© 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved UNDERGRADUATE

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UNDERGRADUATE WOMEN, BELLY DANCE, AND BODY IMAGE: PERSONAL NARRATIVE AND QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

by Hilary Giovale

A Thesis

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirement for the Degree of

Master of Liberal Studies

Northern Arizona University

December 2006

ABSTRACT

UNDERGRADUATE WOMEN, BELLY DANCE, AND BODY IMAGE:

PERSONAL NARRATIVE AND QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS

HILARY GIOVALE

This thesis is framed by the work of several feminist embodiment scholars to explore women’s embodiment and objectification in the West. A brief history of belly dance is given, with particular attention to the modern movement known as “American

Tribal Style.” The author’s feminist, qualitative research methods are detailed.

Finally, the results of the study are discussed and interpreted using a framework of feminist embodiment theory and the author’s experiential insights.

The study reveals that undergraduate women experience conflicted emotions in regard to their bodies and the bodies of other women. Their sense of internal conflict is mostly attributed to the ways in which women’s bodies are portrayed as idealized and fragmented in advertising. The author identifies a tendency among research participants to engage in body fragmentation and selective emaciation in their description of women’s bodies. The research participants express themselves in the postmodern context; they internalize mainstream beauty standards as personal choice.

Finally, the students correlate belly dance with happiness, confidence, body acceptance, and higher self-esteem.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It took a village to write this thesis. First, I would like to thank the members of my committee: Dr. Janine Minkler, who served as the chair, Dr. Kym Maclaren, and

Dr. J’Anne Ellsworth. Thank you for the guidance, support and insight you provided in this project, especially in helping me navigate materials and methods that were unfamiliar to me. I appreciate the time you took out of your busy schedules to be a part of this committee.

Sandra Lubarsky, the director of the Master of Liberal Studies Program, has been a wonderful professor, mentor, and friend to me over the past six years. I would like to thank Sandra for challenging my assumptions, encouraging me, telling me all the reasons why I needed to finish my thesis, and helping me to see that it could be done. Likewise, I would like to thank the Master of Liberal Studies Program

Coordinator, Peggy Richardson, for helping me brainstorm my way out of confusion on many occasions in the process of this project and providing such wonderful administrative support. Sandra and Peggy, it has been a pleasure working with both of you and I will miss you!

There were many undergraduate students who volunteered to be research participants in this project, and eight who were able to come to the initial writing session, the classes, and the secondary writing session. Thank you for sharing your experiences and impressions with me! You made this project possible and your words enabled me to learn a great deal about the topic.

Sherry Hammond, my beloved belly dance teacher – thank you for being my first teacher in this beautiful art form, and showing me that this dance is by women, for women, and that it empowers women. Thank you for teaching me in a way that is both challenging and compassionate. I am grateful to you for including me in Troupe

Shuvani, and for the many opportunities you have opened to me. I would especially like to thank you for being the teacher of the dance class for this project and sharing your knowledge with the students.

Stephanie Selman was the first teacher who introduced me to American Tribal

Style belly dance. Stephanie, in your classes, the “light bulb” turned on as I realized the incredible potential tribal dance has for the women who practice it. Thank you for being a wonderful teacher and friend.

I would like to thank Heather Bostian for her healing touch and her ability to help me find my own voice.

My Giovale sisters Melissa, Megan, and Lainie, provided listening ears, encouragement, and welcome advice as I went through this process. Thank you for all you do!

To my Shuvani sisters: Sherry, Shelley, Liz, Heather, and Boo Boo, thank you not only for being a part of the class and volunteering as teaching assistants; thank you as well for all the ways in which we have explored belly dance creatively and happily over the past three years. I can’t wait to see what all of you will do next!

My dearest Melaqueen, thank you for confirming our combined brilliance. My

Girlfriend Kathi, thank you for helping me believe that it can be done!

Dad, thank you for your counsel in navigating the academic world, and Mom, thank you for helping me perfect this thesis with your supreme editing skills!

My husband Pete enabled me to work on this project in so many ways. Pete, thank you for all of your moral support and encouragement. Thank you for telling me to write a crappy paper and for believing in my unorthodox methods. Most of all, thank you for doing your own laundry.

Gemma, my little flower, thank you for showing me your courage in trying new things. You are my inspiration. May you always love your body as much as I do.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 3 DEDICATED TO ...... 9 Chapter I Theoretical Overview: Objectifying the Female Body...... 10 I. Woman as Other ...... 13 Transcendence versus immanence...... 14 Collaboration in objectification...... 15 Immanence and young women...... 16 II. Present Day: Undoing the Othering of Women...... 18 Immanence and the body...... 18 Changing collaborations...... 20 Young women...... 21 III. Body as Object ...... 22 Modalities of motility...... 23 Modalities of spatiality...... 25 IV. The Bodily Implications of Femininity ...... 27 Objectification and fragile bodies...... 27 Athletics, girls, and bodily confidence...... 30 V. Looking Toward Subjectivity ...... 34 Chapter II: belly dance...... 35 Chapter III: research methods...... 35 Chapter IV: thematic analysis...... 35 Chapter V: theoretical analysis...... 36 Chapter VI: conclusion...... 36 Chapter II Belly Dance: A Historical Overview...... 37 I. A History of Belly Dance...... 37 Ancient beginnings...... 37 New directions...... 39 II. American Tribal Style Belly Dance: The Birth of a Movement...... 45 Origins...... 45 Diverse bodies...... 47 The significance of costume...... 48 The stance...... 50 Shared leadership...... 52 Community...... 53 III. ATS and Mind-Body Dualism...... 55 Chapter III Research Methods: Belly Dancing, Story, and Body Image...... 59 I. Epistemology...... 59 II. Synergy, Methodology and Limitations...... 64 Synergistic research...... 64 Methodology...... 66 Limitations...... 72

III. Methods ...... 74 Latent Content Analysis ...... 74 Open Coding...... 76 Axial Coding ...... 77 Limitations of Coding ...... 78 Chapter IV Thematic Analysis: Emerging Patterns...... 80 Introduction...... 80 I. Session Topic A - Before: Models...... 81 Questioning Media Images...... 81 Judging Appearance ...... 83 Message Projected by Appearance...... 84 Summary...... 86 II. Session Topic B – Before: Belly Dancers ...... 86 Judging Appearance/Admiration ...... 86 Personal Expectations of Body...... 87 Message Projected by Appearance...... 88 Comfortable Despite Appearance...... 89 Summary...... 90 III. Section Topic C – After: Models ...... 90 Questioning Media Images...... 91 Judging Appearance ...... 91 Message Projected by Appearance...... 91 Changing Attitudes ...... 92 Summary...... 93 IV. Section Topic D – After: Belly Dancers ...... 93 Message Projected by Appearance...... 94 Impressions of Belly Dance ...... 95 Changing Attitudes ...... 96 Perceived Audience ...... 98 Summary...... 100 V. Unexpected and Missing Themes...... 100 Chapter V Theoretical Analysis: Belly Dancing and Embodiment...... 103 Introduction...... 103 I. Advertising and Internal Conflict...... 104 Simultaneous Judgment and Appreciation...... 106 Body Fragmentation and Selective Emaciation ...... 109 II. Postmodernism: Bodies as Personal Choice...... 113 Judging Models ...... 115 The Internalization of Cultural Body Norms ...... 117 III. Belly Dance: Creative and Intentional Action ...... 121 Immanence to Transcendence...... 122 The Path to Happiness...... 124 Changing Bodies to Changing Minds...... 127 Body Acceptance and Self Esteem...... 129

Chapter VI Endings and Beginnings...... 132 Introduction...... 132 I. Observations on the Bellydancing Classs ...... 132 Successes ...... 132 Learning Opportunities...... 136 II. Implications for Future and Projects and Research...... 139 Project: Adolescent Girls and Belly Dance...... 139 Project: Belly Dance in Therapeutic Settings...... 140 Research: Women’s Relationship with Food...... 141 Research: Media Literacy and Social Sustainability...... 145 Literature Cited...... 147 Appendix A ...... 152 Appendix B ...... 153 Appendix B ...... 154

DEDICATED TO

Gemma Spoon

Chapter I

Theoretical Overview: Objectifying the Female Body

In my search for a vision of good and sustainable societies as a student in the

Master of Liberal Studies Program, I have come across many facets of sustainability.

For example, challenging the global economy as it currently exists can strengthen local economies and local knowledge. Supporting sustainable farming practices respects the environment, increases our health, and helps local movements to grow food that is appropriate to each place. Finding fulfillment and joy in nature can help us to change the over-consumption that dominates our society and destroys our environment. Just as the environment and indigenous knowledge have been exploited through our present path of development, so have people around the world. In the ever-vigilant quest for more variety, power, and financial gain, our society and economy have capitalized upon certain groups of people for the benefit of a select few.

One of these groups, with which I am particularly concerned, is women.

In my vision of sustainability, women must subvert messages in advertising that devalue their bodies and minds in order to realize themselves as human beings who contribute to the world with full potential, freedom, and agency. I perceive belly dance to be one tool that women may use in this process. In this thesis, I will research and write about young women and belly dance, to gain further insight into my vision of sustainability, asking the research question, “What impressions do young women

Messages imbedded in advertising affect men, women, and children in how they perceive themselves and their roles in society; however, this study is limited to the study of young women, the group with which I am primarily interested. It is true that feminist thought and subsequent social changes have placed women on more equal footing with men. Over the past century, Western women have made significant progress in attaining legal rights that guarantee treatment that is equal to men. Women have made economic progress by venturing into the workforce, with their pay gradually becoming closer to that of men. It is more socially acceptable than ever for women to delay or reject marriage, which can allow them more opportunity for professional and educational development. In an age of rampant lawsuits, discriminatory language and treatment of women is becoming less and less permissible.

Despite these advances, some women today sense that our footing is still not equal. For many of us, this sense takes the form of a vague discomfort that something is not right as we go through our daily lives. While no one is outwardly discriminating against us, we sense the invisible pull of forces that are beyond our control. We feel the subtle limitations that fall around us by virtue of our growing up as girls and then maturing into women. Sometimes women may have a hard time articulating what is wrong; look at all the advances we have made in recent history, is there anything worth complaining about anymore? However, the fact remains that men and women inhabit different worlds.

The first chapter of this thesis provides a context for women’s place in society over the past fifty years, some of the ways in which feminine existence has been experienced in this timeframe, and the ways in which women’s bodies are sometimes affected by this legacy today. In this chapter, I discuss the work of Simone de

Beauvoir, originally published in 1952, and the work of Iris Marion Young, originally presented in 1977, to create an overarching theoretical framework for the subsequent chapters. I enrich these discussions by placing them in context with more modern works to show the ways in which women’s experience has changed over time. The contextual framework created in Chapter I will vary from the analysis provided in

Chapter V, which will offer a theoretical analysis grounded in the data produced in my study.

Here, I will first write about woman as Other, women’s collaboration in their secondary position, and how these concepts historically affected young women, through a discussion of The Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir. I will then contrast the picture painted by de Beauvoir with the work of more recent feminist thinkers. I will then move on to write about the feminine body as object through a discussion of

“Throwing Like a Girl,” by Iris Marion Young, asking how women’s immanence has affected their bodies, and looking into the implications of growing up as a girl in the past as well as presently. Finally, I will explore recent studies on athletics and feminine embodiment. Chapter I will conclude with a brief overview of the subsequent chapters.

I. Woman as Other

In her introduction to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes, “The most sympathetic of men never fully comprehend woman’s concrete situation.” (de

Beauvoir, 1989, xxxii). Reading de Beauvoir, one can see how, over fifty years after this text was first published, the world of women remains firmly shaped by forces that are not feminine, while the world of men is largely shaped by forces from within a masculine worldview. In this worldview, man is subject and woman is object. Since our society has established all things masculine as the default and the norm, all things feminine automatically become different, apart, and deficient in comparison. de

Beauvoir writes, “…man represents both the positive and the neutral…whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity.”

(de Beauvoir, 1989, xxi) Seeing how de Beauvoir depicts woman as Other is an important factor in understanding the fullness of woman’s submission to man over time and in finding empathy for the situations in which women find themselves today.

As de Beauvoir claims, woman’s inferior position in the world has always been

(at least as long as history has been recorded). There was not a particular circumstance that created a separate, confining niche for woman and all things feminine. If woman’s subordination had started with a distinct event, then perhaps another, distinct event could provide opportunity for a shift in power structures. But since woman has always been Other, and man has always been One, this way of being has fully permeated the worldview of both man and woman. The very core of woman’s self-perception has been formed around her status as Other.

Transcendence versus immanence.

Why is woman’s status as Other problematic? For de Beauvoir, the problem lies in the tension between transcendence and immanence. As an existentialist, de

Beauvoir sees the ultimate expression of humanity as being able to live in transcendence. Transcendence is enjoying the approval and support of social structures to act, to create, and to throw oneself into a chosen task. Transcendence is being fully authorized as a subject, independent and free. In the social structures of the past, transcendence was primarily enjoyed by men. While women were not always actively prohibited from transcendence, their role and context within society made transcendence much more difficult to achieve. I would argue that today women are still more likely to exist in a state of immanence, which happens when they experience being turned in toward themselves as objects for the fulfillment of others rather than being turned outward to activities as creative subjects.

For example, women in general are primarily shouldered with bodily maintenance. Bodily maintenance, the process of looking after physical needs, is work that occurs in a repetitive, circular pattern. The tasks of cooking, cleaning, feeding, and maintaining the body are ongoing and endless, rather than tasks characteristic of transcendence, which are creatively progressive. The sheer amount of time and energy involved in bodily maintenance makes transcendence difficult for women to visualize, much less obtain. Bodily maintenance includes the processes which are necessary for all humans to live – the necessities of food at regular intervals, shelter, and clothing. In addition, biology dictates that women are the primary source of care and maintenance for the young of our species, since women are the ones who

Maintaining humanity’s bodily health and well-being is something for which women have been primarily responsible since the beginning of time.

Bodily maintenance is necessary for the health and continuation of all human beings; however, it is primarily the responsibility of half of our species: the female half. Women can find themselves living in immanence when their daily duties and roles of bodily maintenance prohibit them from crossing over into transcendence, where progressive activities such as creating, building, and acting take place.

Immanence is sensing oneself primarily as an object for others, perpetually being focused inwardly, rather than acting outwardly. Patriarchal power structures have not only served to perpetuate women’s immanence; they have created myths around women as inherently immanent creatures: for example, that woman finds satisfaction and fulfillment primarily through attending to the bodily maintenance of others and that this is her natural destiny.

Collaboration in objectification.

De Beauvoir asks why women remain complicit in their own objectification.

Women could join together, rise up, and refuse to accept their secondary status any longer. But, as she states,

…women lack concrete means for organizing themselves into a unit which can stand face to face with the correlative unit. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat…They live dispersed among males, attached through residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. (xxv)

As long as women lacked the means to unify themselves, their ability to change existing power structures remained relatively weak. And, as de Beauvoir states,

“Woman may fail to lay claim to the status of subject because she lacks definite resources, because she feels the necessary bond that ties her to man regardless of reciprocity, and because she is often very well pleased with her role as the Other.” (de

Beauvoir, 1989, xxvii) In essence, woman had access to benefits when she worked within the androcentric cultural paradigm, and she was reluctant to renounce these privileges in search of a freer, but uncertain, existence of her own.

I would argue that especially in certain socioeconomic groups, woman’s cooperation with and participation in patriarchal power structures can still provide her with access to financial, educational, and social status to which she otherwise might not have access. For example, a woman may enter into marriage with a man, a legal status that has historically placed wives as property of their husbands. Today’s women stand to benefit financially, legally, and socially from marriage because of the more perilous position they possess simply by benefit of their gender and because of recent legal changes that have increased the amount of protection to which women are entitled in marriage. Woman’s role as Other is so longstanding and integral to maintenance of the status quo, that it seems to many men and women themselves to be natural, necessary, and benign.

Immanence and young women.

Having discussed the status of woman as Other and the tension between transcendence and immanence, I will now examine the status of the young girl, as de

Beauvoir refers to the adolescents of her time. On the threshold between childhood

16 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved and adulthood, de Beauvoir sees the young girl as a creature who sees her approaching future as a woman, but is still unable to accept the limiting destiny that womanhood entails. On one hand, the young girl sees the social advantages of joining with man; in many circles she still gains prestige and justifies her existence only through marriage.

On the other hand, her allegiance with man will undoubtedly mean the end of her childhood, and it will necessitate her understanding of herself as object who exists for someone else:

This is the trait that characterizes the young girl and gives us the key to most of her behavior; she does not accept the destiny assigned to her by nature and society; and yet she does not repudiate it completely; she is much too divided against herself to join battle with the world. (de Beauvoir, 1989, p. 352)

In de Beauvoir’s description, for a period of several years, the young girl finds herself in a state of conflict and denial. Most often, she has already physically matured and has the body of a woman, but she is still afforded the life of a girl until she gives herself over (or someone else gives her) to man. In childhood, the girl is authorized by society to engage herself actively in a fairly broad spectrum of activities. She is able to run, laugh, be silly, make faces, and engage in activities that may be considered unbecoming. Even though she is protected as fragile, the girl is often able to act freely within certain parameters. However, once adolescence begins, the girl feels her world closing in. She is aware of how she looks at all times. She is careful not to engage in behavior that will make her appear unattractive, or unaware of cultural mores. She becomes aware of her body as a sexual object that is continually gazed upon, commented upon, and even touched, by others. She becomes aware that

17 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved maintaining her youthful body and beauty is necessary for success and social approval, and that this state will most likely continue for the rest of her life as a woman.

The young girl is touching because she makes a stand, alone and weak, against the world. But the world is too strong; if she persists in her opposition, it breaks her…The young girl slowly buries her childhood, puts away the independent and imperious being that was she, and enters submissively upon adult existence.” (de Beauvoir, 1989, p. 365)

II. Present Day: Undoing the Othering of Women

In this section, I will look at newer works to develop a picture of the ways in which women’s position in society has changed since the original publication of The

Second Sex.

Immanence and the body.

