Nyai Roro Kidul: Water, Gender, and the Politics of Sacred Sovereignty in Javanese Cosmology

Abstract

This article examines Ratu Laut Selatan, Nyai Roro Kidul, as a Javanese cosmological text that binds water, gender, and sovereignty within an interconnected regime of meaning. It argues that water functions not merely as an ecological medium but as a cosmological infrastructure of power legitimising rule through the sacred union between the king and the sea queen. By situating the Southern Ocean as a sacred and feminine domain, the study reveals how the feminisation of water creates a dialectic in which the female body of water is both alluring and threatening, sustaining patriarchal authority while expressing feminine agency that resists control.Integrating hydro-cosmology and hydrofeminism, the analysis interprets rituals, taboos, colour symbolism, and natural phenomena as political signs. The Merapi, Keraton, and Ocean axis is read as a dynamic framework of sovereignty balancing human, natural, and spiritual realms. Within this configuration, water emerges as a gendered space of power, generating obedience, fear, and devotion through ceremonial and oral traditions that delineate what is permitted and forbidden. At the local level, the study demonstrates how Javanese water cosmology shapes ideas of sovereignty through nature and feminine symbolism. At the global level, it enriches hydropolitics by introducing a paradigm of the sea as a locus of power and feminine sacrality, rarely explored in social science and humanities. Reading Nyai Roro Kidul as a hydropolitical text, this article calls for expanding water politics theory to include cultural and cosmological dimensions in understanding how water organises ecology, economy, and the imagination of sovereignty.

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