Prophetic Feminist Pedagogy in the Dancer: Gendered Suffering, Islamic Ethics and the Education of Moral Imagination

This study examines Ahmad Tohari’s Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk and Bekisar Merah to formulate a concept of prophetic feminist pedagogy grounded in women’s bodily experience. Rather than treating the female body as a passive cultural object, the study positions it as an epistemic locus through which moral meanings are produced, contested and reimagined. Using qualitative textual analysis informed by theories of embodiment, gender performativity and prophetic imagination, the research analyzes how bodily suffering becomes a site for ethical reflection within the narrative structure of the novels. The findings reveal three interrelated epistemic processes: wound, agency and moral imagination. First, the wounds experienced by Srintil and Lasi expose the failure of customary norms, religious morality and capitalist aesthetics to protect women’s dignity. Second, these bodily experiences generate forms of agency that interrupt dominant gender scripts and challenge social definitions imposed on women’s bodies. Third, the emergence of moral imagination enables the characters—and readers—to envision alternative ethical horizons beyond systems that commodify or regulate the female body. Through this process, Tohari’s fiction functions not only as a representation of gender injustice but also as a pedagogical space in which ethical values are tested through lived bodily experience. This study contributes to feminist literary criticism and Indonesian literary studies by proposing that prophetic feminist pedagogy can be conceptualized as an educational model where the legitimacy of moral values is verified through women’s embodied experiences.