Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java

by Henry Spiller

In West Java, Indonesia, all it takes is a woman’s voice and a drum beat to make a man get up and dance. Every day, men there—be they students, pedicab drivers, civil servants, or businessmen—breach ordinary standards of decorum and succumb to the rhythm at village ceremonies, weddings, political rallies, and nightclubs. The music the men dance to varies from traditional gong ensembles to the contemporary pop known as dangdut, but they consistently dance with great enthusiasm. In Erotic Triangles, Henry Spiller draws on decades of ethnographic research to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing that Sundanese men use dance to explore and enact contradictions in their gender identities.

Framing the three crucial elements of Sundanese dance—the female entertainer, the drumming, and men’s sense of freedom—as a triangle, Spiller connects them to a range of other theoretical perspectives, drawing on thinkers from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lévi-Strauss, and Freud to Euclid. By granting men permission to literally perform their masculinity, Spiller ultimately concludes, dance provides a crucial space for both reinforcing and resisting orthodox gender ideologies.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Carol Colfer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fascinating, if mildly bizarre book. I am studying masculinity, including in Indonesia, so was delighted to find this book and quite curious about its contents. I'd lived for many years in Sundaland, but knew nothing about men and Sundanese dancing. This author maintains/argues that dancing is very important to Sundanese masculinity. He posits three social equivalents to the sides of a triangle: the men dancing (in a way that is both constrained and free), the ronggeng (a beautiful woman who represents both a goddess and a whore), and the drummer (whose music sometimes follows and sometimes leads the male dancers). Some dances are linked with the one-time aristocracy and others with common people, though both seem to exhibit this triangular quality. He explores several different kinds of dances, discussing how they've changed over the years, how social norms and government policies affect them. There is a lot of very technical, musical knowledge required to understand one or two chapters (which I do not have); and there was one chapter that explored the idea of comparisons between the triangles' angles and social phenomena. That one seemed to be going a bit far into imagination-land, so I didn't read it carefully. But I did find the whole book quite interesting and stimulating of ideas about masculinity. It's a good book for gender specialists especially to read, but probably also of great interest for those in musical and dance fields.