Introduction

In The Adventures of Na Willa, a short collection of stories for children by Reda Gaudiama, the title character is a young multicultural girl growing up in the 1960s in a village in Indonesia. I start with her story to explore the idea of women’s literature as an adventure that engages with and depends on travel. Until she left her home to go to school, Na Willa could not escape the limitations of her gender and her ethnicity. Travel gave her freedom to trespass outside other's expectations and limitations.The rest of the introduction establishes stakes and methods of trespassing. After a brief introduction to the context of Indonesia and Indonesian women, I focus on defining "trespassing" as a subject and method. Finally, I will introduce how women artists and authors have often been received as either lesser and/or tokens of national rhetoric about gender equality to establish the stakes of the work by women that are the focus of my book. Like Na Willa, travel in their lives and work creates adventures of empowerment and identity.