Women's education as "cosmetics"? tokenism and performative gender equality in Acehnese Dayah

Abstract

In recent years, dayah (traditional Islamic boarding schools) in Aceh have increasingly featured women in their public materials, projecting an image of gender inclusion. Preliminary fieldwork, however, revealed two conflicting narratives: male stakeholders described dayah education as inherently fair because it is grounded in Islamic values, while female students described unequal opportunities, restricted authority, and gendered educational pathways. This gap between institutional representation and women lived experiences motivates the study. The study has three aims: (1) to examine how gender equality is understood and represented in the dayah; (2) to examine how gender equality is practiced and experienced by women; and (3) to examine how gender equality is interpreted in relation to Islamic and national gender frameworks, and whether it is substantive or merely performative ("cosmetic"). Using an interpretive qualitative case study design, this study examined tokenism and performative gender equality in women's education across four interconnected Acehnese dayah sites. Data were collected through participant observations, focus group discussions, in-depth interviews with 29 participants from multiple selected dayah, and document analysis. The data were analyzed thematically and interpreted through the lenses of tokenism (Kanter), institutional performativity (Ahmed), gender performativity (Butler), and Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, doxa, symbolic power and symbolic violence. The findings show that: (1) gender equality is understood as balance and complementarity rather than sameness, and is represented through women's high visibility in documents and activities while authority remains male, so that equality is substantive in access but performative in control; (2) women experience inclusion without authority, because although they are present and active, their education is gradually redirected toward marriage and domestic roles, and women themselves become the main actors who normalize and transmit patriarchal values through internalized institutional norms, while a smaller group of women who study across several institutions develop critical awareness and question these norms; and (3) dayah actors interpret gender equality through spiritual (ruhaniyyah) and inner moral (bathiniyyah) dimensions and through complementary roles grounded in fitrah, rejecting the national access, control, participation, and benefit framework as too material, while structural barriers, including the rigid application of mahramiyyah and the absence of an effective ummi (the leader's wife) as intermediary, further isolate women's sections and leave patriarchal doxa unchallenged. The study concludes that women's education in the dayah is cosmetic to some extent: a negotiated space in which genuine inclusion coexists with enduring and largely self-perpetuated inequality, where visibility exceeds authority and participation exceeds control.