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

Confirming the date for submitting my review of Christina Sunardi’s Stunning Males and Powerful Females could not be more auspicious, given that it coincides with the fiftieth anniversary issue of Indonesia (volume 100). Like new leaves on an old tree, Sunardi’s project reveals just how much scholarship on Indonesia has transformed in the interim, while gently nudging readers to double back to the diverse roots of that fifty-year-old tree. Illustrative of the diversity, the journal’s very first issue incorporated articles on “Prayer and Play in Aceh,” notes on a Javanese gamelan recording and an Islamic school in Java, letters from an anthropologiSst in Kalimantan, a guide to available source materials on Aceh, two translations—a short story by Ajip Rosidi and an early account of the independence movement by the communist leader Semaun—as well as documents relating to the September 30, 1965, Movement.¹ It is, however, Ben Anderson’s essay on “Languages of Indonesian Politics”—especially his reference to the importance of the riddling pun to the Javanese Islamic tradition as representing a “‘capsulated’ intuition”—that I would like to tap into here as I turn to the rich complexities of embodied knowledge explored in Sunardi’s long-term ethnographic encounters with gender and tradition in Malang, East Java.²

Situating herself provocatively as both scholar and performer of the traditional dance and music of Beskalan and Ngremo, Sunardi makes an important contribution to ethnomusicology, dance ethnology, and queer and gender studies. Her work reveals how performers continue to negotiate and renegotiate the porous boundaries of sex and gender. Moving beyond actual performance, Sunardi investigates the dynamic spiritual and personal ways in which men, women, and waria (men who dress and live as women) access the subtle and magnetically charged power of female bodies. As I embark on this timely review, and in the interest of introducing a riddling leaf-related pun, I will interject here that “I have jaka leaves (madon jaka).” Jaka is the sugar palm. Jaka leaves are called ron in Javanese, but the Balinese verb makaronan means “to confirm a date.” This has no direct relation to the older Javanese reference to the ron of the jaka tree, but it does point to an intuitive grasping toward an energized and highly specific plant in a natural locale, where a person might access and embody the feminine sweetness of sugar palm (jaka) while honoring a commitment in time (ron). In the interest of jumping scale, this playful, linguistically oblique confection, however far-fetched it may seem to readers, will set the stage for my review of Sunardi’s sensuously nuanced account of the highly transformative landscape of East Javanese gender ideology as it is negotiated through the confirmed continuities and shifting partnerships of the researcher’s body as both dancer and musician. On page 3, Sunardi draws on Nancy Cooper’s use of the term centripetality to specify a form of “attracting power” that she associates with women.³ Soedjatmoko suggests “a central concept in the Javanese traditional view of life is the direct relationship between the state of a person’s inner self and his capacity to control the environment.”⁴ As I proceed, I would like to bring Cooper’s concept of centripetal movement into a tight embrace with Anderson’s riddling pun as ‘“capsulated’ intuition,” suggesting that Sunardi’s text maps a host of these embodied moments where dancers and musicians are able to effectively harness feminine power through their capacity to secure, repeatedly through performance, a sense of place. This is an embodied state, requiring a sensual constitution (rasa), to which we will return by way of conclusion.

To her credit, Sunardi accepts sensuousness in scholarship, dispensing with the conceit in which mind and body, self and other, are considered separate.⁵ Physical/cognitive/emotional/spiritual knowledge—embodied through a dancer’s and/or a musician’s behavior—has until...