Contesting Gendered Norms: Women’s Night Work, Social Stigma, and Everyday Agency in Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

Women’s night work remains socially contested in communities where gendered expectations shape women’s mobility, public presence, and perceived moral responsibilities. This study examines how gendered norms surrounding women’s night work are constructed, reproduced through stigma and informal social control, and negotiated through everyday agency in an Eastern Indonesian community. Using an interpretive qualitative case study, the research draws on in-depth interviews, participant observation, and community narratives involving women engaged in night work in Dusun Telaga Kodok, Maluku, Eastern Indonesia. The findings show that women’s night work is interpreted not merely as an economic activity but through normative expectations concerning morality, respectability, family responsibility, and women’s appropriate presence in public space. Stigma is reproduced through gossip, suspicion, labeling, and everyday surveillance, yet women do not uniformly internalize these judgments. Instead, they exercise situated forms of agency by continuing to work, managing social reputations, negotiating familial and community expectations, and selectively accepting, adapting to, or rejecting prevailing norms. The study argues that night work constitutes an everyday arena in which gender norms are simultaneously reproduced and contested, generating gradual shifts toward more contextualized community perceptions. By linking stigma, informal social control, and everyday agency, the study contributes a Global South perspective to sociological understandings of gender, work, and social norm transformation.