Masculinity under pressure: A feminist comparative reading of Navis’s “Jodoh” and Sani’s “Sahabat Saya Cordiaz”

Studies of gender representation in Indonesian literature have so far been dominated by textual analyses of works by female authors or of women as objects of representation, so the construction of the masculine subject in the canonical works of male authors has not been widely  explored.  This  study  %ills  that  gap  by  examining  how  masculinity  is  discursively constructed in two short stories by authors of the 1950s generation: *Jodoh* by AA Navis and *Sahabat Saya Cordiaz* by Asrul Sani. Using a feminist comparative reading approach, this textual-comparative  study  applies  Mills’s  feminist  stylistic  framework—including  lexical choice, transitivity, focalization, and reader positioning—as its primary analytical tools. The results  of  the  analysis  show  that  both  texts  represent  masculinity  under  pressure,  yet through  different  social  mechanisms.  Navis  constructs  masculinity  within  the  collective framework of Minangkabau tradition, while Asrul Sani portrays masculinity as individual alienation  and  an  identity  crisis  amid  the  turmoil  of  post-independence  Indonesia. Comparatively,  both  authors  indirectly  destabilize  hegemonic  masculinity  and  reveal  the fragility  of male subjectivity  within  the social  imagination  of mid-20th-century  Indonesia. These %indings shed light on the gender ideology embedded in the 1950s literary canon while demonstrating how feminist comparative reading can function as a critical literacy strategy in language and literature education. This study contributes theoretically by expanding the application  of  feminist  stylistics  to  texts  by  male  authors;  historically  and  literarily  by reconstructing   the   gender   ideology   of   a   generation   of   canonical   writers;   and methodologically by offering a model of feminist comparative reading that can be replicated in Indonesian literary studies.