Frances Gouda explores issues related to both Dutch and Indonesian women and their interactions with European men, in an effort to understand the "gendering" practices of colonial governance in the Dutch East Indies. She investigates the ways in which The Netherlands articulated and portrayed its unique colonial style to the outside world and specifically examines its governance of the Dutch East Indies represented at the "Exposition coloniale internationale" in Paris in 1931. Finally, she explores the controversial history of Dutch colonial culture in Indonesia as both "imagined" and "reimagined, " or glorified and vilified, in The Netherlands today.