disability through intersectional exclusion in Indonesian independent cinema

Abdul Rohim; Ardian Indro Yuwono

doi:10.24198/ptvf.v10i2.71480

Producing disability through intersectional exclusion in Indonesian independent cinema

Abdul Rohim, Ardian Indro Yuwono

Abstract

Background: The representation of women with mental disabilities in Indonesian cinema remains rooted in the medical model of disability, a framework that attributes disadvantages stemming from gender and class factors to an individual’s mental impairment rather than to structural conditions. Purpose: This study employs an integrated theoretical framework (Oliver’s social model of disability, McRobbie’s feminist theory on body regulation, and Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality) to examine the portrayal of the character Atun in the Indonesian independent film Sengkela (2023); Atun is a woman with a mental disability who was born into poverty, lives in a rural area, and frequently faces stigma as someone with a mental disorder. Methods: Seventeen scenes from the film are critically examined through multimodal discourse analysis. Results: Atun’s disempowerment, the findings show, does not originate within herself. It is instead produced by structural failures that appear consistently across the visual, auditory, and verbal modes: workplace protection is absent, a criminal matter is redirected into the mental health system, and physical restraint (pasung) is normalized as the community’s response to her suffering. Poverty functions not as an additive but as a qualitative factor that forecloses her access to justice through its intersection with disability and gender. Conclusion: Sengkela does not portray the exclusion of women with mental disabilities as a deviation requiring correction; instead, it presents this exclusion as a natural and inevitable condition, thereby reproducing the social order it depicts. Implications: This paper contributes to disability representation studies and critical film studies in Indonesia by showing how film texts reproduce the mechanisms of dehumanization concealed by appeals to tradition and economic limitation, and by proposing ‘politics of exclusion’ as a conceptual tool for future multimodal disability research.

Keywords

Disability representation; Indonesian cinema; intersectionality; mental disability; social model of disability

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.24198/ptvf.v10i2.71480