The subjection and discursive recalibration: a Foucauldian Discourse Analysis of Queen Pandhansari in Serat Centhini the 1st volume

Women’s subordination in Javanese literature has long been shaped by patriarchal arrangements that regulate gendered conduct. Previous work by the authors using Sara Mills’ Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) examined female character in Serat Centhini through patterns of narrative positioning and communicative roles. Building on that foundation, the present study adopts Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) to examine how discourse itself produces and organizes, then governs the conditions under which obedience, authority, and intervention become possible. Focusing on Queen Pandhansari, the article analyzes how power/knowledge, subjectivation, and processes of discursive recalibration operate not through open confrontation but through regulated speech, affective governance, and the repetition of normative roles. Whereas CDA foregrounds representational dynamics, FDA illuminates the productive mechanisms through which submission is rendered virtuous, and action becomes intelligible within Javanese patriarchal regimes of truth. Two principal discursive formations emerge: (1) cultural and familial vocabularies that normalize women’s domestication through the circulation of everyday norms, and (2) gendered subject positions that enable limited intervention through discursive recalibration rather than refusal. By doing so, this study advances understandings of power in classical Javanese texts and demonstrates the value of Foucauldian analytics as a complementary approach to feminist discourse research in literary studies.