In the fifty years since Simone de Beauvoir’s work, the status of women has changed considerably. More and more women enter professions that were previously considered solely masculine. Women have better access than ever to contraception, and the care of infants and children is increasingly available for women who choose to work outside of their homes after having children. However, I believe the situation of immanence de Beauvoir describes is still more or less present for Western women in covert ways. For example, “a study of more than 3,000 American couples showed that women worked more than twice as many hours per week (33.10) than men (14.44) on household chores” (Blair and Lichter, 1991, as cited in Crawford and Unger, 2000, p.

395) and “For most women, work outside the home is followed each day by a “second shift” at home (Hochschild, 1989, as cited in Crawford and Unger, 2000, p. 395).

This work is invisible to many, but still necessary for the bodily maintenance of families. In many ways, women’s immanence is even more insidious than before,

18 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved because it is combined with an increase in freedom of choice. Indeed, women have more choice in their educational and occupational opportunities, and it is now more socially acceptable, even socially expected, that they will work outside of the home.

But how valuable is women’s newfound freedom of choice when they are expected to work a full day and still be primarily responsible for the unpaid and unvalued work of

“cleaning up” for others?

I would argue that despite many cultural, political, and economic advances, women’s reality is still partly shaped by a sense of otherness that is so aptly described by de Beauvoir. A primary focus of this thesis is how women’s historical objectification has permeated present day Western culture, and firmly settled into the ways in which women perceive their bodies. At age twenty-three, the writer Kate

Rossiter comments:

My grandmothers were faced with a complete lack of choice or freedom with regard to how they wanted to live and what social positions they occupied. Now, society and patriarchy has shifted, and while my choices have expanded enormously in the area of what women can do or be, I feel that I was given few (if any) options on how to look, act, and feel in the body of a young North American woman. Forced feminization for me has meant looking, rather than acting, in a certain prescribed way. (Rossiter, 2001, p. 89)

Rossiter’s personal experience is echoed in The Body Project: An Intimate

History of American Girls, by Joan Jacobs Brumberg (1997) who illustrates how the objectification of the female body over the past century has led to problematic relationships between girls and their bodies. Moving from the cultural values of hard work, spiritual devotion, and obedience from the early twentieth century, the most culturally important values that girls possess today are external – the ability to mold,

Young women’s adherence to these values illustrates how culturally important their appearance (as objects for others) still is.

Writing about how she learned to comply with the objectification of her body, Rossiter states,

These lessons, like the subtle lessons of patriarchy which my grandmothers both learned and taught me, were ones which were private and hidden. I learned that what my body was supposed to do and look like through ‘obvious secrets’: through the images of the ‘perfect’ female body, through the condemning and revealing whispers of girls and women around me when someone didn’t ‘get it right’. (Rossiter, 2001, p.89)

Changing collaborations.

Fortunately, there is an aspect of de Beauvoir’s work that has dramatically changed for Western women in the past fifty years: their ability to unite with intention to subvert their objectification. More than ever, women have significant voices in political and academic realms. Women have organized themselves in everything from mainstream political activism groups such as the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966, to more subversive groups such as online forums and women’s magazines which little by little, jam the cultural notion that women’s bodies are objects for others and defy the patriarchal gaze. In addition, women have begun to organize themselves not just as women, but along the different axes of discrimination: race, class, ability, and sexual orientation. In this action, they further complicate and deny their collaboration in oppression as an entire gender. As de Beauvoir describes, woman can still benefit from her allegiance to patriarchal power structures, but she is

Young women.

More than fifty years since the publication of de Beauvoir’s work, many cultural changes in the West have affected the ways in which adolescents and young women experience life. Presently, the expectations placed on Western girls are different and, in many ways, more convoluted. For example, they are now expected, much more broadly, to attend college or work before settling in with a man. Also, they are enabled (even encouraged) to become sexually active much sooner while still postponing their long-term commitment to a man. And finally, due to increased access to advertising and cultural emphasis on consumerism, they are under even more constant barrage as to how they must look, act, and dress in order to achieve success.

All of these expectations vary depending upon the race, socioeconomic status, and cultural background of young women.

As Sharlene Hesse-Biber writes, “A woman’s sense of worth in our culture is still greatly determined by her ability to attract a man” (Hesse-Biber, 1996, p. 13)

Now, the means to that end are more convoluted than ever before. Girls must project a sense of sexual attractiveness without being conscious of their sexuality, and a carefree relationship to their bodies while still keeping their bodies tightly monitored and controlled to specific standards. Rossiter writes,

As I reached the age of 13, my body began to grow and change. As these changes occurred, my experience of ‘being’ changed radically as well. Suddenly, as I felt the insistent and critical cultural gaze of those around me, I was aware that I had a body, and, moreover, a body that I had to do something about. My changing body marked to the world that I needed to learn the ‘lessons of femininity,’ that I (that my body)

needed to learn restraint, control, and subservience to cultural demands. (Rossiter, 2001, p. 89)

These confusing expectations are capable of wreaking havoc in the lives of today’s girls. In her book Ophelia Speaks (1999), Sara Shandler compiles writings by adolescent girls on various topics. Revealing more devastation than the adolescent narcissism and ambiguity described by de Beauvoir, two of the overarching themes among these writings are the intense feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy; these feelings are doubtless reinforced by a culture whose utmost praise is reserved for girls who normalize their looks to mainstream standards no matter the cost (Shandler,

1999). The website for the National Institute on Media and the Family

(www.mediafamily.org, 8/4/06) reports that by age thirteen, fifty three percent of girls are unhappy with their bodies, and by age seventeen that figure grows to seventy eight percent. With these new developments, it seems that girls today face even more complex pressure, mixed messages, and inner conflict regarding their impending womanhood than de Beauvoir could have predicted.

III. Body as Object

The work of Simone de Beauvoir and subsequent discussion gives a picture of how girls and women have been affected by patriarchy in Western culture. A central theme of this thesis is how young women experience their bodies in this culture. To frame this theme, I will explore how women’s secondary status in society has affected their bodies, through a discussion of the essay “Throwing Like a Girl,” by Iris Marion

Young (1990). The basis for her thought draws on the work of Maurice Merleau-

Ponty, who “reorients the entire tradition…by locating subjectivity not in the mind or the consciousness, but in the body.” (Young, 1990, p. 147) In Young’s discussion, the

22 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved body is “the first locus of intentionality, as pure presence to the world and openness upon its possibilities.” (Young, 1990, p. 148) In other words, Young sees our bodies not only as the vehicles in which we experience the world, but as our very awareness.

Our bodies not only allow us to go places and do things, they are our consciousness at the most fundamental level.

In this section, I will first discuss the three modalities Young finds apparent in feminine bodily movement: ambiguous transcendence, inhibited intentionality, and discontinuous unity. Second, I will touch on Young’s three modalities of spatial relations: enclosed, dual, and positioned.

My discussion of Young’s work is not intended to undermine the strength or agency of girls or young women in any way, or to make absolute, generalized claims about the abilities of young women. Rather, in this discussion, I seek to illuminate tendencies of feminine bodily movement, comportment, and spatial relations observed by Young and to show how they are ultimately caused by the objectification of women that has pervaded Western culture. In the subsequent section I introduce other perspectives to this discussion, ultimately asking how girls and women may best subvert the objectification of their own bodies.

Modalities of motility.

The first modality, ambiguous transcendence, is “a transcendence that is at the same time laden with immanence.” (Young, 1990, p. 148) Ambiguous transcendence occurs in the female body, because, while women know that they are subjects as human beings, that they possess the ability and agency to create, and that they can and sometimes do enter the realm of transcendence, their sense of freedom and subjectivity

23 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved is stifled by the constraints of immanence. In comparison to the transcendence experienced by men, Young contends that women are unable to reach their full potential and still find themselves objectified. Young writes,

The lived body as transcendence is pure fluid action, the continuous calling-forth of capacities that are applied to the world. Rather than simply beginning in immanence, feminine bodily existence remains in immanence or better, is overlaid with immanence, even as it moves out toward the world in motions of grasping, manipulating, and so on. (Young, 1990, p. 148)

Young makes use of an excellent example to illustrate ambiguous transcendence: the difference in how boys and girls sometimes use their bodies to throw a ball. While a boy may draw up his leg, twist his body, and then use his entire body in a fluid motion to propel the ball forward, a girl might bend her arm overhead and throw the ball awkwardly, using only her arm, not making full use of her body’s capabilities to propel the ball forward. The boy may use his entire body to complete the task at hand, even losing consciousness of his body in pursuit of his goal; however, the girl may remain painfully conscious of her body. Her body remains “rooted in immanence” while one, isolated, body part tentatively tries to throw the ball.

The second of Young’s modalities is inhibited intentionality, “which simultaneously reaches toward a projected end with an ‘I can’ and withholds its full bodily commitment to that end in a self-imposed ‘I cannot.’” (Young, 1990, p. 148) In explaining inhibited intentionality, Young refers to the tendency women have to underestimate their strength, skill, and coordination in reference to a particular task, before the task has even begun. Once the task is begun, women tend to sabotage their own efforts by using their bodies in a way that contradicts the task at hand: “Their

24 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved bodies project an aim to be enacted but at the same time stiffen against the performance of the task.” (Young, 1990, p. 149) If the task is completed, it is often done with extra effort, since women tend to question their methods of completing tasks from the beginning, and lack the confidence to use a method that is sure to be successful.

Young’s third modality is discontinuous unity, which she describes as placing the feminine body in opposition with itself and its surroundings. Women tend to limit the movement of their bodies when striving to complete a physical task, focusing their movement only in the part of the body that is directly connected to the task. For example, Young describes how women tend to lift heavy objects, not focusing the majority of the effort on the strong thigh muscles that can bear more weight, but in the arms and the hands that are physically touching the object to be lifted. Because of the tendencies toward limitations in women’s movement, they are less likely to complete the task successfully and more likely to injure themselves.

Modalities of spatiality.

In addition to noting how feminine movement has its own particular modalities, Young relates how spatial relations also have modalities that are specifically feminine. The first modality of feminine spatiality is that women experience space as enclosed or confining. Women operate with a perpetual bubble of space about themselves, keeping them confined and separate from the available space that surrounds their bodies. For example, women tend to carry themselves by sitting, walking, and standing with their limbs close about them, while men tend to swing their arms and legs while walking with a wide gait and sit with their limbs extending

25 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved into surrounding space. (Young, 1990, p. 151) Young observes that women do not fully extend body parts into surrounding space even when doing so would help them to enact a task or movement. Young also notes that in sports, women tend to stand still, enclosed in personal space, waiting for a ball to come into their space before they react to it, whereas men actively move forward toward a ball that is flying through the air.

Young’s second modality is that of double spatiality, which she describes with a reference to Merleau-Ponty’s description of “here” and “yonder.” Young says that in feminine existence, here and yonder are distinctly different places, and each has its own possibilities:

The space of the “yonder” is a space in which feminine existence projects possibilities in the sense of understanding that “someone” could move within it, but not I. Thus the space of the “yonder” exists for feminine existence but only as that which she is looking into, rather than moving in. (Young, 1990, p. 152)

In other words, women not only experience space as a bubble about them; the usable space about women is restricted to personal space, whereas men move freely in public space. Since women perceive themselves as being able to move primarily within personal space about them, their potential to affect others, in outwardly driven, transcendent action, is limited. Being restricted to a personal bubble of space could be another reason for women’s experience of immanence, being continually turned inward, in perpetual, repetitive tasks.

The third modality of spatiality is that women experience themselves as positioned in space. That is, they experience their bodies as “positioned by a system of coordinates that does not have its origin in [their] own intentional capacities.”

(Young, 1990, p. 152) Young refers to psychological studies that show how men view items in space as fluid and moveable, while women see items as permanently fixed in space. She argues that women’s spatial modality of being positioned in space extends itself to how they perceive spatial relations of objects in general, as well as their own sense of purpose and motion: “Women frequently react to motions, even our own motions, as though we are the object of a motion that issues from an alien intention, rather than taking ourselves as the subject of motion.” (Young, 1990, p. 152)

IV. The Bodily Implications of Femininity

In this section, I will further analyze the implications of Young’s modalities to articulate how these modalities have come to be, why they persist, and how they were part of my own experience as a girl. Additionally, I will make use of other studies to further develop Young’s analysis and provide insight into how women may subvert the ways in which objectification can tend to affect their bodies.

Objectification and fragile bodies.

Young’s analysis of the ways in which women inhabit and use their bodies shows the complications in women’s and girls’ perceptions of the world and themselves in the nineteen seventies. Despite cultural and legal changes that have benefited women in the time since, many girls and women continue to inhabit their bodies in ways that exhibit ambiguous transcendence or transcendence that is tainted with immanence. In her article “What’s Sport Got to do With it?,” Helen Jefferson

Lenskyj writes:

Despite the gains of the contemporary women’s movement, girls and women continue to be socialized in ways that promote body-hating attitudes…Many girls and women have not had the opportunity to develop the motor skills necessary to participate in, and enjoy, sports

and physical activities. They have not learned to perform basic bodily movements confidently, and many have not had the chance to develop skills such as throwing, catching, and hitting, either because of ineffective physical education programs, lack of parental encouragement, or cultural or societal prohibitions against strenuous physical activity…this ‘physical illiteracy’ among girls and women warrants serious attention. (Lenskyj, 1995, Lessons section, para. 1)

Likewise, Young claims that the habits of feminine body comportment, motility, and spatiality are common, but she does not attribute them to any sort of innate feminine lack: “Rather, they have their source in the particular situation of women as conditioned by their sexist oppression in contemporary society.” (Young,

1990, p. 153) Girls’ socialization in society teaches them different styles of carrying, perceiving, and using their bodies than boys’ socialization teaches them. Part of the socialization girls receive casts their bodies as fragile and weak. Young writes,

There is a specific positive style of feminine body comportment and movement, which is learned as the girl comes to understand that she is a girl. The young girl acquires many subtle habits of feminine body comportment – walking like a girl, tilting her head like a girl, standing and sitting like a girl, gesturing like a girl, and so on. The girl learns actively to hamper her movements. She is told she must be careful not to get hurt, not to get dirty, not to tear her clothes, that the things she desires to do are dangerous for her. Thus she develops a bodily timidity that increases with age. In assuming herself to be a girl, she takes herself to be fragile. (Young, 1990, p. 154)

In reading the examples of feminine body comportment, motility, and spatiality that Young sets forth, I inevitably remember myself as a teenager in physical education classes. In these classes sports were required, and I was more or less a failure. I always thought that this lack of ability was because I was uncoordinated, I did not have an athletic family background, and I was too wimpy to perform adequately.

Young’s analysis casts my experience in a new light, however. In softball, my inability to throw a ball with gusto or to extend my whole body into the task of batting was perhaps an expression of the fragmentation of my body, which largely remained rooted in immanence while one body part tried (awkwardly) to achieve the goal at hand. I stood as far out in left field as possible, praying that a ball would not come my way, and when it did, I would limply hold my hands in front of my chest in a halfhearted effort to catch it (only because my teammates would chastise me if I did not). The ball’s invasion of my personal space signifies how the invisible bubble around my body was the only realm in which I could exist as a subject, untouched and autonomous. In basketball, I lived in terror that a ball would come down and hit me in the face, and contrary to the objective of the game, I would stay as far away as possible from the ball at any given time. This intense fear of getting hurt is possibly because, as Young describes, “We often experience our bodies as a fragile encumbrance, rather than the media for the enactment of our aims.” (Young, 1990, p.

147) Reading this essay, I realize that my own socialization as a girl created a sense that my body was deeply fragile and futile.

More significantly, as Young contends, the female body in society is lived as both subject and object, with object often being its primary orientation. Not only is the female body considered an object through the patriarchal gaze, but by women themselves. Young writes,

An essential part of the situation of being a woman is that of living the ever-present possibility that one will be gazed upon as a mere body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as the potential object of another subject’s intentions and manipulations, rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention…the woman herself often actively takes her body as a mere thing. She gazes at it in the mirror,

worries about how it looks to others, prunes it, shapes it, molds and decorates it. (Young, 1990, p. 155)

To the degree that girls and women perceive themselves as objects, they experience altered states of motility, spatial relations, bodily comportment, and ability.

Young contends that seeing the self as object is necessary for the creation of these conditions which can be experienced as part of feminine embodiment. In turn, the feminine styles of bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality serve to protect women from further objectification: “To open her body in free, active, open extension and bold outward-directedness is for a woman to invite objectification.” (Young, 1990, p.

155) In essence, woman’s perception of herself as object creates specific styles of limiting feminine comportment, and these styles of comportment have become woman’s safeguard against further objectification. This can create a double-bind for women, which makes their realization of transcendence even more difficult.

Athletics, girls, and bodily confidence.

In her discussion, Young sometimes uses athletics to demonstrate how feminine bodily comportment differs from masculine bodily comportment, thereby illustrating some of the differences between the world of women and the world of men and the inequities therein. I find it somewhat ironic that Young relies on these examples, because in the years since her essay was first presented, athletics have been identified as the most important factor in increasing girls’ self-confidence. One study found that in a diverse population of adolescent girls, forty-six percent identified athletics as the area that made them feel good about themselves. (Fields, Sing, &

Marks, 1997, as cited in Crawford and Unger, 2000, p. 252) Likewise, Crawford and

Unger maintain that girls who resist conformance to mainstream gender roles and continue to play sports maintain high self-esteem and become more likely to remain independent and self-actualizing throughout adolescence. Ever since Title IX guaranteed American girls the right to equal participation in educational sports activities in 1972, countless girls and women have benefited from the increased opportunity to participate in athletics, experiencing increased self-confidence, improved strength and physical health, and the interpersonal skills that develop from working as part of a team. Reflecting the positive impact of athletics, self-help articles in magazines for teenage girls routinely advise participation in sports to raise girls’ sense of confidence and body-acceptance.

But where does this leave the girls who believe themselves incapable of playing sports? For girls who have an experience of physical education similar to mine, the social and physical results can be devastating. Since the activities traditionally required in physical education are often competitive and team-oriented, the pressure to perform is strong. If a girl fails to perform, she not only proves herself incompetent, but disappoints her teammates as well. She is mocked by her peers, which makes her feel foolish and socially ostracized. She will often feel the need to poke fun at herself to appear nonchalant about her lack of ability, which only further internalizes the message that she is incompetent.

