Indispensable expulsion: Care in Indonesian early childhood education policy

Vollständiger Abstract

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This article examines how early childhood education (ECE) policies in Indonesia construct, position and ultimately marginalise caregiving work. ECE in Indonesia relies on a vast, female-dominated and low-paid workforce. Although their caregiving roles are fundamental to both education and the state, policy systematically subordinates their labour and knowledge. To unpack this paradox, I employ the concept of the ‘maternal body’, which is derived from Kristeva's notion of the abject and re-elaborated through a Butlerian perspective. Drawing on a post-structuralist feminist discourse analysis of legal documents, standards and curricula defining the figure of the teacher and expectations for them in Indonesia between 2003 and 2025, I argue that these texts discursively enact a process of abjection that marginalises caregiving through four recurring mechanisms: legal exclusion, whereby nonformal carers are placed outside the official category of ‘teacher’; recognition of the body solely in terms of functional readiness, while caregiving itself is not acknowledged as a competency; the positioning of caregiving at the lowest level of the competency hierarchy; and the dissolution of the carer figure into the agency of the child. Overall, caregiving may be inscribed in policy, but it remains subordinated to a patriarchal logic operating through texts, a mechanism that is clearly illustrated by the Indonesian case and is applicable wherever caregiving undergoes professionalisation.