updated 12 Jul 2026
Beta, A. R. (2025). Making Piety Visible: Indonesian Religious Influencers Performing Success and Modesty. In J. Xu, G. Donnar, & D. Garg (Eds.), Asian Celebrity and Digital Media (pp. 197–208). Hong Kong University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.34206972.17
This chapter explores the presentations of success by modest fashion designers who are also religious influencers in Indonesia, particularly how performances of the ‘perfect’ (McRobbie 2015), play out in a hypermediated Muslim society like Indonesia. It examines how gendered expectations, religious practices, and digital culture have encouraged a reconfigured focus on feminine perfection.
I argue that the celebration and ‘celebrification’ of young Muslim women’s commercial and career success promote and condition limited roles as citizens participating in public life, and point to the urgency of critically assessing public presentations of modesty and success as mediated on social media platforms.
Beta, A. R. (2024). Girls’ Digital Citizenship Elsewhere. In S. Mazzarella (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies (pp. 131–142). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367821890
This concept of the elsewhere developed in book chapter is the basis of my current book project, Empowerment Elsewhere.
This chapter explores the preliminary findings of a project based on focus group dicussions (FGDs) with young feminists in Indonesia. The chapter begins by exploring young feminist digital citizenship alongside a conceptualisation of the elsewhere, drawn from my discussions with the participants and my interpretations of their digital diary entries.
The elsewhere makes use of the notion of place offered by feminist geographer Doreen Massey (1994, 1998) to understand social media activism and feminist youth in addition to the outside (Bae-Dimitriadis, 2017).
This chapter also discusses affective solidarity (Hemmings, 2012; Keller et al., 2018) to highlight the significance of the feelings and emotions emergent in the discussions and diary entries of the young feminists. Affect was clearly central to many of the motivations, missions, and advocacies, as well as the continuous learning processes of the young feminists.
Beta, A. R. (2024). Young Women and Identity Formation on Social Media: Lessons from Indonesia. In J. Wyn, H. Cahill, & H. Cuervo (Eds.), Handbook of Children and Youth Studies (pp. 1–13). Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4451-96-3_123-1
Social media, smartphones, tablets, and various devices generate new techniques, rituals, and different practices of self-construction. For young women, social media platforms facilitate the process of learning about and negotiate their sense of self from peers and other users.
A part of the second edition of Handbook of Children and Youth Studies, a foundational reference for scholars of children and youth studies, this chapter explores post-structuralist approaches to identity and subject formation and then moves to look into two case studies on young women and collective identity politics online. Drawing on studies of Indonesian young women, this chapter suggests that studies on youth identity online should be open to differences, ambiguity, and contradictions.
Beta, A. R. (2024). Religious influencers and socially mediated cultural politics. In M. M. Skoric & N. Pang (Eds.), Research Handbook on Social Media and Society (pp. 58–69). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800377059.00014
This chapter addresses how scholars can understand and examine the growing number of religious influencers, not just in Indonesia but in other parts of the world, to better understand how religion and online representations of piety are significant culturally and politically.
The study of religious influencers should be mindful of the dynamic configurations of religiosity and piety, gendered dimensions and articulations of the self, the relationship between social media platforms and neoliberal logic, as well as the discourses around political subjectivity, amongst many other elements, scopes, and milieus. An approach to studying religious influencers needs to be flexible and keenly aware of and responsive to the current conjuncture of contemporary cultural politics within which the influencers are temporarily located.
Beta, A. R. (2022). Fight the Patriarchy: Digital Feminist Public Pedagogy and Post-feminist Media Culture in Indonesia. In P. J. Burke, J. Coffey, R. Gill, & A. Kanai (Eds.), Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism: Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies (pp. 211–228). Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350194625
This chapter looks into how young feminists in Indonesia have actively deployed Instagram as a platform of ‘digital feminist public pedagogy’ (Mendes et al. 2019; Retallack et al. 2016).
It suggests the necessity of interrogating the historical and political settings within which the digital feminist public pedagogy platform is located to understand feminism as it is practiced by young people beyond the Western-centric narratives of post-feminist media culture (Gill 2007, 2017; McRobbie 2009).
The chapter focuses on a popular young feminist Instagram account called Lawan Patriarki (@lawanpatriarki). It defers generalizing the label ‘postfeminist’ to the young feminist social media accounts. Instead, I propose that we look into how cultural, historical and socio-political settings condition how they do feminism.
Annisa R. Beta 