Ecological and feminine exploitation in Ahmad Tohari’s Bekisar Merah: A materialist ecofeminist perspective of Ariel Salleh

This research examines the novel Bekisar Merah Ahmad Tohari's work as a material object using the materialist ecofeminist theory developed by Ariel Salleh as a formal object. This theory highlights the link between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature in a patriarchal capitalist system. This study uses a qualitative descriptive method with literary content analysis techniques to interpret the symbolic relationship between the female body, the agrarian environment, and the surrounding socio-economic structures. The results of the study show that Bekisar Merah presents the dialectic between the female body (Lasi) and the body of the earth (Karangsoga) as two entities that are both victims of exploitation by capitalism and patriarchy. However, both also function as spaces of moral and spiritual resistance through an ethics of care, loyalty, and ecological empathy. Tohari constructs a critique of modernity that alienates humans from nature, while at the same time offering an ecological ethic grounded in local spiritual values, mutual cooperation, and agrarian morality. Thus, this study confirms that through a materialist ecofeminist perspective, the novel Bekisar Merah can be understood as a narrative ecoethical (environmentally friendly) that unites social criticism, environmental ethics, and a distinctive Indonesian spirituality. This finding expands the global ecocritical discourse through a reading based on local Nusantara wisdom.