As an adolescent, the girl is beginning to mature sexually, and she may sense her immanence within society pressing down on her as her body becomes progressively more objectified by peers and adults. Lenskyj writes, “In a culturally diverse society…it is difficult to generalize about patterns of female socialization, but

31 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved it is fair to say that by puberty most girls have learned that others evaluate them first and foremost in terms of their physicality and sexuality.” (Lenskyj, 1995, Lessons section, para. 1) These factors are simultaneously girls’ means to social success and the factors which raise their risk of harm from others, such as teasing, harassment, and rape. In contrast, adolescent boys are becoming progressively more authorized as subjects as they approach adulthood. They are given more freedom to explore, create, and carouse. Their bodies naturally grow stronger and more muscular, in contrast to girls, whose bodies naturally grow rounder and softer. The space which boys are authorized to occupy becomes increasingly broad, while a girl’s (or her parents’) need to protect and define her personal bubble of space can become increasingly stronger in an effort to maintain some degree of safety and autonomy. For a girl who is struggling with these circumstances, the intrusion of a flying ball into her “personal bubble” during physical education class can be truly threatening.

In athletics, girls must perform in an arena espousing typically masculine skills: physical precision, full use and extension of the body, and team competition.

Though the girls of the past three decades have been told repeatedly that sports don’t only take place within the masculine arena and that girls succeed in sports in their own right, their experience and context within society sometimes come into conflict with the skills needed for athletic competition. One study questioned seventy-three adolescent girls from diverse backgrounds in Toronto on the barriers they perceive to physical activity. One of the main reasons given as a barrier to participation was competition. While some girls found competition invigorating and inspiring, the majority expressed that it was too stressful. They articulated fear at being judged by

32 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved peers and coaches and feeling “not good enough.” They expressed a desire to participate in physical activities that are not for competition, but for fun. (Dwyer,

Allison, Goldenberg, Fein, Yoshida, and Boutilier, 2006)

The participants in this study also cited body-related issues such as menstruation, feminine gender identity, and physical appearance as barriers to their participation in sports. They found sports distressing and difficult during their periods, and expressed embarrassment at being regarded by adolescent boys during physical activity. Perhaps most interestingly, “They asserted that they have to choose between being feminine and being physically active.” (Dwyer et al., 2006) The authors of this study found that anxiety around competition and body-related issues in exercise are compatible with previous research and they recommend activities “…that address multiple issues such as realistic body images and self-esteem…more physical activity programs that are for girls only and offering more noncompetitive programs that emphasize fun and skill development [to] facilitate their participation.” (Dwyer et al., 2006)

Reflecting on my own experience with athletics, the similarities in personal anecdotes I have heard from other girls and women, and the aforementioned study, I feel that Young’s example of athletics illuminates not only truths about feminine bodily comportment, but also about the physical activities to which girls are traditionally exposed in educational settings. For some girls, the benefits of participation in sports are many: higher self-esteem, strength, and overall health. For other girls, however, sports can reinforce cultural messages of bodily awkwardness

33 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved and weakness, reiterating cultural ideas that the feminine body is not to be trusted, and that it is merely an object for the fulfillment and pleasure of others.

V. Looking Toward Subjectivity

After looking at woman as Other and the ways in which her status affects her bodily comportment and ability, I ask how women’s status primarily as object may be subverted. In my vision of a good and sustainable society, it is extremely important for women to find methods of reducing their status as objects, increasing their transcendence, and becoming freer to exist fully as subjects. Young shows how women’s bodies sometimes bear the burden of their position within society, and as de

Beauvoir states, “It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.” (de Beauvoir, 1990, p. 333)

Sports are a well-known antidote to women’s and girls’ objectification; in this thesis, I explore whether another antidote may be developed that makes use of the findings from the study by Dwyer et al. by incorporating noncompetitive physical activity for women that emphasizes fun and skill development. Specifically, I explore whether American Tribal Style Bellydance (ATS) may play a role in subverting the concept of woman as object for others and provide an artistic vision that helps to authorize bodily diverse women as subjects, in turn reshaping how women view some of the restricting expectations that are placed on their bodies, by asking the research question “What impressions do young women share about images of the female body, and how do their impressions change after the experience of taking a belly dance class?” Here, I will give a brief summary of each chapter that follows:

Chapter II: belly dance.

In this chapter, I provide a brief history of belly dance; its ancient origins and how it migrated throughout the world, eventually coming to the West, where it became ripe for new interpretation. I will discuss the movement of American Tribal Style

(ATS) belly dance; how it developed, and some of the key elements in its presentation: acceptance of diverse bodies, the significance of costume, the bodily stance, and shared leadership and community. I will then discuss ATS and mind-body dualism using Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics by Sondra Horton

Fraleigh.

Chapter III: research methods.

In Chapter III, I use the work of Sprague and Kobrynowicz in Feminist

Perspectives on Social Research to describe the epistemological framework used for my research, feminist epistemology. I then turn to the work of Sharlene Hesse-Biber and Denise Leckenby to discuss synergistic research, methodology and the methodological limitations of my study. The chapter concludes with a description of my research methods, using the framework detailed by Anselm Strauss and Juliet

Corbin in Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and

Techniques.

Chapter IV: thematic analysis.

In this chapter, I draw out the themes that became apparent through the process of coding the student writings. I discuss these themes in four session topics, revealing the students’ impressions before the dance class about two different photo collages, and contrasting this with their impressions of the photo collages from the writing

35 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved session after the completion of the belly dance class. Throughout this chapter, I offer my thoughts on the themes that emerge, making note of the most significant themes for further analysis in Chapter V.

Chapter V: theoretical analysis.

Chapter V contains an analysis of the three most important overarching themes from the student writing, showing how the students’ perceptions relate to images of women in commercial media. I use Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism,

Western Culture, and the Body, Jean Killbourne’s documentaries, and the work of other feminist scholars to first interpret the students’ overwhelming sense of internal conflict in relation to women’s bodies, and then interpret what I see as the students’ expressions of postmodern bodily plasticity. Finally, I offer my own interpretations to analyze the students’ perception of belly dance as creative and intentional action.

Chapter VI: conclusion.

This chapter begins with a discussion of my successes and the learning opportunities created in relation to the belly dance class itself. I then give a description of two projects that could emerge from my research: teaching adolescent girls a combination of belly dance and media literacy and using belly dance in therapeutic settings. The chapter concludes with a discussion of two potential research subjects: women’s relationship with food and the ties between media literacy and social sustainability.

Chapter II

Belly Dance: A Historical Overview

The purpose of this chapter is to show how belly dance has evolved through different times and cultures, and the variety of ways in which it has been socially constructed throughout its progression, ultimately revealing how belly dance is an appropriate and unique means of female empowerment. Chapter II begins with a brief history of belly dance from its ancient origins, and follows the dance through its subsequent migration, including its introduction to the West at the end of the nineteenth century. I then move into a discussion of ATS belly dance; how it developed, and the qualities of this style that make it compatible with feminist sensibilities: acceptance of diverse bodies, the significance of costume, the bodily stance, shared leadership, and community. The chapter will conclude with a brief discussion of dance and mind-body dualism, using the work of Sondra Horton

Fraleigh.

I. A History of Belly Dance

Ancient beginnings.

Living in a culture that has been dominated for many centuries by patriarchal religions, it is difficult to imagine that a time ever existed when the divine feminine was revered throughout the world. Yet, archeological evidence from primitive cultures around the world suggests that mother goddess cults evolved and flourished from the Paleolithic Era (50000-10000 BCE) to the Neolithic Era (10000-3500 BCE).

The rituals and practices of these cults included sacred fertility dances honoring an

37 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved earth mother goddess. (Hobin, 2003) In these early religious practices, the earth was thought to be sacred, imbued with magical powers of life-giving birth and regeneration. Women’s fertility and the earth’s were worshipped together as being the seat of life:

To our ancestors, as the earth mother was the nourisher and preserver of the universe, she represented nature, productiveness and childbirth and became a symbol of life, death, and rebirth, celebrated through sacred dance, music, and singing. To ancient civilizations, goddesses manifested themselves in everything around them: in the waters, wind, mountains, trees and vegetation, and in the sky, sun, moon, and stars. They were also associated with animals, both wild and domestic, particularly birds and snakes whose shapes they could adopt. (Hobin, 2003, p. 21)

Far before the mind-body dualism created in Cartesian thinking, the spiritual experiences of the ancients were physical, grounded and based in the body. In her book Grandmother’s Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly

Dancing, Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi describes how women were seen as having “the capacity to connect to higher forces and preserve the unity of people, nature, and the world of plants and animals.” (Al-Rawi, 2003, p. 30) Al-Rawi writes that women’s dances were used in conjunction with the cycles of the moon to mark and celebrate menstruation, fertility, menopause, and birth.

According to Tina Hobin in Belly Dance: The Dance of Mother Earth, the cult of the mother goddess flourished in the area between Israel and the Persian Gulf, then stretched to Western Asia, the Indus Valley, and Algean Crete, and eventually found its way across the Iberian Peninsula and throughout Europe, influencing many cultures and religions in its path. Some of the archeological evidence of the mother goddess cult is evident in the sculptures from the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras: figures of

38 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved women, either standing or squatting in the childbirth position have been found on different continents, including North America and Australia. Made out of various primitive materials, these figures typically portrayed women with “rounded buttocks and large hips, large and heavy breasts, prominent bellies and genitalia, symbolizing the functions of motherhood, fertility, regeneration, and abundance.” (Hobin, 2003, p.

32) The figures were sometimes adorned with red designs, thought to be symbolic of the blood of menstruation and childbirth. As ancient people migrated, the cult of the mother goddess spread and evolved, adapting to different cultures and religions.

One of the most fertile civilizations for the cult of the mother goddess was found in Ancient Egypt, where women’s fertility and birth dances were a highly developed, integral part of society. Between 2055 and 1650 BCE the Egyptians conquered Nubia, and Nubian tribal dances began to infiltrate and modify Egyptian styles of dance. The Berber tribes of Northern Africa heavily influenced Egyptian dance as well. As time passed and cultures intertwined, sticks, swords, and fire entered into the Egyptian repertoire of sacred dance. These props are continue to be used in belly dance around the world today.

New directions.

Eventually, women’s sacred dance, or belly dance, as it came to be known later, became even more widespread. The Rom people are the group considered most responsible for spreading this style of dance throughout the world. The exact origin and timeline of Rom migration is unknown and debated by historians, but it is thought that they traveled from Northern India into the Middle East, Northern Africa, and

Europe sometime between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. In the many places they

39 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved settled, the Rom were rarely accepted; instead they lived on the outskirts of society, bringing the cultural and artistic influences of their own culture and their travels into their new surroundings nonetheless. In the various countries in which they settled,

Rom people were known by different names, but a common term used to describe them was “gypsy,” which is considered offensive by many Rom people but has infiltrated our language regardless. Incidentally, the use of the word “gypsy” in modern belly dance circles is much disputed; some feel that it is the equivalent of a derogatory racial slur while others feel that it is merely descriptive of a style of dance and costume. (Djoumahna, 2003)

For thousands of years, women’s dance was sacred, an expression of their connection to the earth’s vitality and an expression of humanity’s dependence upon the earth. No one is certain when or how, but as time progressed, women’s sacred dance metamorphosed into dance for audiences:

“…with the development of primitive cultures into many layers, the new beliefs repressed the rituals that belonged to the old beliefs. This is how women’s belly dance died in many parts of the world. Yet in some places the sacred dancing ritual developed into an entertainment dance. (Al-Rawi, 2003, p. 35)

As belly dance evolved for audiences, so did the ways in which it was perceived. The cultures in which belly dance was practiced often condoned it as long as it was practiced by women, for women, in the privacy of homes and out of public view. However, when taken from this hidden realm and into the public, belly dance was reviled as a dance associated with sexual availability, prostitution, and titillation of men. And in fact, many of the women who practiced belly dance in public earned their living with a combination of entertainment dance and prostitution.

Two tribal groups who incorporated public belly dance as an integral part of their culture were particularly influential in shaping belly dance as it is known today; these were the Ghawazee of Egypt and the Ouled Nail of Algeria. The Ghawazee were Romanies who settled in the Egyptian countryside. The women of this tribe practiced belly dance as entertainment to earn a living. In general, they were not accepted into Egyptian society, but they were hired occasionally for outdoor celebrations such as births, weddings and circumcisions. Additionally, they were sometimes hired to entertain men in brothels. Ghawazee dancers were known to perform amazing feats of muscle isolation, which is one of the hallmark characteristics of modern belly dance. They were notorious for their ability to vibrate their hips rapidly from side to side, quiver their breasts together or independently, flutter their stomachs, and ripple their arm muscles. (Hobin, 2003)

European travelers to Egypt in the early nineteenth century were the first

Westerners to see and write about this style of dance, and it is thought that these travelers were the first to make use of the term “belly dance” in describing what they saw. Most often, their accounts found the Ghawazee dances to be vulgar, lascivious and unappealing. However, these travelers, most of whom were male, managed to continue to watch and write about the female Ghawazee dancers throughout the nineteenth century. One account follows, from the early 1800s, when a traveler hired some dancers to entertain he and his traveling companions:

Their vocal and instrumental music we thought was horrible, and their persons appeared disgustingly ugly with their yellow-stained hands, spotted faces, absurd ornaments and their hair larded with pomatum, but by degrees we learned to endure them and for want of a better way to fancy some of them as pretty, imagine their voices agreeable, their movements graceful though indecent and their music not absolutely

intolerable. (From the notes of Carsten Niebuhr following his expedition to Yemen in 1762, as cited in Hobin, 2003, p. 110)

The yellow-stained hands mentioned by Neibuhr must have been from henna tattoos which were used by women to denote their tribal allegiance and to ward off the evil eye, and the spotted faces must have been tribal facial tattoos, which were used to enhance beauty and communicate women’s marital and tribal status.

The Ouled Nail were a Berber tribe from Algeria who also had a tradition of public dance for entertainment and pay. This women of this tribe regularly incorporated prostitution into their repertoire, and unlike the Ghawazee, their activities were considered socially acceptable by the surrounding society. Ouled Nail girls were trained in the arts of dance and seduction from an early age. As teenagers, they traveled from Morocco to Algiers, stopping en route to sing, dance, and have sex for money. The money they earned was always visible on their bodies in the form of heavy coins and jewelry that served as adornment, a costuming practice which is replicated by belly dancers today. Once the girls had earned enough money, they returned home to their tribe and married. The more money a girl had earned professionally, the more likely she was to marry well. She then had children and taught her daughters to dance in continuation of the Ouled Nail cultural practice.

Dancers of the Ouled Nail became popular subjects for painters of the

Orientalist movement and other Western visitors during the 1800s. Most often, these visitors were men. However, there is one written account by a woman, the French writer Colette. On visiting a dancer’s home, Colette gives a glimpse into the inner life of one Ouled Nail dancer, Yasmina:

Like all the Ouled Nail she danced using her arms and hands, her feet merely brushing the floor, as if on hot paving. When she danced, she also used her flanks and the muscles of her vigorous belly. Then she stopped for a moment’s rest, using the interval to undo her bodice, shirt, and chemise – for the guide insisted that she dance nude. She returned to the middle of the room between us and the two musicians, who had now turned their backs…She danced the same dances, knowing no others. But because of her nudity she no longer smiled but turned her gaze away from us and refused any longer to meet our eyes. She looked away and above our heads, full of a regal gravity and disdain, seeking the distant, invisible desert. (Places by Colette, as cited in Buonaventura, 1998, p. 98)

The most significant event in spreading belly dance throughout the world was the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Sol Bloom, an American, brought dancers of the

Ouled Nail and Ghawazee tribes to Chicago, where the women’s dances became an immediate sensation among the sexually conservative Americans. It was at the

Chicago World’s Fair that the dance was given various names such as “Danse du

Ventre, muscle dance, contortion dance, nautch dance, oriental posture dance, the ballyhoo, and the hoochy coochy.” (Hobin, 2003, p. 150) From this point on, an intermingling of Eastern and Western influences has shaped belly dance styles and costuming. The Western cabaret costume evolved in the 1920s and 30s, a creation which was inspired by costuming from the Middle East (primarily Egyptian).

Hollywood films from this period that featured “Oriental” dances performed by white women made the Western Cabaret costume wildly popular, and it remains largely unchanged today. This is the costume that was eventually used in nightclubs throughout the West and the Arab world. It is the most common type of belly dance costume worn around the world today. It typically consists of a sheer skirt, a sequined

Upon its introduction to the West belly dance immediately developed a reputation as a dance of seductive entertainment, to be limited to nightclubs and cabarets, basically stripping but with a few provocative garments added to prevent the dancer from being completely nude. This perception was probably influenced by a variety of factors including the socially conservative and ethnocentric environment of the United States in the late 1800s, the subsequent Hollywood portrayal of belly dancers as femmes fatales, and costuming popularized by films which consisted of little more than embellished undergarments. However, for the past several decades, belly dance has been re-interpreted through a more feminist lens, enjoying a revival that has brought it into a more socially accepted milieu:

It is a terrible stereotype that belly dance has been reduced in both perception and unfortunately sometimes in practice to simplistic erotic dance by women for the pleasure of men. Sensual this movement is, yes, but powerfully so as in reclaiming the wisdom, strength, and creative power of birth and the ability to nurture and bring forth life in all its meanings. I teach movement that allows women to define what is strong or beautiful or sensual by their own criteria. This is dance as a spiritual practice, using mental and corporal discipline to interpret an ancient movement into a relevant contemporary practice for women. (Palika, director of Heavy Hips Tribal Dance, http://www.heavyhips.net/)

Many of the women who direct ATS troupes, including Palika, have been instrumental in reframing belly dance to emphasize women’s strength and agency.

