In this wide-ranging and intriguing study of Indonesian arts, especially those that appeared during the first 10 years following Suharto's fall, Marshall Clark looks at diverse genres: the novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Ayu Utami; films — some art house, some more popular — by a number of important new directors; and works by a controversial poet, Binhad Nurrohmat. In each case, he asks how men are represented and what we can learn in light of those representations about contemporary Indonesian attitudes toward masculinity. In particular, he wishes to learn whether conventional expectations of the idealised male are undergoing re-evaluation. Has there been any loosening of the screws that keep Indonesian males fastened to a New Order take on gender, wherein men are in control of themselves and everyone else, and women are subservient, supportive and focused on the family? Or to say the same in a different idiom, has the radical questioning that the end of the New Order occasioned reduced the power of Javanist patriarchy and heteronormativity?

Clark frequently invokes Bakhtin as he examines materials that deal much more frankly and provocatively with sexuality and ‘lower bodily strata’ than has been customary in recent Indonesian culture. Like Bakhtin, he celebrates the anti-authoritarian tenor of what comes from the ‘marketplace’: the way that exchange of all sorts challenges the order and stasis of institutionalised power. Yet there is a risk here, one that Clark does not completely avoid, of taking representations of the lowly or non-normative as critiques of the high and mighty or the normative, when the point may simply be to emphasise their differences. Pramoedya, certainly, challenged hierarchical assumptions at their foundations. Yet many of Clark's other examples, particularly those from film, are equivocal. As Clark admits, many popular films reflect men's sense of being under threat from assertive feminism. But they do so by reaffirming stereotypes of women's baleful power and retelling tales of men's violent responses. Directors who fall back on these standard tropes may simply, and cynically, exploit young male spectators' taste for such violence. But their films' popularity suggests no rethinking of conventional (and destructive) masculinist attitudes.

Clark's claims are modest. He phrases his interpretations as suggestions, not definitive pronouncements, about current debates concerning masculinity in Indonesia, and such modesty is becoming. Readers should understand in any case that this is a work of cultural studies, not sociology. That is, it uses techniques from literary criticism and film analysis rather than ethnographic methods to reflect on current developments in ideas about masculinity in Indonesia. Fair enough: Indonesian artists, as Clark notes, have long played an important role as activists in political and cultural matters. Their influence makes it all the more important to attend to what they are saying about the state of things. Yet it is hard not to wonder about the impact of artists whose work's appeal is often extremely restricted.

Rather than appealing to a broad swathe of the Indonesian population, many of Clark's materials address a narrow band of highly educated, cosmopolitan people. As Clark (following Meier) notes, Pramoedya's novels attract a great deal of interest outside Indonesia but go largely ignored within it. Difficult, complex novels like Utami's Saman, and films such as Kuldesak, provide intriguing alternative takes on masculinity, as Clark makes clear. But do they suggest that Indonesians outside the rarefied circles of these creators and their audiences have really grown interested in challenging, or even reflecting upon, conventional ideas about masculinity? These people may represent a vanguard, a small but influential circle whose ideas and imaginings will eventually become widespread. Yet Clark seems to think that their work can be used as a diagnostic of ideas abroad in Indonesian society today. This strikes me as optimistic, although I sympathise with Clark's hope that Indonesia's current cultural tensions will result in greater flexibility in gender roles.

Thoughtful and informed by a thorough knowledge of contemporary Indonesian cultural expression, this book constitutes an important meditation on the contradictory and inchoate manifestations that thinking about masculinity currently takes in Indonesia. If the conclusions Clark reaches are tentative, their provisional status reflects the fact that such ideas are always in flux, and never more so than in a society undergoing shifts as fundamental as those that Indonesia has experienced since Suharto's fall.