| Session 39 | Interpreting Femininities |
| Angela Moe | Reclaiming the Feminine: Bellydancing as a Feminist Project |
| Bellydancing is largely misunderstood and stereotyped. Few realize that it is an expressive, ancient, and woman-centered genre of movement, rooted in Middle/Near Eastern folk tradition and culture. Not surprisingly, it has received scant scholarship despite its increasing popularity throughout the world. This paper offers a feminist critique of hegemonic understandings of bellydance, based upon ethnographic research on American women’s experiences. Findings are organized along five themes: discovery (of the dance and of self); healing (repair and respite from illness, injury and victimization); spirituality (connectivity to each other, a higher power, and divine femininity); sisterhood (community, specifically woman-space); and empowerment (omnipresent sense of pride and self-confidence). I argue that bellydance is too easily dismissed as a means through which women are objectified via patriarchal views of beauty, sexuality and performativity. These may be understood as byproducts of Western Orientalist renderings of the Middle/Near East, and contextualized within our contemporary anti-feminist society. | |
| Jessica Damon | Vai Sambar! American Meaning Making in Afro-Brazilian Dance |
| “Vai Sambar! American Meaning Making in Afro-Brazilian Dance” describes the interaction between an American community of dancers and the wave of Afro-Brazilian influence that entered that community. Through personal experience, academic research, community observation, and conversations, the author examines the role of samba and the religious dances of the orixás within a suburban white community, highlighting how meaning is changed and constructed based on cultural context. The author emphasizes how women in this community responded to the political, social, and sexual implications of a non-native dance form, and how their resulting self-identification as a community was transformed. The essay questions how Americans can locate themselves within the greater cultural context of samba and other Afro-Brazilian dance forms, not simply as cultural outsiders, but as women deeply connected to the unique American reality of these practices. | |
| Alexandra Kolb | Mata Hari: Fictions of Femininity and Exoticism |
The Dutch dancer Mata Hari (alias Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) has achieved an iconic status within 20th-century dance history, partly due to her execution as a German spy in 1917. Although she lacked significant dance training, she successfully performed her works, primarily in eclectic oriental styles, before European audiences. My discussion considers Mata Hari’s contributions against the backdrop of the pre-WWI European dance scene, filling obvious gaps in existing research. It specifically explores the ideological and aesthetic framework within which she was embedded as a female artist, in the context of related concurrent dance trends such as Ruth St Denis’s work, Loïe Fuller’s veil dances and nudist dance. Drawing on feminist theories such as Sylvia Bovenschen’s imagery of the female, orientalism and post-colonialism (Edward Said) together with dance analyses, the paper examines how Mata Hari’s on- and off-stage personae conformed to certain stereotyped images of women whilst also subverting social conventions. |
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| Angela M. Moe is Associate Professor of Sociology at Western Michigan University. Her research interests include violence against women and sociology of the body. Her work may be found in such journals as Violence Against Women, Women and Therapy, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and Women and Criminal Justice. She has served as president of the Midwest Sociologists for Women and Society; executive counselor for the American Society of Criminology, Division on Women and Crime; and founding member/deputy editor for the journal Feminist Criminology. Her CORD presentation is part of an ongoing ethnography on women’s healing through dance. | |
| Jessica Damon is a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Primarily a modern dancer and choreographer, she spent several years involved with the Brazilian dance community of Santa Cruz, California, where she became fascinated with Brazilian cultural forms. This paper represents her investigation into the problems and implications of being a “Brazilian dancer” in the United States. Jessica has danced professionally with Mel Wong, Anne Bluethenthal, Huckabay McAllister, RAWdance, and Dance Brazil. She will graduate in the Spring of ’09 with an MFA in Choreography and Performance and emphases in Somatic Studies and Dance for the Camera. | |
| Alexandra Kolb is the Chair of the Dance Studies programme at Otago University in New Zealand, having received her doctorate from Cambridge. She trained professionally in dance in Düsseldorf and at John Neumeier’s Academy of the Hamburg Ballet. Her research interests include European dance and literature in twentieth century modernism; dance, politics, and globalisation. She has contributed to several international journals, and her book on Performing Femininity (Oxford) will be published in 2008. | |
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