As I often like to say to students upon a course’s completion or when making graduation remarks, I hope that you are not satisfied. I hope that you have many questions remaining and continue learning, reading, observing, listening, researching, questioning, and thinking. It is my hope that some of the discussion questions and assignment ideas that follow might lead you to new research projects, which might someday become publications that advance scholarly and general understandings of gender.

The six artists I have foregrounded in this book are just a few of the many incredible individuals I was fortunate enough to meet, learn from, watch, hear about, and listen to over the course of my fieldwork in and visits to Malang. This book has focused on ways Djupri, Muliono, Mama Samsu, Muskayah, Tri Wahyuningtyas, and Sri Handayani fashioned femininities and made masculinities, exploring gender as a cultural construction that people continuously produce, reproduce, contest, challenge, alter, and so on—in short, negotiate. Through the analytical frameworks of gender performativity and intersectionality, this book has explored ways we can understand processes by and through which individuals negotiate gender through the performing arts and their lived experiences as artists in specific cultural contexts. In centering the lived experiences and perspectives of six dancers, I have presented some of the ways individuals contributed to the cultural production of gender on- and offstage as they navigated dominant norms in Malang, highlighting themes of onstage–offstage gender negotiations, gender fluidity, gender pluralism, and spirituality. I have argued that the production and representation of gender and place-based identity informed each other as dancers contributed to the production of Malangan styles of performance as distinct substyles within the cultural region of east Java.

Performers produced complex senses of gender, including male femininity, female masculinity, and contingent senses of gender. Something that has interested me is that male femininity and female masculinity are not entirely analogous. In many cases when males took on male femininity, they worked hard to pass as female, while when females took on female masculinity, they kept their womanliness visible. In other publications, which I invite you to explore, I have built from other scholars’ work to suggest that there is an underlying femaleness or female power in dances performed as cross-gender dances in Malang that is connected to centuries-old Indic notions (Becker, 1988, pp. 385, 388; 1991, p. 116; 1993, pp. 3, 8, 128; Hughes-Freeland, 1995, p. 198; Sunardi, 2015, p. 3; 2020, p. 454; 2022, p. 291). Indeed, I hope that you are inspired to continue to learn more about Javanese and Indonesian cultures, and the compelling, creative, and courageous ways people in various cultural and historical contexts around the world negotiate, navigate, and produce gender.