Belly dance has had a long and tumultuous history, being used throughout the ages for the purpose of worship and ritual, profitable entertainment and seduction, and now

[Belly] dancing has thus completed its transformation from the realm of the sacred to the aesthetic and artistic and back to a joyful, sensual, playful instrument for self-discovery. The contents of dancing changed with each phase, always combining with people’s immediate physical and spiritual needs. Indeed, the language of dance flows over the socially coded body, and it uses a different logic that can be understood through sensual awareness. Leaving oneself through dancing to enter a world beyond one’s control and beyond the personal level – almost flowing between the inner and outer world – contributes to a new and different understanding of the tensions between the different poles of existence. (Al-Rawi, 2003, 53)

II. American Tribal Style Belly Dance: The Birth of a Movement

Origins.

Once belly dance had its introduction to the West at the Chicago World’s Fair, it entered a realm in which it became ripe for new interpretation. Throughout the first part of the twentieth century, belly dance became popularized by Hollywood movies and was performed primarily in nightclubs and cabarets in the West. However, a few women with artistic vision took the dance to a new level beginning in the late 1960s in the San Francisco area. The legacy of ATS is re-told by Sarah Johansson Locke in her article “An Introduction to Tribal Bellydance” (2003).

The first woman considered to be an innovator in ATS was Jamila Salimpour, who had originally performed with the Ringling Brothers Circus and performed belly dance in nightclubs. In the 1960s, Salimpour became interested in the folkloric traditions of belly dance and started creating a more folkloric style for her performance troupe, Bal Anat. While the music, costumes, and dancing styles of Bal

Anat were far from being authentic replicas of any particular culture, they had a more

Masha Archer, a visual artist and designer, was one of Salimpour’s students.

In the 1970s she founded the San Francisco Classic Dance Troupe, and building upon

Salimpour’s ideas, added the concept of group improvisation. Archer is credited with

“dressing” dancers – taking them out of the flimsy chiffon skirts and revealing bra tops that were the hallmark of the cabaret costume and putting them in Indian choli tops that covered the arms and upper back, pantaloons that resembled Turkish pantaloons, and headdresses.

Carolena Nericcio was a student of Archer, who was the first woman to make use of the term “American Tribal Style.” In 1987 she founded FatChanceBellyDance, layering her own artistic sensibilities over Archer’s stylistic choices and Salimpour’s attention to the dance’s folkloric roots. Nericcio developed a system of cues associated with dance movements to facilitate group improvisation. She is known as the most prominent innovator of this dance form, and her troupe is considered to have a rigorously high performance standard. Nericcio’s troupe added full skirts, more elaborate headdresses, antique jewelry from the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, and facial tattoos to the ATS costuming repertoire.

Paulette Rees-Denis, a student of Nericcio, started her performance troupe

Gypsy Caravan in 1991. Using her training with FatChanceBellyDance as a foundation, she added her own artistic aesthetic in developing her troupe’s performance style. Rees-Denis places an emphasis on community and spirituality in

From these foundations, ATS troupes have sprung from all corners of the earth, its dancers continually reinventing it through their own artistic visions.

However, a few tenets of ATS dance have remained constant in the groups which practice it. These include a presentation style that is strong, regal, and feminine. It is almost always performed as a group, which is necessary because one of the key characteristics of ATS is its emphasis on group improvisation. Trust among the dancers is a necessary component in creating improvisational dance, and that trust is built through dancing together repeatedly over years. The dancers involved in this form often find shared values in community building, cooperation, and sisterhood.

ATS is a fusion dance form, carrying the legacy of the Rom in its practice of combining different costumes, music, and dance styles from different times and different cultures. Dancers of ATS do not claim their dance as authentic renditions of any of these cultures, but respectfully utilize aspects of these cultures to create a new aesthetic ideal. Locke writes, “Tribal bellydance has a modern vision of the power of creativity and innovation to honor tradition.” (Locke, 2003, p. 6)

Diverse bodies.

Accepting and valuing a wide array of body types and diverse forms of beauty is one of the qualities held dear by ATS artists. Following are a few quotations from leading ATS dancers in regard to this topic:

What I liked about the costuming most was how it seemed to flatter every body type in the troupe. I also loved that there were more than one body type in the troupe. How affirming! (Djoumahna, 2003, p. 25: on her first impression of ATS)

Tribal Bellydance is a dance form that women . . . of all body types and ages can enjoy. It is compatible with feminist sensibilities. The emphasis in this dance is one of women’s power, dignity, and strength. It is a display of sensuality rather than sexuality. (Jill Parker, director of Ultra Gypsy, as cited in The Tribal Bible, 2003, p. 67)

[I’ve had students] with hairstyles, body types, tattoos and piercings of all kind . . . I think people felt comfortable coming to my classes because they weren’t being examined . . . In my classes, people . . . like the grounded female energy. It’s not based on looking good for men, it’s based on looking good for ourselves and sharing with other women. (Carolena Nericcio, as cited in The Tribal Bible, 2003, p. 19)

As a teacher I am committed to supporting and facilitating the dancer within any age, any size of woman . . . I had no idea how in need women were for this combination of socio-material spiritual healing. (Palika, director of Heavy Hips Tribal Dance, http://www.heavyhips.net/)

Watching a performance of ATS by women with varied bodies can be an enchanting experience. In some of the performances I have seen, I have been truly inspired by the vision of bodily variety and the women’s evident love, respect, and admiration for each other’s bodies. I have also experienced how students (including myself) initially feel self-conscious about their bodies when learning this dance form; however, for many, this feeling of insecurity eventually melts away in the environment of support and acceptance from the women of the tribe.

The significance of costume.

In his book A Measured Pace: Toward a Philosophical Understanding of the

Arts of Dance, Francis Sparshott writes:

A dancer onstage . . . is clothed as a person but costumed as a performer. The dance is the entire time in which the dancer is a dancer- for-us-in-that-dance, a performer of that person. Throughout that time the dancer is costumed, and in terms of that performance would have no existence apart from that costume. (Sparshott, 1995, p. 294)

Costuming takes this level of significance in ATS. Dancers use costuming to create a persona that is integral to the presentation of the dance itself. Far from haphazard, it is a manifestation of the dancers’ very intentional choice to portray themselves as mysterious, earthy, and bold. Costume elements are pulled from all variety of inspirational sources – Turkish pantaloons, very full Flamenco skirts, Indian cholis,

Western Cabaret coin bras and belts, Egyptian Ghawazee coats, Afghani tribal Kuchi jewelry, Berber headdresses, tassel belts, and a proliferation of shells, coins, feathers, and braids are just some of the items that can be found in a typical costume. Despite the endless variations of possibilities, one quality remains constant in ATS costuming: its ability to cover the body and frame it in a beautiful, but intentional way. Kajira

Djoumahna, director of Black Sheep Bellydance, explains her troupe’s costuming choices:

We do not choose to play up the ‘cute sexy plaything’ or the ‘sensitive, vulnerable female’ aspects of Bellydance. We instead choose to enunciate power, strength, independence, and the natural sensuality that comes from being a self-assured woman in our expression of the dance…We are women unto ourselves, needing no outside approval for us to decide what we need, like, or will project. This in itself is a very American ideal! (Djoumahna, in TheTribal Bible, 2003, p. 93)

Often, when regarding a dancer in ATS costume, the only skin one can see is that of her belly, face, and hands. Clothing, jewelry and adornment cover the rest of her body from head to toe. The costume not only serves to provide an air of mystery and intricate beauty, it accentuates the movements of the dance, lending an especially rich and earthy quality. And of course, the body part that is most prominently framed by this costume is the belly. Ironically, the belly is the area most abhorred by both

In addition to the framing of the belly, the ATS costume emphasizes the hips and buttocks (another area abhorred by modern women) with the addition of scarves, coins, and tassel belts. These costuming pieces visually draw the eye to the hips, and their bulk, noise, and movement greatly enhance the hip-oriented movements of the dance. In many ways, with the framing of the belly and the enlargement and emphasis on the hips, the ATS costume forces modern women out of a comfort zone they have been socialized to inhabit. Rather than following the feminine social norm of doing all they can to minimize the appearance of belly, hips, and thighs, ATS dancers make a very deliberate decision to draw attention to these parts of the body and use the movements of their dance to celebrate and display these parts of their bodies.

One code of conduct shared by ATS belly dancers is the use of a veil or coat when a dancer is in costume but not yet performing, or after she has finished a performance. The veil covers the costume from either the head or the shoulders, to the bottom of the legs. Dancers do this not only to keep their costumes somewhat mysterious and to reserve their display for performance alone, but as a way of keeping their bodies covered, sending the message that their bodies are not on display gratuitously.

The stance.

Another important element of ATS is the stance from which all movements originate. This stance (very much like some of the ancient female statues used in mother goddess worship) is strong and does not make any attempt to contort or hide

50 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved the feminine features of the body, but rather accentuates them. In the ATS stance, the feet are always planted firmly on the ground, about hip width apart. The knees are almost always bent, because the knees act as pistons to move the hips in circles, shimmies, and undulations that are so elemental to this dance. The pelvis is held slightly tucked to protect the back, and the stomach is not sucked in with the breath to make it smaller, but it is constantly engaged to give strength and power to the movements. The arms are slightly bent, energy and life within them, and the chest is lifted almost, but not entirely, to its full potential. The shoulders are pressed down and back, engaged as much as possible. The head is held high and level, and the gaze is often very direct.

This heavy and grounded stance sometimes feels unnatural to beginner dancers, who may have been oriented to hold their bodies in ways that make them seem lighter, thinner, and more airy. Western women, who have usually been socialized to hold their stomachs in, sometimes have a hard time letting their stomachs naturally protrude with the movements of belly dance. Women who have been socialized to think that moving the pelvis is dirty or only associated with sex often have a hard time locating the pelvis, learning to isolate its musculature, and learning to move it precisely. However, it is my experience that with time and dedication, the stance can give women confidence in their dance proficiency and in their concept of themselves as subjects in their own lives and owners of their own bodies. The concept of women reclaiming their bodies is a central one in ATS says Palika, the director of

Heavy Hips Tribal Belly Dance: “[It is] a way for women to reclaim their varied bodies as powerful, creative, sensual, and wise.” (http://www.heavyhips.net/, 2006)

Shared leadership.

In my perception, perhaps the most important feature of ATS dance is its ability to incorporate women as leaders and followers alternately in improvisational dance. An important part of the feminine gendering process occurs when girls enter adolescence and learn to be silent, stop competing for attention, and generally appear unsure of themselves. They stop considering their own feelings, thoughts, and experiences as relevant and important. One theory about the “silencing” of girls says that this is a coping strategy girls employ as a result of their perilous position in society – a way of becoming invisible to protect themselves from danger and to be more accepted by peers. (Crawford and Unger, 2003) Silencing can continue into adulthood, as it is still much more socially acceptable for women to appear timid, unsure, and doubtful of themselves than it is for them to appear bold and decisive.

Breaking this mold of silence and passivity can be difficult for women to enact. One reason is that if they try to break into a leadership role within a masculine environment, they are unlikely to be successful. (Crawford and Unger, 2003).

Another reason is that there can be a heavy social price to pay for breaking the mold of silence: for example, being labeled bossy, bitchy, or too loud. I believe this code of silence is another way that women are turned inward, into immanence.

The cooperative nature of ATS enables women to break the mold of silence and find a method for working together in a nonverbal context to simultaneously create art and community while using shared leadership in a feminine setting.

Stepping forward into intentional, creative, shared action is the antithesis of being an object for others. The ATS tribe works together to create a shared library of

52 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved movements and cues. This library can be used as a means of dancing together for enjoyment and practice, or to create fluid and spontaneous performances for audiences. At any given time, the leader has the job of using her body and vocal calls to communicate clearly to her followers what she is going to do. At the same time, the followers have the job of mimicking the leader to the best of their ability, even if she misses a cue or “reinterprets” a movement at the spur of the moment. When it is time to switch to a new leader, the group utilizes its code of dance steps to maneuver a new leader into position, and the process starts over again.

While beginning students are often reluctant to begin experimenting with leading the tribe, the experience, when conducted in an environment of mutual love, respect, and playfulness, can lead to increased confidence in their abilities, their bodies, and the group itself. Leading also helps to solidify movement combinations in dancers’ minds, enhancing the learning process. The trust that is created in practicing leading and following is essential to the functioning of the ATS tribe. Through this practice, a level of intimacy is achieved between members of the tribe. In my own experience with ATS, I have found that repeatedly dancing with a group of women over several years can lead to an almost telepathic ability to understand each other as we dance.

Community.

Having been a student of dance throughout my life, I noticed a distinct difference during my first belly dance class. Rather than sensing an edge of competition with the other dancers, I perceived that we were all in the class together to learn, practice, and laugh. The more experienced students introduced themselves and

53 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved the teacher welcomed me with open arms. Granted, not all belly dancing classes are this way. I have participated in several with other instructors, in which the typical

“dance class protocol” reigned: an authoritative instructor who clearly favors the

“best” students (often the thinnest students), who actively (and often harshly) corrects students, and who teaches the class in an erratic, angry, and judgmental manner.

Having been immersed in dance class protocol throughout my life, I was extraordinarily pleased to find that dance could be taught without it.

As I learned more about the culture that can be created within an ATS classroom and an ATS performance troupe, my appreciation grew. My initial instructors gave frequent reminders to be aware of our bodies, not extend beyond the limits of our bodies, and be patient with ourselves. There was always an emphasis on mutual respect in the dance, and the instructors spoke often of our connection to each other, our teachers throughout life, and the earth. Their compassion was reflected in the kindness and openness of the other dancers, who smiled, embraced, and laughed often. Dancers who were older, younger, or had larger body types were not ostracized, but included joyfully as part of the group. Eventually I began to see that these dancers were not perceived as “old,” “kids,” or “fat,” but just as other women on a journey with the group. The culture within an ATS classroom, and especially within a troupe that spends a great deal of time dancing together, provides a strong sense of community in which cooperation and mutual respect reign.

My experience integrating into the culture of an ATS tribe reflects findings from a study published in the Family and Consumer Sciences Research Journal

(2006). The study explored the cultural framework of a high school girls’ cross

54 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved country team; specifically, how the team culture influenced the girls’ attitudes about their bodies. It was found that the team culture placed emphasis on unity and harmony, which was reflected in the students individually feeling more positive about their bodies and experiencing less desire to lose weight by dieting. This provides another example of how group values are capable of affecting individual experience.

The connections formed and reinforced through ATS dance are not only experienced by the dancers themselves; their subtle evidence is noticed and appreciated by audiences as well. Audience members can sense the connection, mutual respect, and sense of community that ATS dancers intend in their dance:

The message is that camaraderie between women is not about commiserating about men or attracting a man. It’s not sexual or erotic or even domestic. It’s about putting your individuality on hold long enough to trust the group and be uplifted by it.” (Carolena Nerricio, as cited in Zussman, 1995, p. 39)

Effective ATS education includes this concept of group integration. Dancers are taught to honor each other with their attention, support, and vocal calls. Not only does this practice help women create connections and tribal cohesion among themselves, it sends a message to the audience that this dance is about cooperation among the dancers, not competition. I believe it provides a refreshing change from the ways in which groups of dancers typically relate to each other and their audiences.

III. ATS and Mind-Body Dualism

In her book Dance and the Lived Body, Sondra Horton Fraleigh writes about the process of dance in relation to mind-body dualism, which is an important concept in this thesis. For Fraleigh, the ways in which dance is typically discussed and taught merely reinforce the mind-body dualism that is already prevalent in Western culture:

The dualistic language of mind versus body . . . pervade the literature on dance. Habits of language reinforce a view that the body is simply material substance and mechanical physiological process, moved by something other than itself, and that mind, as pure thought escapes the material body. (Fraleigh, 1987, p. 9)

Indeed, this has been my experience learning other forms of dance. My childhood ballet teacher sometimes walked around the class with a cane and used it to poke my belly or rear end when she thought one or the other was protruding too much in a movement. She would use her cane to pound the rhythm on the floor next to the foot of a student if she lost count of the music. In this approach, the body is merely clay that is molded by the will of the mind. The body is stretched, strengthened, and toned, as an instrument that executes the mind’s desires (often the teacher’s mind). In her article “Emancipatory Pedagogy?: Women’s Bodies and the Creative Process in

Dance” Jill Green writes:

. . . dancers’ bodies are habituated, inscribed, and influenced by dance culture through a constant effort to reach an unattainable bodily ideal . . . dance classes promote a training process whereby . . . women’s bodies are constantly under ‘surveillance’ . . . teachers take ownership of student bodies, weakening their bodies in an effort to disconnect them from their bodies . . . teachers sometimes inadvertently perpetuate a practice that marginalizes young women in dance classes. (2000)

During dance class, students stare in the mirror at their bodies, breaking them down and compartmentalizing them into movement in mental concentration:

Another consequence of dualism is that it encourages the all too common view that the training of a dancer is the training of a body, simply understood as physical. The body then is conceived mechanistically, as thing to be whipped, honed, and molded into shape. But in reality the whole self is shaped in the experience of dance, since the body is besouled, bespirited, and beminded. Simply stated, the body is lived through all of these aspects in dance. (Fraleigh, 1987, p. 11)

Fraleigh does not refer to ATS in her work; however, the concept she advocates in dance education is an important aspect of ATS: the integration of the mind and the body. Classes usually start with some type of meditation, allowing the mind to quiet and expand as the body stretches. Students breathe deeply, focus, and make a conscious effort to relieve mind and body of tension. Stretches and warm-ups are often done in a circle, with the group facing each other, not the mirror. Sometimes partner stretches are incorporated in which the dancers use their bodies cooperatively to help each other relax and stretch.

The mirror is used to help students learn dance technique – having a reflection enables students to see the different parts of their body and learn to move them in isolation. The use of the mirror in this fashion is typical of any dance class. However, what differentiates the use of the mirror in ATS is the intention. In ATS classes, dancers are not attempting to master their bodies or force their bodies into postures or movements. In ATS classes, attention is always given to the students’ awareness of the body – how it feels in any given movement. Students are encouraged to be patient with their bodies and to give their minds and bodies time to adjust to the unaccustomed movements.

