Indispensable expulsion: Care in Indonesian early childhood education policy

Abstract

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.