The debates surrounding Muslim women’s feminist agency have been central among feminist and postcolonial scholars who perceive the trajectory of Western feminist liberal subjects and Muslim women’s non-secular religious subjectivities as contradictory. Engaging with such a scholarship, this paper reads the Sekolahlah Tinggi-Tinggi: Perjalanan Perempuan Mengejar Cita di Empat Benua (Aim High for Education: Women’s Ethnography in Pursuit of Dreams Across Four Continents. 2025. Jakarta: Gramedia), as a feminist archive that records Indonesian Muslim women’s agency across decolonial and transnational contexts. Feminist archive echoes feminist decolonial framework that underlines archive as a non-static epistemic resistance, living, and relational feminist knowledge production. Drawing on theories of the coloniality of power and gender, Transnational and Islamic feminist thought central to Decolonial Transnational Islamic Feminism (DTIF) theorizing, this paper argues that Muslim women’s pursuit of higher education cannot be reduced to neoliberal aspiration or secular emancipation. Instead, it emerges as an ethical, relational, and faith-informed form of agency enacted within—and against—colonial, racialized, and gendered structures of power. By framing higher education as a site of re-existence rather than assimilation, this paper contributes to debates on decolonizing education, feminist archiving, and Muslim women’s agency beyond liberal feminist paradigms. It concludes that Sekolahlah Tinggi-Tinggi exemplifies how community-based, faith-rooted feminist archives can not only preserve marginalized histories but actively transform the epistemic foundations of the modern university.

Authors:
Yuyun Sri Wahyuni, Yogyakarta State University, Indonesia
Lailatul Fitriyah, Claremont School of Theology California/University of Toronto, Canada, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Yuyun Sri Wahyuni is a lecturer and gender studies scholar at UNY, specializing in decolonial transnational Islamic/Indigenous feminism (DTIF) and lecturer at CRCS UGM. Her works explore gender, state policy, political economy, religion, and culture.

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