Additional techniques used to teach ATS include turning the class to face away from the mirror, having the students take time to “free dance,” or dance however their bodies want to, incorporating dances to thank and bless both the earth and the students’ bodies, trying on a persona through the movement of the body, projecting an image or intent with the body, and holding the class outdoors. The intention of mind-

We dance to become acquainted with that which cannot be known by any other means – to find out what can be known through the body as a mental, physical, spiritual whole. Thus we acquire a kind of knowledge we might designate as experiential . . . dance involves more than just knowing how to do a movement. It also involves knowing how to express the aesthetic intent of the movement and how to create aesthetic movement imagery. (Fraleigh, 1987, p. 26)

In my experience, when women dance together cooperatively, using methods that encourage mind-body integration, intending feminine power and feeling mutual respect, a very unique and transformative experiential knowledge is created.

Chapter III

Research Methods: Belly Dancing, Story, and Body Image

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on methods and discuss the practical steps I use in creating the qualitative research project for this thesis. In this chapter, I first draw on the work of Joey Sprague and Diane Kobrynowicz, to discuss feminist epistemology, the framework from which I approach this study. I then turn to the work of Sharlene Hesse-Biber and Denise Leckenby to reveal the methodology, limitations of my study, and my efforts to use synergistic research techniques. The chapter concludes with a description of my research methods, using the process detailed by Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin in Basics of Qualitative Research:

Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques.

I. Epistemology

In Feminist Perspectives on Social Research (2004), Sprague and

Kobrynowicz write that positivism, the underlying basis of Western natural and social science is “an epistemology of the fact.” (p. 78) In the positivist framework, knowledge is a neutral, objective, absolute truth and facts are empirical observations.

What exists is what can be seen and measured with objective standards. Positivism requires that researchers reduce or eliminate any subjective judgment and personality from the process of research because these cloud the process of uncovering truth. In this pursuit, the researcher or observer attempts invisibility and offers no point of view. Because the researcher is separate and distinct from the subject, a hierarchical relationship can develop in which the researcher is entitled to know, whereas the

59 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved subject is entitled only to be known. Positivist epistemology offers a basis for knowledge that is clear-cut and factual. However, positivism is limited: “Scholarly paradigms, like other forms of human consciousness, are the expression of specific world views.” (Hesse-Biber & Yaiser, 2004, p. 79).

Feminist scholars have criticized the worldview expressed by positivist epistemology as an androcentric, or male-centered, worldview; this is the worldview that has overwhelmingly dominated public consciousness and the power dynamics of knowledge. Sprague and Kobrynowicz contend that positivism reflects “a privileged masculine consciousness.” (p. 84) The privileged masculine consciousness has emerged over time from differences in how genders have been socially constructed, including lack of male involvement in attending to bodily maintenance and lack of male participation in the work that is associated with the rearing of children. Women have participated in the emergence of the privileged masculine consciousness by consistently attending to bodily needs of themselves, their children, and men, and by participating in gender roles that guarantee their responsibility for these tasks.

Feminist scholars argue the need for a shift in paradigm, including our ways of knowing and being known:

Feminist critiques of sociological practices point to a detachment, both intellectual and emotional, from the daily work of keeping life going, from the people whose lives we study, and from popular political discourse. They take issue with the way we have organized the production of knowledge, noting that it serves more to control people than to nurture them. They challenge a reliance on dichotomy and high levels of abstraction. The terms of the feminist critique roughly parallel the description of privileged masculine consciousness. (Hesse- Biber &Yaiser, 2004, p. 89)

From critiques such as these, another approach to knowledge has developed, called feminist standpoint epistemology. At its core, feminist standpoint epistemology has the ideal of helping the oppressed to ultimately challenge and overcome their oppression. However, as Donna Haraway explains in her chapter “Situated

Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial

Perspective” (1991), there is a danger inherent in taking the position of “oppressed others,” claiming to see from their perspective and speak on their behalf. The danger lies in the fact that knowledge must be situated in context, from the perspective of the knower, and translation of this knowledge by an academic involves an inherent shift in perspective. As she writes, “Translation is always interpretive, critical and partial.”

(Haraway, 1991, Persistence of Vision section, para. 15) It seems necessary, then, that feminist researchers claim their perspective, bias, and context in the research to ensure responsibility in its presentation. It is also necessary that feminist researchers see the participants of their research as having personal agency, not as resources to be tapped for information.

In feminist standpoint epistemology, the oppressed are considered to be any group historically controlled by privileged male consciousness, based on gender, sexuality, race, class, or ability. A central concept to this epistemological framework is that oppressed persons develop a dual perspective, incorporating aspects of their personal experience and the perspective of their oppressors, which they adopt to enhance their survival and success. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) W.E. B. Du

Bois describes the dual perspective of African Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (DuBois, 1903, para. 3)

Feminist epistemology does not seek to unite this dual perspective by forcing its recognition, but rather to illuminate it as a rich and complex strategy for coping with oppression. This research is firmly rooted in the idea that knowledge is situated in context; that it cannot be separated from its time and place. It denies that a “view from nowhere” can be achieved, and seeks to access knowledge through different pathways. One of the approaches used in this theory of knowledge includes an avoidance of control and domination over research subjects, favoring connection and relationship instead.

Feminist researchers strive to foster supportive and cooperative relationships in which self-revelation builds trust with research subjects. They seek to reduce the distinction that has historically been made between public and private spheres, insisting that knowledge within these spheres has equal significance and that the knowledge created in these spheres naturally overlaps. They contend that all women need to see the issues they face as part of the larger culture, not only as personal problems; rather, they create knowledge that is connected to daily life and larger social, political, and economic frameworks. They also strive to reduce subject-object split and mind-body dualism, which are key concepts in this study.

Rather than attempting to deny bias, feminist research is open to acknowledging and embracing bias as part of the researcher’s personality. In feminist

62 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved standpoint epistemology, each standpoint is limited by time, experience, bias, oppression, or privilege, so that data collection is not considered finite or objective, but as a critical conversation in a series of communications. In this epistemology, there is recognition that the roles of researchers and research subjects are socially constructed:

If something is socially constructed it is not the durable, detached web of lawlike operations that positivism conjures up. It is – and we are – historically specific and changeable. Rational knowledge is open- ended because the world is open-ended. (Hesse-Biber & Yaiser, 2004, p. 93)

One of the limitations of feminist standpoint epistemology is that researchers still maintain an aura of privilege in relation to research participants. If researchers from the academic realm seek to know about groups that are comparatively disadvantaged, including groups of other race or class, a level of power imbalance will persist and limit the ability to form open, trusting relationships. In addition, “Some have argued that the powerless are aware that official knowledge, rather than serving their interests, often works against them. This makes them appropriately suspicious of, and therefore less authentic with, researchers.” (Mies, 1993 & Edwards 1990, as cited in Hesse-Biber & Yaiser, 2004, p. 89) Feminist standpoint epistemology attempts to minimize this limitation by acknowledging that researchers are constantly in relationship – not individually responsible for the research they generate, but dependent upon the cooperation and goodwill of the surrounding community.

Feminist standpoint epistemology is also limited in its inability to fully access knowledge based upon differences of race, class, sexuality, and ability. As this epistemology focuses primarily on differences of gender, the concept of “universal

63 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved woman” and her oppression by “universal man” can oversimplify findings. It is important, as much as possible, to acknowledge and explore the differences among women based on their backgrounds, experiences, and contexts within the larger society.

Feminist standpoint epistemology is confined to the limits of individual standpoints. Its strength of situating knowledge within time, space, and context is also a limitation in the amount that can be known within time, space, and context. As I will show in section II, Synergy, Methodology and Limitations, my study was limited by time, because the research participants naturally changed their mood, preferences, and ideas over the course of the class, making it impossible to correlate the belly dancing class with individual changes of opinion. In consideration of this, it is still possible to draw comparison between their original opinions and their subsequent opinions, noting trends and changes throughout their writings as a whole. In Chapter

IV, I will draw out the prevalent themes that emerged from the student writings, and in

Chapter V, I will provide a theoretical analysis to these themes, which must be seen as

“interpretive, critical, and partial.” (Haraway, 1991, Persistence of Vision section, para. 15)

II. Synergy, Methodology and Limitations

Synergistic research.

Sharlene Nagy Hesse-Biber and Denise Leckenby (2004) explain the synergistic perspective of research in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research. In this concept, epistemology, methodology, and method work together to create social change: “While traditional research employs these components of research, the

64 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved synergistic engagement of these components in feminist research interrogates the status quo, aiming to raise our consciousness about how we do research.” (Hesse-

Biber & Yaiser, 2004, p. 210) In this study, I strive to find the intersection of epistemology, methodology, and method.

According to the authors, some of the ways in which the synergistic perspective is achieved include the researcher’s constant re-evaluation of her double roles as researcher and feminist. For example, the researcher must be open to changing contexts as the research proceeds and to “fluid intentions of the research question.” The research question must be open to the creation of new theories and not limited to its original intent. The process of finding research participants, the collection and synthesis of their opinions, and the subsequent analysis are all performed through an intentionally feminist perspective. Qualitative methods may be used because they help to reveal issues of power and control that may be only implicitly known otherwise. The intent of the research is to give women a public voice they can put to use, not only to write about them as research subjects. The research includes an awareness of the complex relationships between class, gender, race, and sexuality. It attempts to make strong and valid statements about women’s experience as a whole without oversimplifying and losing sight of women’s reality as being rooted in individual experience. As the authors state,

Synergistic research seeks an engagement with subjugated knowledge, challenging the basic power structures of scientific knowledge building. Synergistic involvement of epistemology, methodology and method deeply challenges the basic power structures of our society. Feminist research is giving us new models for social change and knowledge building, impacting both our work and daily lives. (Hesse-Biber & Yaiser, 2004, p. 224)

Methodology.

To explore the research question “What impressions do young women share about images of the female body, and how do their impressions change after the experience of taking a belly dance class?,” I decided upon a simple writing exercise that the research participants would complete before and after the belly dance class. In the process of designing the study, I chose to have the students write their first impressions before being exposed to any belly dance instruction or information and write their second impressions after having taken the class and re-reading their first impressions. My intention was to provide a sense of continuity for the students, so that they would be able to refresh their memories of their first impressions and have a framework within which to reiterate their original impressions, modify them slightly, change them completely, or some combination. The advantage of this approach was that it facilitated the students’ self-reflection while leaving the direction of their second writing open to the direction of their choosing. The limitations of this approach will be discussed in the following section, Limitations.

At first, I wanted to provide the students with different images before and after the class, preferably images from the cover of both American Tribal Style (ATS) dance magazines and mainstream women’s magazines from popular culture. These images would serve as prompts for the research participants to write about. I soon realized the difficulty with this plan, because no widely distributed American Tribal

Style magazines exist, only troupe newsletters and smaller-scale publications. I also felt that showing only one image of belly dancers and mainstream models would not do justice to the complexity of the images I was attempting to portray.

I decided instead to compile photo collages from a variety of sources. I contacted the directors of several well-known and respected American Tribal Style dance troupes, including FatChanceBellyDance in San Francisco, California; Gypsy

Caravan in Portland, Oregon; Heavy Hips Tribal Dance in Santa Cruz, California;

Troupe Salamat in Prescott, Arizona; Domba! in Phoenix, Arizona; and Black Sheep

Belly Dance in Rohnert Park, CA and received permission to use photos from their websites for the purposes of my study. Since photos of fashion models are so widely distributed and available, I gathered a selection from the internet and magazines and compiled a photo collage of these as well. The major limitation of this process was that since I was hand-selecting photos, my own bias undoubtedly entered into the creation of the photo collages. That bias is basically that I feel the images of ATS dancers provide more realistic and positive images of women, while media images create unrealistic and limiting images of women. My intention for selection of the photos was primarily that I wanted to show how women’s bodies are portrayed in ATS and in commercial advertising. So, I chose photos for each collage that showed as much of the body as possible. In addition to showing the body, I tried to find pictures that were typical and representative of both the ATS culture and popular culture as portrayed in commercial advertising.

The belly dance collage consists of both professional, posed, publicity photographs, and more casual snapshots of dancers together. The women in the belly dance collage are white, between the ages of twenty and fifty, which is typical of the actual population involved in this dance form. The women in the collage are mostly

Interestingly, when I have attended performances and workshops in the greater

ATS community, there are always quite a number of women performing with troupes and teaching classes who are of a much larger build, and they are always received with encouragement and admiration from students and audiences. However, on American

Tribal Style websites, I found virtually no body-revealing photographs of these larger women. There were several pictures of larger women included in The Tribal Bible,

(2003) but the quality of the photographs was poor and they were black and white.

Perhaps this is an indication of covert size discrimination in the realm of ATS. As part of this community, I have seen how women will often begin to accept and appreciate the bodies of others even when they still remain critical of their own bellies, fat, and stretch marks. Clearly, women still have a conflicted relationship with the female form, even in an activity and community that tend to be progressive. Note: Six months after I collected photos for the belly dance collage, I saw more and more photographs of diversely-bodied women in ATS websites, particularly on the

BlackSheep Bellydance website (http://www.blacksheepbellydance.com).

In the belly dance collage, many of the women are in “power positions,” most often standing with chests lifted, gaze directed at the camera, and smiles. In some cases they are turned in to each other, laughing. In two photos the women are shown with arms overhead, looking almost defiant, and in one a woman walks boldly with a sword balanced on top of her head. The costumes they wear represent the wide array of possibilities seen in American Tribal Style dance costuming. The body postures

68 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved and costumes are typical of the ways in which American Tribal Style dancers usually appear when dancing and when posed for a photograph. The “strong” stance is an integral part of ATS dance posture.

I wanted the models photo collage to show a significant contrast to the images of the dancers. I gathered the photos of the models from modeling websites,

Cosmopolitan and Vogue magazine websites, and from the back covers of Seventeen magazine and Teen People magazine. While there have been some recent advertising campaigns featuring more “real” women’s bodies, I chose not to include these as they still represent only a small fraction of the millions of images used in advertising. I chose instead to focus on images very typical of the millions of advertisements targeted at young women. In this collage all the women are white and most are blonde, under 35. All are thin, some extremely so. One model has breasts that have obviously been surgically enlarged. The photos include the movie actress Charlize Theron, the

TV actress and Playboy model Pamela Anderson, pop culture icon Paris Hilton, and supermodel Eva Herzigova. The photo from the back cover of Seventeen magazine was an advertisement for prom dresses.

The body positioning of the models is most often in “powerless” positions: lying down, hunched over, and on the knees. I included one picture of a model with a bow and arrow to provide contrast to the belly dancer with a sword on her head and a picture of an actress “teaching” math at a chalkboard wearing only a black bra and an unbuttoned white shirt. I felt that these two pictures used visual images to make tongue-in-cheek commentary about women using weapons and doing math. In the collage the models are wearing high fashion dresses, bikinis, underwear, and one

69 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved wears nothing but a sheet. Two of the models are portrayed as being in the process of undressing, with clothes half-on and half-off the body. The body positioning and the models’ clothing are typical of the way young women are portrayed in commercial advertising.

Interestingly, after I selected these photos based on the amount of body shown,

I noticed that none of the models are smiling; rather, all are showing either a pouty or a sultry stare. The fact that none of the models are smiling gives the impression that they are all unhappy, which many of the students commented upon. However, I find it interesting that the sultry/pouty stare seems to go hand and hand with body exposure in the models’ pictures. When I was looking for pictures, it was difficult to find pictures showing a great deal of body and a smile. Does the juxtaposition of body visibility and sultry/pouty stare come from the cultural concept that a woman’s body is a sexual object, and that seduction/pouting is the only appropriate display of emotion as long as her body is visible?

On the first day of the class, I began by introducing myself and giving the students information about the informed consent. I gave no information about the subject of the study, as I wanted to avoid biasing their responses as much as possible; however from seeing my advertising flyer, some of the students knew that the study was about young women, body image, and belly dance. After the students signed the informed consent forms, I passed out packets, each containing a copy of the two photo collages and blank paper on which to write. Each student packet was identified by a random number code. I kept the key to these number codes separate for future use.

All of the students participating in the research were undergraduates between the ages

70 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved of 18 and 23, and had no prior experience with belly dance. I asked the students to take thirty minutes to write their impressions, ideas, and feelings about the pictures.

Twenty-one students participated in the preliminary writing exercise.

Upon the completion of the course, I had the students repeat the same procedure. Using number codes, I returned each student’s original writing exercise and asked each to re-read their original impressions and modify where applicable, if at all. For the second writing exercise, nine students participated. In the course of the six dance classes, many students had dropped out and the class had reduced in size by at least fifty percent. I will discuss the reasons for this in Chapter VI. (For photo collages, class handouts, and class curriculum and observations see Appendix B).

As the researcher, my overall contact with the class was limited to a role of facilitation; I wanted to avoid being in a position of power in relation to the students as much as possible. I was in contact with the students for the initial information giving and registration. I administered the writing exercises at the beginning and end of the class. I attended all the classes as a student, and occasionally served as a teacher’s assistant for Sherry Hammond, who was teaching the class. At the end of the class,

(after the completion of the final writing exercise) I participated in a discussion about my research and a performance with other members of my dance troupe that we gave as a “thank you” to the students. While I was very involved behind the scenes in creating the curriculum and observing the class, I attempted to equalize the power imbalance inherent in my relationship with the students as much as possible by avoiding the role of instructor. I tried to create an environment in which the students could feel free to express themselves and reveal their true impressions in the writing

71 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved exercises they completed. However, because the students all knew I was the researcher and they were the research subjects, a certain amount of power imbalance inherent in our positions relative to each other was bound to remain intact.

Limitations.

In this study, there are several methodological limitations that must be addressed. The participants were identified through self-selection from women students at Northern Arizona University. I used two criteria to narrow the pool of participants once they expressed interest in the class. The initial interest in the study was overwhelming, and while there were many graduate students who signed up for the class, there were enough undergraduate students to exclude the graduate students from the research portion. There were several students with previous belly dance experience who signed up for the class, but I chose to limit the research group to students who had no previous experience. The undergraduate, non-experienced women who chose to participate in the research may have had pre-existing ideas about body image, belly dance, or media images that would differ from a randomly chosen sample from a general population. However, due to time and financial constraints, it was necessary to use self-selection to gather the group of participants.

