(Re)Writing Srikandi: How Tradition Gives Performance Power for Women in Indonesia

Srikandi is a transgender warrior woman from the Mahabharata , a popular source for stories in a wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) performance in Indonesia. As a mythic character rooted in tradition, Srikandi represents contradictory constructs of sexuality and gender for women in Indonesia. Srikandi might be transgender, strong, and assertive, but in some versions, she also is a loyal wife. Gender and sexuality in Indonesia must be understood as incredibly diverse and influenced both by local traditions and ideology and global modernity. Also, Indonesians have long been suspicious of Western influence over gender and sexuality in Indonesia. I argue that these transnational paradigms of gender and sexuality can be framed as a clash between tradition and modernity, which can be explored in performance. In this paper, I use the idea of palimpsest to explore the different ways Srikandi enforces and challenges hegemonic ideals of gender and sexuality in Indonesia in order to articulate how Indonesian sexuality, especially that of women, must be uniquely considered in relation to tradition.