Chapter 6 - The Marital and the Martial: Gendering, Killing, Oscillating

Summary

Cross-regional perspectives

‘There is in truth no male, no female’

In a recent interview, Didik Nini Thowok, the famous Javanese transvestite dancer, said of his performances:

For me, I never think about who is behind the mask. I only see the character in the mask. … When a woman dances the male mask, she is transformed – it is mystical. And when a man dresses up as a woman, in bedhaya, we don't always recognise that the dancer is male – it is mystical. He, too, is transformed. I believe a better term [to transgender] is ‘mystical gender’. I plan using this term.

(Ross 2005, 226)

Didik refers here to his own work as male sexed dancer performing female roles, a practice that both continues and advances ‘traditional’ Javanese court dance practices, according to which the genders of the performer and the character being portrayed do not always coincide (see also Soedarsono 1969). Such cross-gender dances, as well as gender-crossing ones, in which the gender of the character changes in certain key episodes of the story, manifest an understanding of gender as unstable and always in motion. In the present chapter, I claim that this condition of mobility and mutability that Didik describes as ‘mystical’ is informed and facilitated by a concept of the person as androgynous.