The time span of the study was also a limitation. The length of time was limiting because the women naturally changed their mindset, mood, and opinion over the course of the eight week session. It would be impossible to make a direct correlation between their before-class writing, the belly dance class, and their after- class writing. This study is an exploration of the women’s perceptions at two given points in time and cannot make any claims beyond this limitation. The brevity of the

72 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved study is limiting because the students only had a brief experience of belly dance to reflect upon. Perhaps if the class had been longer and more sessions offered, their reflections on belly dance and body image would have been altered in some way.

The study is limited in its scope because it accesses issues of body image and beauty without significant intersection with the categories of race and class. As I stated earlier, all the photographs of ATS dancers used in the study are white women, presumably of middle class or higher. The photographs are representative of the majority population participating in this dance form. It seems ATS unintentionally excludes some women from participation. This may be due, in part, to its nature as a recreational activity that usually requires a certain amount of financial flexibility to pay for classes, workshops, and costumes. My choice to solicit undergraduate college women for participation undoubtedly narrowed the population from which the participants came. There was a forty dollar registration fee for the class, but I advertised that the fee would be waived for any woman for whom it was a financial difficulty. While my class was certainly open to all classes and races of women, the majority of students were white, European American students. However, the students also included one Native American, one African American, one Hispanic American among the research participants. One Indonesian woman took the class but did not participate in the second writing session.

Another limitation in the study is the design of having students re-read their original impressions before the second writing session. This may have created a resistance to expressing changes of opinion that occurred from the experience of learning belly dance; on the other hand, it may have lead the students to express even

Nonetheless, a benefit of structuring the study in this way lies in the continuity created by having the students read and reflect upon their own writings, providing a context for their reflections in the second writing session.

The nature of this project is exploratory: I am reading women’s own narratives, ideas, and feelings about body image, and trying to understand how their perceptions compare to my own assumptions. I understand that my assumptions were challenged in this study. With this noted, my assumptions include the following: that by and large, young women are suffering from poor body image and a conflicted sense of self within our culture. Their feelings of inadequacy are reinforced by nearly all elements of our present culture, and especially by commercial media. To move toward a more healthy and sustainable society, women must cease to see themselves and others as isolated, fragmented body-projects. From personal experience and anecdotal evidence, I believe that ATS dance is one tool women can use in the endeavor of increasing body acceptance and reducing mind-body dualism.

III. Methods

Latent Content Analysis

Using feminist standpoint epistemology and feminist methodology, the research was conducted using the method of latent content analysis. As Earl Babbie describes in The Practice of Social Research (2001), content analysis is a method effective for performing unobtrusive research using recorded human communications.

Being unobtrusive in the researcher role was an important consideration in the design of my study, so I chose to structure the study without use of interviews or

74 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved questionnaires, leaving the possibilities for participant responses as open-ended as possible. The use of content analysis was also more economical in terms of time and resources than a survey, questionnaire, or interviews might have been.

In this study, individual student writings are the units of observation, while the collection of student writings as a whole serves as the unit of analysis. Content analysis is most often used to analyze communications such as art, email, and newspaper articles that are created independently, before their analysis by a researcher. However, in this study, the written communications were created for the purpose of study. This is one of the disadvantages of my study because the participants were conscious of their writing being used for research from the beginning, which may have biased their responses and damaged the validity of the study. However, since no written communications pertaining to my research question were in existence, I needed to structure the study in this way.

In their book Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and

Techniques, Anselm Strauss and Juliet Corbin outline the following reasons for coding as a method of analysis: it helps to build theory, rather than only testing existing theories; it gives the research process necessary vigor; it helps the researcher uncover her own biases and assumptions; and it provides grounding for the creation of new theories. (1990, 57) Indeed, in my process of coding, I found much that verified and supported the theoretical literature I had previously read, but I also found themes in my data that opened new ground, previously not addressed in the literature. I found deeper nuance than was apparent in my own preliminary readings of the student responses. I found some evidence to support my original assumptions and beliefs

Due to time constraints, this study is limited to a thematic analysis; however, upon further study and analysis, it could be possible to further develop my thematic analysis into new grounded theory.

Open Coding

I began the process of coding using the technique of open coding, described by

Strauss and Corbin as “the part of analysis that pertains specifically to the naming and categorizing of phenomena through close examination of data.” (1990, 62) Using the two techniques described by Strauss and Corbin as making comparisons and asking questions, I methodically read and re-read the data I collected to form thematic categories with which to understand, compare, and analyze the student writings.

My first step in this process was to assign each student a pseudonym so that I would be able to track her perceptions consistently throughout her writings. I then went through each student’s writing separately, reading line-by-line for the themes that emerged in her writing. After completing several students’ writings in this fashion, it became apparent that many of the themes would be repeated again and again throughout the students’ writing as a whole, while a few outlying themes emerged within a unit of observation that would not be repeated within the unit of analysis as a whole.

I developed a list of thematic categories, linking them to the student writings using letter codes. Early in the process, it became apparent that nesting codes were needed to show the variety of the students’ perceptions within each thematic code.

These nesting codes were delineated by number and their descriptions kept in my code

76 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved book. As part of this process, going back and forth from the student writings to my code book, I began to define the thematic categories in terms of their meanings, contexts, and limitations. I developed criteria for each category to determine which portions of the student writing would be appropriate for each respective category.

Axial Coding

My next step involved a shift into axial coding. Strauss and Corbin write the following about axial coding:

Axial coding puts…data back together in new ways by making connections between a category and its sub-categories…In axial coding our focus is on specifying a category in terms of the conditions that give rise to it; the context in which it is embedded; the action/interactional strategies by which it is handled, managed, carried out; and the consequences of those strategies. (1990, 97)

I created a document with which to organize student quotations pertaining to each thematic category, specifying the numerical nesting code, or sub-category, when applicable. Since I was not dealing with interviews or writings that focused on one topic in one session, I further organized this document into four sections. My research question relates to the students’ perceptions of two different photo collages in two different writing sessions; hence, I felt it necessary to keep their perceptions distinct in four session topics: A) Before – Models, B) Before – Bellydancers, C) After – Models, and D) After – Bellydancers. By organizing excerpts from the student writings in this way, I was able to see which themes emerged before and after the dance class, and whether they pertained specifically to the models or the belly dancers.

Once this coding document was created, it was easy to see which thematic categories were of most relevance in each session topic. While there was some overlap among the session topics, there were also distinct themes that became

77 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved prevalent within the coding of each individual session topic. Particularly from the preliminary writings to the secondary writings, I saw a shift in the themes the students chose to address.

I used my coding document as a tool to write Chapter IV, Thematic Analysis.

In writing this chapter, I attempted to enhance my theoretical sensitivity by continually asking myself questions as to why, what, when and how the students were expressing their perceptions. I continually went back and forth between my coding document which lists student quotations according to session topic, category, and sub-category, and the student writings themselves, to re-read and check for overall meaning and the context from which the quotations came. Through this process, I found many nuances in the student writings which I had overlooked on their second or third reading, and found some assumptions that I had had throughout the coding process to be flawed based upon the data. I also further refined my codes, finding some instances in which new sub-categories needed to be created and other instances in which categories or sub-categories could be combined into more comprehensive groupings. Throughout the writing of Chapter IV, the categories and themes that emerged were considered provisional, until I re-examined them in relation to the data itself.

Limitations of Coding

One limitation I discovered in the process of coding was that I was unable to validate students’ meanings of words, concepts, and phrases because the unit of analysis was in written form, not open to discussion or clarification. Because of this limitation, my analysis of their writings is undoubtedly colored by my own meanings of these words, phrases, and concepts. Because of this, my own perceptions are

My coding process does not continue into the use of selective coding, which

Strauss and Corbin describe as identifying a story line in the data, developing the core category in terms of its properties, using the story as a guideline, and arranging categories until they fit the story. This aspect of coding is instrumental in creating grounded theory. However, because of time limitations, this study does not seek to create theory. However, it does offer thematic analysis in Chapter IV and theoretical analysis using a combination of feminist embodiment theory and my own interpretations in Chapter V.

Chapter IV

Thematic Analysis: Emerging Patterns

Introduction

This chapter contains my thematic analysis of the two student writing sessions, before and after the belly dance class. The students’ preliminary writing session began with a brief explanation of confidentiality and informed consent. I offered to answer any of their questions about the study, but none of the students asked any. From the advertising flyers, they knew that the study was focused upon young women, body image, and belly dance, but nothing more. After signing the informed consent forms, I handed the students packets containing writing paper and the two photo collages. I then asked them to take thirty minutes to write their impressions, thoughts, and feelings about the photographs. Upon completion of the course, a similar procedure was repeated, in which I asked the students to re-read their original writings and share changes (if any) to their original impressions.

To explore the research question, “What impressions do young women share about images of the female body, and how do their impressions change after the experience of learning belly dance?” it is necessary to break down their responses into four session topics – A. Before: Models; B. Before: Belly Dancers; C. After: Models; and D. After: Belly Dancers. In coding the student responses, ten thematic categories emerged that contained the majority of the relevant themes. Some of these categories additionally contain sub-categories to further synthesize and understand the impressions of the students. The ten thematic categories remain the same throughout

80 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved the entire coding process; however, each of the four session topics focuses on different thematic categories depending upon the trends within the students’ responses.

In this chapter, I will relate the prevalent themes that emerged from each of the four session topics through the process of coding, and offer preliminary interpretation of these themes. The overarching themes from this chapter will be analyzed using a combination of feminist embodiment theory and my personal interpretation, in the subsequent chapter.

As a preface to my thematic analysis in this chapter, I must state that the most characteristic quality I found among the student writings was internal conflict in how they perceive social body norms, their own bodies, and their expectations of themselves in relation to their bodies. This conflict is apparent consistently throughout this chapter, and will also be discussed in Chapter V. Chapter IV will conclude with a discussion of the unexpected themes (and lack of themes I was expecting) among the student writings.

I. Session Topic A - Before: Models

The three most important themes that emerged in the preliminary student writings on the collage of the models were Questioning Media Images, Judging

Appearance, and Message Projected by Appearance.

Questioning Media Images

This category focuses on statements that reveal students’ mistrust or questioning of images typically found in commercial media. In this category, I learned that most of the students were far from being accepting of the typical, mainstream images I collected. Not only critical of the models’ appearance, their

81 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved critique extends into the cultural forces that help to create images such as these, the ways in which these forces affect women in general, and the ways in which they affect the students personally.

Some of the statements about how media images affect other women show a concern for the psychological impact they impart to themselves and other women. For example, Joelle states, “These are America’s girls or what today’s perception of young, middle [aged], or older women should look like. This, to me, is the wrong message.” Joelle makes note of the tendency in media images to include only young women as icons of feminine beauty, and judges this as the wrong approach. Maya brings her awareness of photographic altering techniques to the table, stating,

Images in the media can be touched up so much that they aren’t even real anymore. I think when we see these pictures all the time we start to think that our own bodies aren’t adequate and no matter how healthy, thin, or fit you may or may not be, you will never be happy with ‘you.’

Indeed, this rings true for Maya as becomes apparent later in her writing. She, like many of the students, harshly judges the industry that creates the models’ look and the messages these images send, and yet she yearns for some of the bodily qualities the models possess, primarily thinness.

Both Amanda and Tia bring their impression of media images into the realm of the personal:

There’s no way in hell I will ever look like that, no matter what I do. I guess I’m OK with that; I’m unique and beautiful in my own ways. I’m short and thick and I’m just fine with that. (Amanda)

I have curves and I love them but society’s demands are ‘barely there’ women. If this is society’s standards, where do I fit in? (Tia)

Amanda thwarts the pressure of media influences by asserting her own self-confidence and individual beauty, describing her own body as quite different from to the typical model’s tall, willowy frame and rejecting the idea of conformance to an ideal that does not suit her. Tia, on the other hand, asserts that she loves her curves while questioning where she fits into a society that does not approve of curves. In Tia’s subsequent writing, she reveals a difficult relationship with her body, continually teetering between acceptance and rejection, heavily tinted with shame.

Judging Appearance

This category focuses on aesthetic judgments the students make based on the appearance of women in the photographs. The overwhelming response focused on two distinct critiques: the models’ thinness and their lack of individuality. Repeatedly, the students described the models as being underweight: “too skinny and unhealthy”

(Isabel); “all skinny and not normal” (Irene); “gangly” (Amanda); “deathly skinny”

(Joelle); and “grossly thin” (Maya). Additionally, their critiques contained complaints about how the models’s thinness affects women, including fears about women being prevented from maintaining good health, feeling sexy or beautiful in their real bodies, being carefree about their intake of food, and having fun.

Many of the students were judgmental of the models’ adherence to a certain look, and judged them as being not unique, or having a lack of individuality. Among the aspects of their appearance that were critiqued were their clothing, Pamela

Anderson’s breast implants, their lack of racial diversity, and their blond hair. Along with these critiques, Amanda assigned a lack of individuality in the models’ approach to their outward appearance: “Some of these women look like they try so hard to look

83 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved alike.” I find it interesting that these critiques are assigned to the models themselves, and not to a larger cultural force that creates pressure for women to conform to these outward manifestations of beauty. In other words, the students blamed the models for conformance to this ideal. This tendency is further analyzed in Chapter V.

Message Projected by Appearance

This category is most important throughout all of the preliminary writings. It focuses on the ways in which the students perceived the personalities or motivations of the women in the photographs based on their appearance. A wide array of sub- categories was created under the category of Message Projected by Appearance; however, the most prevalent in the Before: Models topic session is “Seductive.” The impression of the students was that the models were dressed, posed and on display with the intention of being seductive to others. In most cases, the perceived “other” was a male audience. Their impressions ranged from a description of “sexy outfits”

(Joelle) to Isabel’s assertion, “They look like prostitutes who would be easy to have sex with.” All of the statements in the sub-category of Seductive were loaded with judgment. Interestingly, this judgment is only present in the cases in which women are being seductive for an audience of others. In the sub-category category “Sexy,” which will be discussed later, I will show how the students value women’s expressions of sexiness if the intention is for women to feel sexy on their own terms.

The second most significant sub-category in this topic session is “Trying Too

Hard.” Trying too hard to find self-acceptance, be beautiful, be seductive, or to fit in socially is something the students judge harshly here. Isabel writes, “The poses and the way the ladies are makes me think that they would do anything in order to make

84 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved them like themselves.” Similar to the sub-category “Lack of Individuality” discussed earlier, this statement reveals a mistrust of the models’ ability to assert themselves, be unique and shows a distaste for the models’ perceived need to do anything for approval. Irene writes, “The only picture I like…is made to look like she isn’t trying but she’s probably trying the hardest of all of them.”

One additional theme emerged in Session Topic A – that of body fragmentation and selective emaciation. This is not a thematic category in itself; however, I noticed its emergence in this session topic through the juxtaposition of two categories: Judging Appearance and Personal Expectations of Body. I saw bits and pieces of this theme throughout the students’ writing, and it is especially apparent here with Isabel’s discussion of the models. She writes:

I do like how flat their stomachs are. They do have nice thighs, however, their arms look too skinny. None of them seem to have any definition or curves in their body. I always figured men like a little bit of curves with their ladies…The ladies do look too skinny and unhealthy. I would be worried if I could see the bones of the top of my ribcage.

In this selection, Isabel fragments the models’ bodies, showing admiration for the model’s flat stomachs and thin thighs with simultaneous dislike for the skinny arms that accompany the stomachs and thighs.

Isabel’s evaluation reflects the impossibility of the modern beauty ideal that takes the typically larger parts of women’s bodies (stomachs, hips, thighs) to pre- pubescent size while expecting other parts (arms) to remain at a normal size and still others (breasts) to achieve an extra large size. This is coupled with a critique of the models’ thinness and lack of curves, framed through the patriarchal lens of “what men like,” and finally brought into the personal realm, revealing that Isabel would be

This is one excellent example of the conflicted relationship young women have with their own bodies and the bodies of other women.

Summary

The students’ reflections about the models in the preliminary writing session reveal that they question images of women typically found in commercial media.

They find these images misleading and confusing for themselves and other women.

They judge the consistent thinness portrayed in commercial images and its effects on women’s health and well-being. They don’t approve of widespread conformance to the modern beauty ideal. They perceive the photographs of the models as being seductive to a male audience, and think the models are trying too hard to gain approval. Additionally, two of the students described the model’s bodies using fragmentation and selective emaciation. Several of these themes will be discussed further in Chapter V.

II. Session Topic B – Before: Belly Dancers

In session topic B, the students’ impression ranged across many thematic categories, including Questioning Media Images, Judging Appearance, Admiration,

Personal Expectations of Body, Message Projected by Appearance, Costuming,

Comfortable Despite Appearance, Impressions of Belly Dance, and Changing

Attitudes. Here, I will discuss the four most significant thematic categories.

Judging Appearance/Admiration

For purposes of comparison, I will discuss these two categories together. Two students found the pictures of the belly dancers disconcerting. The criticisms focused

86 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved on bellies. Isabel writes, “The lady…with the flower in her hair looks a little bad with her big belly hanging over her skirt. The…pregnant [lady] looks weird too. Pregnant bellys scare me because they are so big.” Tia writes, “If I had the stomachs that a few of these women have, I would not be displaying it.” These criticisms mirror women’s tendency to hate their bellies more than any other body part. (Bordo, 1996)

The Admiration category focuses on approval or admiration based on aesthetic observations. This category revealed that the students found the dancers both beautiful and unique. Amanda found their beauty “exotic and unique” in contrast to the models’ beauty, which she found “stereotypical.” Joelle appreciated their diverse hair styles and colors. In one case, there is admiration for the dancers’ perceived relationship with their bodies, based on appearances. Irene thought that the belly dancers had control over their bodies which she found sexy and beautiful. Extending these concepts into an assertion of body acceptance, Nikki says “I think bellydance is beautiful, no matter how fat or thin the dancers are…” As I will discuss later, Nikki’s acceptance of diverse bodies here is a taste of significant personal changes to come.

