Soma as Commodity: An Analysis of the Double Exploitation of Women in Pangku (2025)

Abstract

This study examines the multimedia representation of structural economic constraints driving the commodification of women's bodies (Soma) in the informal sector along Java’s North Coast Route (Pantura). The research employs a qualitative approach using Critical Semiotic Analysis, drawing on Roland Barthes’ framework of denotation, connotation, and myth. The primary data consist of verbal and visual signs from the film Pangku, including dialogue, settings, body gestures, and narrative structures. These signs are interpreted through Materialist Feminism, Social Reproduction Theory, and the Constrained Choices framework to reveal how capitalism, patriarchy, and informality shape women’s labor and agency. The findings reveal that Sartika’s participation in kopi pangku labor is not a free choice but a structurally constrained survival strategy driven by poverty, gendered labor markets, and the absence of state protection. Her body and emotions are commodified as productive resources in the informal economy, while her reproductive labor as a single mother remains unpaid and socially devalued. The study identifies a condition of double exploitation, where surplus value is extracted simultaneously from affective, sexual, and caregiving labor. Additionally, symbolic violence operates through emotional debt, moral stigma, and narratives of benevolence that normalize exploitation and erode social capital across generations. The study concludes that Pangku represents women’s exploitation not as an individual moral failure but as a systemic outcome of patriarchal capitalism. Sartika’s experience demonstrates how constrained choices produce the illusion of autonomy while continuously relocating exploitation from public production spaces to domestic and intimate spheres. The film exposes how informal labor regimes and patriarchal family structures mutually reinforce women’s subordination specifically analysing how cinematographic codes transform labor into a visual commodity