Stunning Males and Powerful Females: Gender and Tradition in East Javanese Dance by Christina Sunardi (review)

Christina Sunardi's Stunning Males and Powerful Females adds to a growing body of literature at the intersections of gender, performance, and music. Her choice of Indonesia, specifically a small city in East Java called Malang, as a site to explore gender, power, and dance proves especially productive. Indonesia is not only historically rich in the performing arts; it is also a country where strict conceptions of gender roles are policed through local customs and mass media and by state and religious authorities. Conversely, the politics of identity and gender are continuously negotiated in both public and private spheres, especially in the performing arts. Java also has an extensive history of cross-gender dance. In the broader context of female and male impersonation in theater, such as wayang wong in the Yogyakarta court, ludruk in East Java, and ritual and social dances like seblang and gandrung in Banyuwangi, the dance traditions described in this book fit quite well.

The book opens with a preface describing various locales where Sunardi studied and observed the performance of drumming, dancing, and singing. She observes that the importance of "embodying femininity" is not merely for visual impact but also for how the power of femaleness and of dance performance contributes to Indonesian ideas about tradition, history, and identity (iv–xiv). This premise drives her study of how male and female performers expressed, embodied, and reproduced female power in East Javanese dance and music traditions. In the process of studying performance, Sunardi intriguingly finds a self-reflexive awareness of how her own sexed, mixed-race African American body shaped her fieldwork interactions and conclusions. Sunardi explains how, as a dark-skinned American whose complexion was similar to that of many Javanese people, difference was mitigated because she was perceived as "less foreign" than white Americans (xxvi–xxvii). Sunardi's ethnic background (among other characteristics) led some performers to be more comfortable with her, perhaps believing she would be more sympathetic to their East Javanese subaltern perspectives on music and dance relative to the central Javanese traditions, which are more prestigious (and more researched). Her identity as a researcher was further complicated because some Indonesians believed her to be a man who dressed and lived as a female (waria), based in part on her interest in cross-gender performance combined with her height, broad shoulders, and athletic build. Sunardi's discussion of mixed-race identity and misrecognition suggests further areas to explore, especially as nonwhite and mixed-race researchers increasingly complicate and confound local preconceptions and stereotypes of the Western researcher.

The main body of the book consists of six chapters in which Sunardi examines East Javanese cross-gender dance traditions like Beskalan and Ngremo. Each chapter produces a theme supporting the argument that performance contributes to cultural processes where gender and sex boundaries are continuously negotiated in ways affecting how maleness and femaleness are performed. Drawing from research in gender studies, ethnomusicology, and anthropology, chapter 1 describes how ideas such as "contingent masculinity" (Blackwood 2010) and "female masculinity" (Halberstam 1998) influenced her approach. Sunardi examines the ways performers in East Java expressed and demarcated femaleness and maleness based on classifications of dance into particular gendered styles. She suggests that although gendered dance styles form the basis of East Javanese dance, most performers understood that a person's ability to perform a gendered style did not map directly onto biological sex. Her explanation of how competence was assessed according to a dancer's personality or disposition effectively addresses how crossgender dance blurred gender boundaries both onstage and in the quotidian lives of males performing "female dances." The chapter concludes by addressing the relationship between Islam...