Personal Expectations of Body

In this category, the students discuss their own bodies and describe how they want their bodies to be. Two themes emerged significantly here: the desire to be thin and the desire for a small, cellulite-free, controlled belly. For Tia and Maya, having the ideal belly is a personal quest – they say they don’t judge women with larger bellies, but they want their own bellies small and contained:

I don’t think it’s wrong to be proud of or display a large belly but being in shape is important to me. (Tia)

…many of the professional bellydancers I have seen were not super thin or had tight waists, yet none of them seemed a little self-conscious about a little tummy jiggle. I on the other hand am very self-conscious about tummy jiggle and don’t see it as attractive. I prefer to keep mine covered until it is more in shape. (Maya)

These comments show Maya’s and Tia’s personal internalization of cultural beauty ideals. Instead of being seen as a requirement created and enforced by cultural forces, the need for “belly control” is interpreted as a personal choice or preference.

Nikki says that she has always hated her abdomen and feels badly about her

“belly cellulite.” She relates that she has always been embarrassed by the way her belly looks, but in contrast to the others, she feels ready to start changing her attitude about it now.

Message Projected by Appearance

In this category, the overwhelming theme was located in the sub-category

“Happiness.” The students’ resounding impression of the belly dancers is that the dancers are happy. In all cases, the perception of happiness was coupled with either the sub-category “Full of Life” or the sub-category “Strong/Confident/Proud/Bold.”

This stands in contrast to their earlier discussions of the models. While the models were perceived as being immanent creatures, characterized primarily by thinness, their ability to conform to beauty standards, and their seductiveness, the belly dancers are overwhelmingly perceived here as transcendent creatures, living life happily and boldly, turned outwardly to the world:

These ladies look happy and full of life. These ladies look confident and strong. (Isabel)

They all look so happy. There are all different body types and no one cares. (Irene)

Everyone looks so happy and comfortable with themselves! (Amanda)

These women look very happy and comfortable with themselves and their bodies. (Maya)

These women look confident and they are glowing. These women are bold and happy. I admire them. (Tia)

They are all full of life and sexy in their own way. I like how happy the women look in the picture… (Nikki)

In this category, it becomes apparent that happiness and the means to its achievement are important to the students. Commercial media typically uses images of women to sell products that are portrayed as necessary for happiness; however, these young women do not link the thinness, conformity, and seductiveness they perceive in the commercial media images with happiness. In their discussion of the belly dancers, they link happiness with other qualities that are quite contradictory to conformity and have little to do with thinness and seductiveness, namely liveliness and confidence.

Comfortable Despite Appearance

This category contains statements that indicate a judgment about a woman’s body juxtaposed with the realization that the woman is comfortable displaying her body regardless. It shows both the criticism students administer in regard to another woman’s body and the admiration that the students have for another woman’s ability to boldly risk criticism. For example, Stacey writes “There is a pregnant woman…and there are several people who look slightly overweight, but those people look as if they’re fine with it.” Stacey’s sentence contains an element of shock, as though she finds acceptance of a larger body quite unusual. Maya writes, “I give more power to the women that can show their midriff and not really care. They don’t need to be

‘supermodels’ to be happy.” With this statement and her subsequent writing, Maya reveals her own conflicted feelings about her midriff. She is critical of her own, but she admires the women who aren’t afraid to show theirs (even though they may be built very much like Maya). The quotations that emerge in the category of

Comfortable Despite Appearance perhaps do more than any other to show how the young women are conflicted about their bodies, the bodies of other women, and which criteria make the public display of a woman’s body socially acceptable.

Summary

In their discussion of the belly dancers in the preliminary writing session, the students overall find the belly dancers beautiful and unique, although two students are critical of the larger bellies some of the dancers display. The students reveal that they expect and want their own bodies to be thin and their bellies to be small, free of cellulite, and controlled. The students perceive the belly dancers as being happy and simultaneously full of life and confidence. Several students remark that the belly dancers are comfortable showing their bellies even though their bellies do not match the flat, smooth, controlled ideal. Several of these themes will be further analyzed in

Chapter V.

III. Section Topic C – After: Models

Upon the completion of the belly dance class, the students re-read their original writings and made changes to their original impressions, when applicable. Seven of the students stated that their original impressions had not changed in regard to the models and most did not write much about the models, other than to emphasize their

Questioning Media Images

In her secondary writing, Amanda brought her questioning of media images out of the personal realm, into a critique of the ways in which media images can be misleading and the fact that these images are intended for an audience of others:

The collage with the white and thin supermodels leads me to think that their bodies could possibly look that way naturally (but they probably don’t) and they’re embracing that and using their looks to provide visual stimulation or enjoyment for others.

Amanda questions the validity and intention of these images. As was apparent in other students’ passages in the preliminary writing session, she assigns the blame for this manipulation to the models themselves, not necessarily to the culture that creates these images.

Judging Appearance

Stacey had something new to add to her original impressions in this category.

She writes, “There isn’t really anything unique about the [models]. There isn’t really anything beautiful about what they’re doing or what they look like.” Stacey’s original writing focuses on the contortion of the models’ bodies, their seductiveness, and the inappropriateness of the message they send. In her second impressions, though, she becomes much more judgmental of the models, saying there is nothing beautiful or unique about their appearance or their activities. Stacey makes an interesting transition here from thinking about the models as images to thinking about them as people engaged in activities.

Message Projected by Appearance

Two comments were made in this category that varied from the students’ original impressions. As above, the comments show a growing judgment and critique of the models’ images, questioning their validity and the environment in which they are produced. Irene commented that the models make what they are doing look easy, showing an increasing awareness of how difficult achieving the models’ look may be.

Joelle remarked “I think [they] are all trying to compete with each other to be the best, most beautiful, or to have the most sex appeal.” Here, Joelle senses that the environment or culture in which the models are situated is one of limited resources and approval that must be won through competition. As I will show later, Joelle contrasts this competitive environment with a belly dance environment, which she sees as “friendly and inviting.”

Changing Attitudes

While most of the students revealed changing attitudes when discussing the belly dance collage in the second writing session, Maya discussed her changing attitudes in relation to the models:

After taking this class, I have learned to appreciate my body a little bit more. I still would like to change some things, but I don’t want to look like the women in these photos. They all probably believe they have some flaws despite their body size, shape, etc. You need to love your body and not care what others think.

Here, Maya says she has experienced a positive change in regard to the class, feeling a little better about herself. Interestingly, she questions the confidence of the models, likening their misgivings about their bodies to her own misgivings about her body.

Maya shows an easing of judgment, realizing that many women in this culture do not feel adequate – even the ones that are considered icons of beauty. She thwarts the

92 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved perceived critical audience of others, asserting a value of love for her body despite the opinions of others. Maya does not appear to have completely internalized this message, but she asserts it just the same; perhaps a vision of where she would like to be in her relationship with her body.

Summary

In the students’ reflections on the models in the second writing session, many state that their opinions are the same. A few opinions are expressed that show change: one student critiques the models’ look as misleading and assigns responsibility for that to the models themselves. One student makes a transition from thinking about the models as images for others (immanent) to people engaged in activities for themselves

(transcendent). Two students show a growing judgment of the models themselves and the environment in which their images are produced. One student empathizes with the models, likening her own bodily misgivings to their perceived misgivings, and asserting that women need to love their body regardless of others’ opinions. Several of these themes will be further analyzed in Chapter V. More significant changes of opinion are noted in Section Topic D, when the students reflect upon the images of the belly dancers.

IV. Section Topic D – After: Belly Dancers

In section topic B, the students’ preliminary impressions of belly dancers, a significant theme that emerged was in the category of Personal Expectations of Body, emphasizing a desire for thinness and a small, tightly controlled belly. Interestingly, none of the students made comments within the Personal Expectations of Body category in the second writing session. The most significant themes for this session

Dance, and Changing Attitudes. After discussing these, I will discuss an additional theme called Perceived Audience that emerged in my analysis.

Message Projected by Appearance

In this category, the students’ impressions did not show a prevalence of any one sub-category. Rather, nine different sub-categories are mentioned. They are

Accepting of Others, Having Fun/Relaxed, Making it Look Easy, Reality,

Individual/Unique, Sexy, Full of Life, Happiness, and Strong/Confident/Proud/Bold.

Within the students’ perceptions, some interesting changes occurred. Isabel, who first described the belly dancers as “happy and full of life; confident and strong,” added to her original impressions by writing “They must have great bonds with the other people they dance with. They want to have fun but be down to earth when they do.” Isabel shows an appreciation of the relationships that are created through belly dance, and a perception of belly dancers possessing humility, in contrast to her perception of the models as “mean looking snobs” in the second session.

Just as Stacey had a shift in perception of the models as images in the first writing session to the models as individuals in the second session, she goes from merely describing the belly dance costumes in the first session to assigning personal characteristics to the dancers in the second session: “I much prefer the pictures of the bellydancers because they are individuals with their own goals. The bellydancers don’t look like they’re trying to be seductive, but they are seductive because they’re each unique and have their own story.” Here, Stacey echoes some of the values held dear by many of her classmates throughout their writings: being unique and not

“story.”

Impressions of Belly Dance

This category emerged primarily in Session Topic D, as students began to write not only about their impressions of the dancers themselves, but of belly dance as an activity. The two most prevalent sub-categories that were discussed in relation to belly dance were Good Exercise/Challenging, and Creates Positive Change for

Women.

Several students find belly dance a physically challenging endeavor:

I feel even more respect for the ladies. Bellydancing is a lot of work and sweat. For these ladies to put so much dedication into the art is great. (Isabel)

It takes so much to control your body and look graceful in doing so. (Irene)

Belly dancing is hard and complicated and takes a lot of practice. (Nikki)

All of these students moved from the preliminary descriptions of how the belly dancers look in their costumes, various descriptions of their bodies, and the idea that they seem happy, to perceiving belly dance as a rigorous bodily activity. This is a natural change in perception, considering that they previously had no experience with belly dance and in this writing session, they have just completed a six-week dance course.

Several students wrote about bellydance, its effects on them and its ability to affect other women similarly:

This is contrasted with the friendly and inviting environment of the group of women involved in belly dancing. This seems to me like the way to go, where the pressure is to be yourself and not something run of the mill. Who knows, maybe if every woman started to belly dance, even if it was just for a little while, the female society would have less eating and perception disorders and a higher self opinion. (Joelle, after writing about the competitive environment she perceives among the models)

[The belly dance collage] somewhat laughs in the face of what images and notions are displayed in [the models collage]. It makes me think what could society learn from a belly dancer? (Tia)

I feel that my views are very different about bellydancing. I think any woman any shape or size should bellydance. You feel like such a woman when doing it, I honestly cannot say any other point in my life I have felt sexier, than I do when I bellydance. (Nikki)

Joelle’s perception moves from talking about the aesthetic qualities of the dancers’ costumes and the fact that they are not all “deathly skinny” to an astute perception of the contexts in which both the models and the bellydancers exist; competitive versus accepting. Tia, who has dealt with shame over her body weight and feels “terrified” of experiencing that shame again, perceives the belly dancers to be defiant, and asks how this defiance might change the ways society sees women. Although she says her views are very different, Nikki states virtually the same thing in the preliminary writing session: “I think belly dancing is beautiful, no matter how fat or thin the dancers are, and I want to be a part of it.” This discrepancy could possibly be attributed to a belief that Nikki held intellectually at the start of the class, which has now been internalized and is believed in a more significant way – through personal experience.

Changing Attitudes

This category was by far the most significant in session topic D. The two most prevalent sub-categories that developed in the students’ writings are Improving Self

Esteem and Body Acceptance of Self and Others. Interestingly, the two themes are often correlated in the students’ writing; their self esteem seems to grow as they become more accepting of their bodies:

For me, bellydance has given me more confidence than losing any amount of weight on a diet could have. I’m proud of my curves and my entire body; I’m finally comfortable with being myself, whether short or tall, skinny or fat, I’m happy being who I really am and I think I really needed that (being comfortable in my own skin). So much of society spends millions of dollars and endless hours of exercise trying to look a certain way to please others; I’m tired of that and doing bellydance has allowed me to do things to please my own self and not care what others think of me or my body: it was given to me for a reason. (Amanda)

In Amanda’s initial writings, she “guessed she was okay” with her appearance; here she becomes more than okay with her body, asserting its right to be the way it is, being proud of it in its entirety, associating her body with who she really is, defying the cultural norm of endless diet and exercise for a smaller body, and beginning to value

“pleasing her own self” instead of others. This, in turn, has lead to more confidence for Amanda.

Cherise writes, “Looking back at these collages I have come to realize that beauty comes in different shapes and forms. Different modes are taken to portray the beauty we all possess…I experienced the comfort and joy of owning a graceful lovely body.” While Cherise did not disparage her own body initially, here she expresses acceptance for a wider range of feminine beauty and talks about her own body in favorable terms.

Tia expresses a general change of perception: “Though I wrote the initial reflections only six weeks ago, I feel like I’ve grown up in that amount of time. It’s been a time of realization and reflection for me, I guess.” She continues to talk about the defiance of mainstream beauty norms she believes the bellydancers portray, asking

“… what could society learn from a bellydancer?”

Nikki, who started the class with a deliberate intention to change her attitude about her body, experienced dramatic results to that end:

…from the little taste [of bellydance] I have had, I have learned a lot. I love my body more and I am becoming more accepting of how my body is. I have small breasts and not a perfect six pack and it’s OK! I cannot hold myself to having a body type like the women of the [models] collage. I am beautiful and sexy on my own and bellydancing has given me that…I have had such a moving experience. I have a stronger self-esteem and I have learned a lot about myself.

Nikki relates positive changes from the class, as she accepts her body more and more.

Showing a change from her initial feelings of inadequacy when regarding the models collage, she accepts her body and asserts her right to do so, relieving herself of previous wishes to have bigger breasts and a smaller belly. She expresses greater self awareness as a result of her changed perception of her body.

Perceived Audience

One additional theme developed in Session Topic D. Many students expressed judgment for the concept of looking beautiful or seductive for others in session topics

A, B, and C; especially for male others. By contrast, in section D, three students emphasize what they consider to be an important quality in the belly dancers and in themselves:

The nice thing about the bellydancing pictures is that they do not seem to appeal just to men. Bellydancers were originally dancing for other women as opposed to trying to seduce men like [the models]. (Stacey)

[The bellydancers] are using their bodies for the visual stimulation/enjoyment of themselves; they dance only for themselves whereas the models…look and pose as they do for others’ needs and desires. (Amanda)

You dance for yourself first and then show it off to others. It is kind of the same with your body. (Maya)

The concept of self-determination in how a woman presents herself seems to be the key concept in these statements. All of the students knew that Sherry was running a performance troupe that performs for mixed audiences publicly. They routinely watched members of this troupe perform in their class. However, their knowledge of the performance aspect of belly dance does not lead them to perceive belly dancers as doing what they do “for others.” Rather, as seen in these quotations, the students seem to share a perception that belly dancers, even when presenting themselves publicly, have an intention of dancing for their own pleasure and portraying themselves on the terms they see fit – not for the intention of seducing, stimulating, or even providing enjoyment for an audience of “others,” men or otherwise.

This shows a favorable outlook in the ways students perceive belly dancers – as strong women who make their own choices and dance for themselves; however, it also reflects a character judgment of the models. By judging the models’ clothing, postures, makeup, and bodies as “seductive” or “for men,” the students show a lack of empathy for the models, who are clearly making a living within a culture that demands conformance to these standards. In other words, the students judge the models as

99 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved though their look and the message it sends are merely a personal choice, rather than a complex mixture of a sexist and commercially driven culture, the models’ individual bodies, and their personal choice in how they portray themselves.

Summary

In the students’ reflections on the belly dancers in the second writing session, many changes of opinion were expressed. One of these was the absence of comments about the students’ personal expectations of their own bodies. The students relate many positive impressions about the belly dancers, including the relationships they have together and the idea that the belly dancers honor their individuality. Several students find belly dance challenging and others think it has the potential to benefit other women. Several students show changing attitudes about themselves, linking bodily acceptance with higher self-esteem. Some students reveal a perception that belly dancers do their activity for the pleasure of themselves, while models do their activity for the pleasure of others. Several of these themes will be further analyzed in

Chapter V.

V. Unexpected and Missing Themes

During this analysis, I was surprised how pervasively students judged the models for their compliance with a certain beauty standard. While many criticized the cultural norms that dictate the models’ look, their comments were often coupled with a critique of the models themselves for adhering to this look. Other students did not criticize the cultural norms; instead their criticisms focused solely on the models, often assigning negative personality characteristics in their impressions of the models, because of the way they look. I feel that it is unfortunate to blame the models

100 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved themselves, when much larger social, political, and economic forces factor into models’ decision to look the way they do; I feel that a more substantial public discourse about mainstream beauty images could add needed complexity to the way women perceive themselves and other women. This tendency in the students’ writing will be further analyzed in Chapter V.

In my own experience, the community aspect of ATS dance was one of the strongest forces that led to my appreciation of the art form and my own body. I was surprised that more women did not comment on this part of the class. It could be that they felt a sense of community in the class, and that their sense of community influenced their overall perceptions in the second writing class, but they did not write about community explicitly.

The shared leadership opportunities in ATS are quite different from other, more typical, forms of exercise and dance. Shared leadership was another element that was transformative for me in learning this dance form. I was surprised that the students did not comment on their experience with leading and following classmates.

Only one student mentioned it, in passing, and speculated that the individuals in the dancer collage must have “great leadership.” Again, the experience of shared leadership may have influenced the students in their impressions – for example, they described the dancers as dancing for themselves, honoring their individuality, and being friendly; however, they did not write about shared leadership explicitly.

Another quality of my own experience was first seeing my own body on more favorable terms through the process of ATS dance; but with further participation over time, I began to see other women’s bodies more favorably as well, and sense my

101 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved distinctions of “who should” and “who shouldn’t” melting away. I had hoped that the students might express a similar feeling of acceptance for their classmates’ bodies, but the ones who wrote about increased bodily acceptance primarily wrote about accepting themselves. Perhaps if the class had been longer, or if I took another writing sample a year after the conclusion of the class, they would have more to say about other women’s bodies, in addition to their own.

