Dangdut Beyond the Sex: Creating Intercorporeal Space through Nyawer Encounters in West Java, Indonesia

Abstract

Sexuality, morality and Islam have come to occupy an important place in Indonesia's national public debates, with the sexualisation of female performers of the popular dangdut genre often a central feature. Intercorporeal relationships through nyawer encounters, formed on stage between dangdut singer-dancers and dancing audience members, sometimes include sexually provocative interplay, and a direct and publicly visible money transfer from dancing audience members to performers often accompanies such interplay. As a result, national public debate in Indonesia, but also most academic work on dangdut performers, tends to reduce the subject matter around these female performers to conservative moralising and feminist discourses of exploitation or empowerment. Such debates overlook many of the performers' perspectives and experiences as singer-dancers, and do not adequately acknowledge the role of these performers in a creative intercorporeal process. This article demonstrates that nyawer encounters feature social practices that are usually neither exploitative nor immoral, nor solely empowering. Indeed, nyawer encounters involve a dialectical relationship between culturally embedded understandings of appropriate behaviour, which are subject to the specific cultural environment of dangdut performances in the local villages of West Java's north coast, and the rather fluid and dynamic virtues that evolve in the intercorporeal space created between performer and audience member. By exploring nyawer encounters through an approach that considers the embodied lived experiences of the performers, this article challenges the connection often made between nyawer encounters and immorality, revealing such encounters to be creative processes through which conventional values and codes of behaviours are negotiated.