1 Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting October 2, 2003 Relieving Stress, Resisting Desire: Gendered Exchange at Jakartan Dangdut Performances Jeremy Wallach Bowling Green State University jeremyw@.bgsu.edu The scholarly encounters between gender studies and Southeast Asian studies have been extraordinarily fruitful, particularly for ethnomusicologists of Southeast Asia. I want to suggest that the valuable insights contained in recent studies and edited volumes by researchers such as Suzanne Brenner, Nancy Cooper, Sarah Weiss, Aihwa Ong, Michael Peletz , Laurie Sears, Anna Tsing, Sean Williams, and others derive in part from the ability of these authors to reflect productively on the contrast between two radically different gender ideologies that tend to compete with one another in contemporary Southeast Asian societies. In simplified form, the first ideology views men and women as mutually hostile groups locked in an unending and unequal struggle for power, a struggle in which women’s bodies are objectified and made to serve a patriarchal order. The second gender ideology, on the other hand, regards men and women as comprising two halves of a complementary whole. In this view both groups ideally struggle to preserve harmony between the genders through actions in their respective spheres of influence. During the course of my fieldwork in Jakarta I found that residents of the Indonesian capital city were influenced by both ideological systems: patriarchal