Born: 15 November 1979, Indonesia
Died: NA
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Fire Dragon Feminism: Asian Migrant Women’s Tales of Migration, Coloniality and Racial Capitalism by Quah Ee Ling (2025), republished with permission from the author.
Intan Paramaditha, Indonesian of Sumatran-Sundanese heritage, anticolonial feminist academic and writer based in Australia, is one of the co-founders of Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (The School of Women’s Thought). Sekolah Pemikiran Perempuan (SPP) sets out to ‘situate Third World women as knowing subjects and engage in “epistemic disobedience” to the colonial, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal knowledge system’ (SPP 2022). What is inspiring is that SPP, informed by decolonial approach, aims to ‘disrupt not through a formal “school” but through guerrilla actions and interventions in various forms of knowledge exchange fora such as classes, lectures, workshops, and broadcasts’ (SPP 2022). The organization organizes women living in different islands of Indonesian archipelago and broader Indonesian diaspora to excavate, collect and document their thoughts, knowledges and histories. Primarily, the collective’s mission is to centre ‘women across cultures, geographical locations and generations’ in the Indonesian archipelago and diaspora as ‘valid producers of knowledge, challenging the Eurocentric knowledge system and the exclusion of women from local knowledge institutions, such as the state, customs, and religion’ (SPP 2022). SPP also releases their manifesto to challenge dominant heteronormative family genealogy and constrictive pathway of ‘born-study-work-get married-have children-take care of husband-die’ for women in Indonesian society. Instead, SPP’s manifesto proposes an anti-colonial feminist understanding of family and a ‘practice of living together, without violence, without marginalising people who are deemed different … of care and love, characterised by openness and willingness to adapt, determined by consensus among those who are willing to take part in it’ (SPP 2022). SPP wants ‘everyone involved [to] have authority over themselves, and believe that a more just future for humans and the universe is something we must absolutely fight for together’ (SPP 2022). Besides the groundbreaking, ground-up grassroots anti-coloniality feminism activism with SPP, Intan Paramaditha is actively challenging and breaking down the limits of colonial knowledge production in the literary world and academy.
As part of taking an anti-colonial feminist approach in her literary, academic and activism works, Paramaditha (2024) wants to rethink her personal cannon to consider the exemplary works of women ofcolour in the Global South that often remained hidden, disregarded and erased. The author of The Wandering, ‘a novel about the condition of ghostliness experienced by travellers and migrants: in between homes, more often homeless, neither nor there’, she professes, ‘I am not writing alone. I am writing with witches – those who have gone before, those who are brewing, and those who will rise’ (Paramaditha 2024). She urges us to rethink our literary influences as a form of ‘border crossing: the act of questioning fixed ways of looking, the act of de-naturalising categories, and the act of challenging the boundaries of the self ’ (Paramaditha 2024). Informed by border thinking and decolonial feminist perspectives, Paramaditha (2024) wants us to actively ‘reclaim our literary lineage and stitch a tapestry of defiant voices’, ‘summon literary witches to traverse, defy erasure, and to borrow from, Gloria Anzaldúa, to rewrite the stories that others have miswritten’.