In east Javanese dance traditions like Beskalan and Ngremo, musicians and dancers negotiate gender through performances where males embody femininity and females embody masculinity.

Christina Sunardi ventures into the regency of Malang in east Java to study and perform with dancers. Through formal interviews and casual conversation, Sunardi learns about their lives and art. Her work shows how performers continually transform dance traditions to negotiate, and renegotiate, the boundaries of gender and sex—sometimes reinforcing lines of demarcation, sometimes transgressing them, and sometimes doing both simultaneously. But Sunardi's investigation moves beyond performance. It expands notions of the spiritual power associated with female bodies and feminine behavior, and the ways women, men, and waria (males who dress and live as female) access the magnetic power of femaleness.

A journey into understudied regions and ideas, Stunning Males and Powerful Females reveals how performances seemingly fixed by tradition are instead dynamic environments for cultural negotiation and change surrounding questions of sex and gender.

| Cover Title Contents Note on Conventions Preface: Inspiration Acknowledgments 1. Aims and Approaches 2. Maintaining Female Power through Male Style Dance 3. Negotiating Pressures in Terms of Gender: Male Dancers and Female Style Dance 4. Constructing Gender and Tradition through Senses of History 5. Maintaining the Representation of Female Power through Beskalan Putri 6. Where Tradition, Power, and Gender Intersect: Performer Interactions Afterword Notes Glossary Works Cited Index | Co-winner, Philip Brett Award, LBTQ Study Group of the American Musicological Society (AMS), 2016. Honorable mention, Alan Merriam Prize, 2016. — LBTQ Study Group of the American Musicological Society (AMS)
Co-winner, Philip Brett Award, LBTQ Study Group of the American Musicological Society (AMS), 2016. Honorable mention, Alan Merriam Prize, 2016. — Alan Merriam Prize, Society for Ethnomusicology
|Christina Sunardi is an associate professor of music at the University of Washington, Seattle.