| Session 34 | Queer Femininities |
| Panel Members: Cindy García, Michelle Heffner Hayes, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley | |
| Neglected Imaginations: Unwieldy and Strange Femininities | |
The three scholars on this panel have begun to develop frameworks to imagine the neglected spaces of queer femininity in order to address how women, strange and unwieldy, have created and performed alternatives to hegemonic orderings of racialized gender. We consider historically what has not been documented, methodologically what has not been articulated, and choreographically what has not been allowed. The three presentations explore how dancers play with and undermine received choreographies of womanness, moving against the current of dominant imaginations of femininity: un-prettying poses in flamenco, de-heterosexualizing partnering in salsa clubs, and dirtying dances in backyard birthday parties. The consequences for these queer performances vary from arm-poking to harassment to colonial police intervention; but enactments of hegemonic femininities, which risk strangulating these queerly racialized, sexualized, and classed subjects, threaten differently violent consequences that dancers refuse to accept. What, these papers ask, creates the conditions for such unwieldy femininities to emerge and persist? What are the uneasy negotiations that take place between leaders and followers, partiers and police, performers and audiences that make these queer presentations possible and provocative? How does reading for female performers’ strategies of roughness—their enactments of queerness, disruption, coarseness, conflict—counteract the flattening effects of discourses of global culture? |
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| Cindy Garcia | Offensive Missteps: The Performance of Queer Salsa Femininity |
| This paper considers the performances of queer Latina-ness in Los Angeles dance clubs. While many salseras in Los Angeles heterosexual nightclub hierarchies infuse their performances with standardized speedy spins, stylized arm gestures, and sequins to create themselves as desirable dance partners, other women practice alternative femininities. At a club with a primarily immigrant clientele from Mexico and Central America, I will consider the parallels between two women who dance together without inviting men to join them and another who practices participant observation that focuses on women. What emerges is the importance of being armed with a racialized queer methodology in order to counteract the pressures of the club’s heterosexual choreography that continuously derails the ethnographic project and interrupts encounters among women. | |
| Michelle Heffner Hayes | “Somos Anti-Guapas:” Against Beauty in Contemporary Flamenco |
| An analysis of performances by three different bailaoras, Belén Maya, Pastora Galván and Rocío Molina demonstrates the ways in which contemporary female flamenco dancers negotiate the exotic stereotype of Mérimée’s Carmen as well as the idealized image of Spanish femininity and beauty that pervades “traditional” flamenco. These choreographic readings are situated between comments shared by the artists in interviews and the critical response to their work. The dialogue reveals the ways in which contemporary flamencas speak very pointedly to the representations of their exoticism, as well as their struggles to use flamenco as a language to achieve an intelligibility beyond a heteronormative construction of appropriate femininity. Their experimental steps carve out a space for “authority” in the narratives—choreographic, written and spoken—that threaten to contain or constrain their performance. | |
| Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley | Dancing with Fayalobi: Women Performing Hybrid Sexuality in Paramaribo, Suriname |
| Through dance, Caribbean theorists argue, enslaved Afro-Caribbeans enacted complex, supple, dislocated, and reassembled anti-colonial worldviews, recorded and carried in their bodies. But—focused on performances of racial hybridity—critics rarely engage how gender is queerly dislocated and reassembled in these same movements. This paper revises these neglected imaginations by asking how the danced rituals of Surinamese women who love women reinvent the Caribbean racialized, gendered, and sexualized body, and how their movement vocabulary reflects and contests regional imaginations of femininity. Specifically, I focus on literal and figurative uses of the flower fayalobi (fire love) in the danced exchanges of Surinamese women who love women at the community celebration of the birthday party, where women enter dancing, singing, and carrying bouquets for female lovers. I read these performances as active theorizing of Caribbean women’s sexuality as a site of Creolization: that is, a queer or eccentric site that moves, dances, plays in dialogue with multiple regional histories. | |
| Dr. Cindy García is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities where she is also an affiliate faculty member in Chicano Studies. Her research interests include the performance of Latina/o-ness in urban libidinal economies and practices of racialization in the United States. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Un/Sequined Corporealities and the Deterritorialization of Salsa that addresses the politics of gendered performances of Mexican-ness, Latinidad, and belonging in Los Angeles salsa clubs. |
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| Michelle Heffner Hayes, a dancer, choreographer and dance scholar, holds a Ph.D. in Dance History and Theory from UC-Riverside. Following more than a decade as a curator and director of organizations devoted to multidisciplinary performance and the commissioning of new work, she joined the faculty of the University of Kansas in 2006, where she teaches modern dance, improvisation, dance history and flamenco. Her forthcoming book Flamenco Histories: Exoticism and the Dancing Body, will be published by McFarland & Company in 2009. | |
| Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley is an assistant professor in the departments of English and African American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her forthcoming book, Thiefing Sugar: Reading Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (Duke University Press), excavates and explores Dutch-, English-, and French-language Caribbean women’s texts between 1900 and 1990, tracing how their queering of landscape-as-female beloved metaphors imagines a poetics and erotics of decolonization. | |
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