Chapter V

Theoretical Analysis: Belly Dancing and Embodiment

Introduction

This chapter explores the overarching themes that emerge from my analysis of the student writings in the previous chapter. In Chapter IV, I pull from the students’ own words, bringing forth the ideas that they expressed individually and as a group, specifically noting how their ideas changed in the course of the belly dance class.

Here, I offer a theoretical interpretation of the three most important themes echoed throughout the students’ writing in both the preliminary and secondary writing sessions, showing how the students’ impressions are an expression of young women’s experience in Western culture, using a lens of feminist embodiment theory to frame the analysis.

First, I will show how images and messages of commercial media create internal conflict for women in regard to their bodies and how this relates to the student writings in my study, using Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the

Body (1993) by Susan Bordo, Jean Killbourne’s documentaries Killing Us Softly 3:

Advertising’s Image of Women (2000) and Beyond Killing Us Softly: The Impact of

Media Images on Women and Girls (2000), and recent sociological studies on body image and the media. Secondly, I will draw on Bordo’s work and Renee Englen-

Maddox’s paper “Cognitive Responses to Idealized Media Images of Women: The

Relationship of Social Comparison and Critical Processing to Body Image

Disturbance in College Women” (2005) to show how women’s conformance to beauty ideals is interpreted in a postmodern context as pure personal choice, unrelated to

103 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved cultural expectations, and how this negatively affects the students’ perceptions of themselves and other women. In the final section of this chapter, I offer my analysis on why the students saw belly dance as an intentional activity that leads to body acceptance and confidence, which creates happiness, and what this means in the larger cultural context.

Throughout this analysis, I attempt to be as transparent as possible about my own biases, values, and experiences in an effort to create “strong reflexivity.”

(Harding, as cited in Feminist Perspectives on Social Research, 2004: 219) My intention is to connect with the feminist epistemology and methodology within which

I operate; I hope to make my study more valid in this endeavor. I started this study with the intention of being as objective as possible, but with a realization that my own experience has lead me to perceive that belly dance can help women recover from the damage they experience at the hands of commercial media. In my analysis of the student writings, I saw many of my own beliefs and experiences echoed, but I also read students’ observations and conclusions that differed from my own experience, adding richness to my perception of what advertising, culture, and belly dance can mean for young women.

I. Advertising and Internal Conflict

When reviewing my thematic analysis, the first and most prevalent overarching theme that occurred was how the women in the study express constant internal conflict in relation to their bodies and the bodies of other women. Their discussions of women’s bodies are tinged with a great deal of judgment and appreciation that occur simultaneously and are often contradictory. To interpret this, I turn to Susan Bordo

Bordo’s work focuses on the ways in which the consumer culture of the West has, over the past century, influenced women’s bodies. Beginning with advertisements for everything from corsets, sanitary napkins, lard, tar soap and corn flakes in the early twentieth century, the faces and bodies of young, attractive women have been increasingly used to sell products ever since. The images of women used in advertising have always fit the beauty and body ideal of the day; whether the corseted wasp waists of the early twentieth century, the thin, flat-chested flappers of the twenties, the voluptuous, hourglass figures of the fifties, the “twiggy” bodies of the sixties, or the increasingly thin, tall, and large-breasted women of the eighties and beyond, advertising has served both as an inducement and a reflection of the way women look and want to look in any given time. (Brumberg, 1996)

With the rapid development of technology over the past one hundred years, and the increasing affluence of Western societies, advertising now plays a major role in public consciousness and the development of cultures. According to Jean

Killbourne in her documentary Killing Us Softly 3 (2000), the average American is presently exposed to three thousand advertisements per day. These advertisements, most often using images of young, white, stereotypically attractive, thin women, sell us products by conveying concepts of love, sex, success, and normalcy, in conjunction with products for sale. Advertisements present “ideal” images with no reference to the underlying circumstances that may have aided in their creation: exercise, extreme dieting or starvation, surgery, makeup, airbrushing, money, and other resources…

The general tyranny of fashion – perpetual, elusive, and instructing the female body in a pedagogy of personal inadequacy and lack – is a powerful discipline for the normalization of all women in this culture. (Bordo, 1996, 254)

Additionally, advertisements utilize a core belief of American culture to their advantage: that we can achieve all our dreams if only we try hard enough and spend enough money to that end. (Killbourne, 2000) By combining a “pedagogy of lack” with a consumer culture, advertisements have not only kept business booming; they have contributed to a culture of body loathing among women. Girls are typically initiated into this culture at the onset of adolescence (Crawford and Unger, 2000) and girls’ participation in consumer culture is associated with a substantial decline in self- esteem that occurs in mid-adolescence as noted in “Body Image and Self-Esteem

Among Adolescent Girls: Testing the Influence of Sociocultural Factors.” (2005)

The influence of advertising continues as girls grow into young adulthood and beyond. In the article “Societal Influences on Body Image Dissatisfaction in Younger and Older Women,” (2006) media pressure was seen as the most important factor influencing body image dissatisfaction in women ages 19-23 and in women ages 65-

74. I would argue that the disjointed, conflicting, images of girls and women seen in advertising lead women to perceive their hunger and their bodies in ways that are disjointed. The ever-present “not good enough” message in commercial media contributes to a culture of self-loathing, which in turn feeds depression, isolation, eating disorders, and ultimately, women’s inferior position in society.

Simultaneous Judgment and Appreciation

I noticed two trends in the student writings that show a tendency to simultaneously judge and admire other women for a given quality, and I believe this comes from the pervasive influence of advertising in Western culture. Many of the students express judgment for how thin the models are coupled with admiration of their thinness. The models were repeatedly described as “too skinny, gaunt, unhealthy, and grossly thin,” et cetera, yet when looking at the models the students reluctantly admitted to wishing they were thinner, or had bigger breasts, or liking certain portions of the models’ bodies, despite their overall thinness. I was surprised by their well-developed sense of media literacy – none offered unhampered praise of the models and all critically looked at how the models were portrayed, whether it was about their lack of diversity, their seductiveness, their extreme thinness, or the size of their surgically enlarged breasts.

Yet despite all this criticism, there is an undercurrent of longing in the students’ reactions. And, of course, this is exactly what these images are intended to do to all types of women – to provoke a sense of wanting, and a sense of not being quite good enough, in order to sell a product, image, or identity. Working with these women and reading their writings, I see that while they are critical of mainstream images, these images also beckon as examples of “true” beauty, seen culturally as women’s main source of power.

The students’ tendency to criticize models is discussed in Renee Engeln-

Maddox’s paper “The Cognitive Responses to Idealized Media Images of Women:

The Relationship of Social Comparison and Critical Processing to Body Image

Disturbance in College Women.” (2005) In her study, Engeln-Maddox did

107 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved quantitative research with 202 undergraduate women, asking them to write responses to pictures of models in swimwear. Many of the participants wrote critically about the models, their comments mirroring those that were made by the students in this study, criticizing the models’ thinness, perceived unhealthiness, fakeness, and subservience to male desires. Likewise, the students’ critical comments about the models were paired with self-comparisons in which the students found their own bodies lacking… with stomachs that are not flat enough, bodies that are too fat, and faces that are not pretty enough. Englen-Maddox observes that the women have no problem thinking critically about media images, but that even when they are able to think critically about images, they still tend to compare themselves to models and find their own bodies lacking. (2005)

The flip side of this internal conflict is found in the student writings on the belly dancers. Several students initially judge the belly dancers’ bodies, especially the women who have larger bellies and the woman who is pregnant. The conflict arises when their judgment is tempered with admiration that the belly dancers are able to display their bellies, wear the ornate costumes, and participate in this activity regardless of their size. In essence, the students judge women who display larger bellies or heavier bodies, yet they also admire the women’s ability to risk criticism by an audience of “others.” The students admire the boldness they perceive in the belly dancers, but don’t feel that they could take this risk themselves.

I believe the internal conflict expressed here mirrors the messages contained in advertising. In relation to bellies, advertisements simultaneously tell women to hunger and consume insatiably, even as they portray female hunger as something to be tightly

108 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved controlled and restricted. Imagine an advertisement in a woman’s magazine that depicts an extremely slender, muscular woman secretively using ice cream as a comfort food after being dumped by her boyfriend. This juxtaposition of incongruent messages creates an ambiguous and confusing relationship between women’s hunger and the reality of women’s bodies. This leads to the idea that women need to have it all (ice cream, boyfriend, secretive relationship with food) and be it all (thin, muscular, happy), despite evidence to the contrary (ice cream is a potentially fattening food). Not only do women get conflicting messages about what to do and how to act, they are also steeped in conflicting messages about what to eat, how much to eat, and for what reasons. This disconnect in how female hunger, food, and bodies are portrayed is perhaps related to the fact that anorectics, bulimics, and obese women despise the stomach (the physical symbol of consumption) more than any other body part. (Bordo, 1996)

When it comes to women’s ability to be bold and risk criticism, the consumer culture couples messages such as Nike’s “Just Do It” with mandates to “Get A Bikini

Body in Time for Summer.” How could women not be confused and ambiguous about their ability to be bold in their own bodies when bombarded with these messages, mixed together, day after day? Women are told to be bold, but admonished at the same time to get their bodies “just right” beforehand.

Body Fragmentation and Selective Emaciation

A second way in which women experience internal conflict with regard to their bodies is discussed in Killing Us Softly 3 (2000); Jean Killbourne talks about how women are portrayed by advertising in fragments – how images of selected parts of

109 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved women’s bodies are used to sell products. In Beyond Killing Us Softly (2000), media literacy educator Gail Dines talks to a group of students about how this fragmentation of women’s bodies has pervaded the ways in which people in our culture perceive women’s bodies. I observed this phenomenon in the student writings along with a secondary characteristic, which I call selective emaciation. In writing about the models and themselves, students not only break up and compartmentalize women’s bodies; they pick and choose which parts of bodies are too thin, too fat, and which parts are acceptable, all on the same body. For example,

Here, Isabel’s writing shows an excellent example of body fragmentation and selective emaciation. She is breaking down the models’ bodies into stomachs, thighs, arms, and also talking about them as wholes. Overall, she sees the models’ bodies as being too skinny, not having enough curves, or definition. But, she likes the stomachs and thighs that accompany these thin bodies (although she would be worried if the bones of her ribcage showed, showing a recognition that the models’ stomachs probably really are too thin to be healthy). Midway through this paragraph, Isabel brings men into her discussion, ultimately showing her perception that these women are objects for men’s pleasure and entertainment.

In thumbing through any women’s magazine, it is possible to see how fragmented images of women’s bodies have become a tool used pervasively in advertising. Pictures of long, slender legs are used to sell razors, pictures of a

110 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved woman’s feet in the sand are used to sell trips to Jamaica, and pictures of women’s chests and cleavage are used to sell rum. In her book Measuring Up, How Advertising

Affects Self-Image (2001), Vickie Rutledge Shields studies the ways in which the portrayal of female bodies in advertising affects the perception of both male and female perceptions. In a review of this book, Lori Dunn Kelly writes:

Shields compares responses of men and women to eight ads identified by scholars of gender and advertising as representing prevailing stereotypes of sex roles and ritualized gender behavior. What the voices of the real life people in her research reveal is that ads have a deeper impact on how women view themselves than is true of their male counterparts. The repetition of images of idealized female bodies becomes fundamental to a woman’s feelings of self-worth and social valuation and also contributes to a variety of social pathologies ranging from sexual harassment and subordination to eating disorders, low self- esteem, even rape. (2003)

That advertising images significantly influence women’s self-perception comes as no surprise, and the effects of this influence are far-reaching and potentially quite dangerous. So, it makes sense that the images of fragmented and idealized female body parts cause women to think about their bodies as separate, fragmented pieces that can be shaped and re-assembled in various ways to create ultimate aesthetic appeal.

Even though women are often consciously aware that advertising images are unrealistic and sexist, the messages they transmit still affect perception. Kelly writes,

“…women, unlike men, possess the ability to theorize about how advertisements cause them to view themselves as objects rather than subjects. But such awareness does little to contribute to their ability to escape being influenced by them.” (2003)

I would argue that when women continually see the female body in fragments, they cease perceiving it as a whole. This disconnect, combined with the pervasive

111 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved messages that appearance is all-important, create an emphasis on refining and toning each body part to perfection, regardless of consequence to the person as a whole.

Hence, some women lose their ability to process how the parts of the body function together for the good of the person as a whole being. For example, with a combination of extreme exercise and diet, or even anorexia or bulimia, the typically larger parts of a woman’s body, such as thighs, stomachs, buttocks and hips may be downsized to “model” proportions. But her body, functioning naturally as a whole, will also downsize her arms and breasts to starvation proportions, which to most people look disturbingly small. With the widespread availability of breast augmentation, the appearance of shrinking breasts may be remedied, but her arms remain disturbingly thin. However, in body fragmentation and selective emaciation, the flat stomach, small hips and thighs are not seen as disturbing, but ideal.

In the nineteen fifties, de Beauvoir described the concept of woman as Other, and in the nineteen seventies, Young observed how the objectification of women affects their tendencies of bodily comportment and physical ability. At present, the patterns observed by de Beauvoir and Young have developed into an even more complex form of sexism – the female body that is no longer a body, but a collection of parts to be managed. I believe that body fragmentation and selective emaciation are caused by the fragmentation and objectification of women in advertising; they serve to perpetuate women’s immanence by infiltrating our cultural consciousness in an insidious manner. Body fragmentation and objectification prevent women from experiencing their bodies as whole and vital, and they prevent men from seeing women as whole and transcendent creatures within their own right.

II. Postmodernism: Bodies as Personal Choice

In discussing postmodernism, Bordo identifies a cultural development in the wake of technological advances – the concept of plasticity in regard to the human body. Once feared as the prison of the mind and the source of evil desires, the body has now come to be seen as a machine to be manipulated to whatever end deemed necessary by its owner. The individual manipulation of bodies becomes essential because the control, sculpting, and beauty of bodies are seen as outward manifestations of the will of the mind and spirit. Bordo contends that this shift in paradigm began with the advent of medical technology to replace broken or missing body parts:

Gradually and surely a technology that was first aimed at the replacement of malfunctioning parts has generated an industry and an ideology fueled by fantasies of rearranging, transforming, and correcting, an ideology of limitless improvement and change, defying the historicity, the mortality, and indeed, the very materiality of the body. In place of that materiality, we now have what I will call cultural plastic…we now have ourselves, the master sculptors of that plastic. (1996: 246)

The concept of the body as cultural plastic is placed in a historical context by

Brumberg, who relates how the improvement of their bodies has become the most important occupation of American girls over the past hundred years; prior to that, the concept was unknown as girls focused more upon spiritual, intellectual, and domestic development. She writes:

Today, many young girls worry about the contours of their bodies – especially shape, size, and muscle tone – because they believe that the body is the ultimate expression of self. The body is a consuming project because it provides an important means of self-definition, a way to visibly announce who you are to the world. (1997: 97)

Bordo describes how the perception of bodies’ plasticity has influenced, and is influenced by the phenomenon of plastic surgery and the way in which it is depicted in advertising – as nothing more than a personal choice to look one’s best. Plastic surgery has been socially constructed to imply that it is on par with changing clothes, accessories, or hair color, all of which are constructed as fun, playful ways for women to change their appearance and express their individual personalities and sense of style. Bordo points out the darker side of this construction; that while changing one’s appearance can certainly function as free play and creative self expression, it is also experienced by some women as duty and obligation for their participation in the world. The portrayal of the alteration of women’s bodies as carefree, freedom of expression opens a window on how women perceive themselves and their bodies in the postmodern era. The widespread cultural interpretation of why women alter their bodies surgically, cosmetically, and with continually changing styles is that women are slaves to fashion and are never happy with themselves. In other words, women are vain creatures who are willing to fork out billions of dollars simply because they have to look good. Bordo writes:

If we are never happy with ourselves, it is implied, that is due to our female nature, not to be taken too seriously or made into a political question…the content of fashion, the specific ideals that women are drawn to embody…are seen as arbitrary, without meaning, interpretation is neither required nor even appropriate. Rather, all motivation and value come from the interest and allure – the “sexiness” – of change and difference itself. (1996:253)

In the absence of any substantial political or social discourse on the forces underlying consumerism, advertising, women’s place in society, and how these factors relate to women’s bodies, it is assumed that women’s willingness to continually

114 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved manipulate their bodies, clothing, hair, and faces has nothing whatsoever to do with cultural patterns, which Bordo claims are “increasingly difficult to [identify] in a postmodern context, where we are surrounded by endlessly displaced images and are given no orienting context in which to make discriminations.” (1996:259) I would argue that the lack of this discourse has created an environment in which women blame, judge, and criticize other women for adhering to beauty ideals, rather than looking to the larger social, economic, and political forces that have created this paradigm; the forces which limit women’s options for success based upon their appearance.

Judging Models

One theme that occurred throughout the student writings was the students’ dislike of the models’ appearance. In the first writing session, several students question the validity of the images and the damage these images impart to other women. They show awareness of the lack of racial and age diversity depicted and reject the images as “the wrong message.” I was heartened and impressed to see how the students interpreted the model photographs with such a critical eye.

However, mixed in with the student’s criticism of the larger cultural forces that contribute to these pictures, there is a tendency to critique the models themselves and judge them personally for their adherence to mainstream styles of clothing, comportment, makeup and body. The models were seen as being too thin, unhealthy, blond, and white. Rather than discussing the models’ uniformity in terms of the social norms that reward the models for looking this way, the students blame the models for the way they look, in the most fundamental aspects – of body type and race. In this

Taking this judgment a level further, the students assign personality characteristics based on the models’ appearance. The models are seen as trying too hard to look alike, to accept themselves, be beautiful, and to fit in socially. They are perceived as being mean and competitive. The students especially disapprove of what they perceive as the models’ intentional seduction of a male audience, and the fact that the models are profiting from their ability to seduce.

Looking at the students’ comments through Bordo’s lens of postmodern plasticity, I believe that the students are displaying an awareness of the consumer culture in which we live; they are able to partially see beyond the curtain of the ideal of white, thin, young, perfection. However, postmodern, Western beauty norms are interpreted culturally as personal choice, free play, and creative self-expression; hence the students become trapped in a double bind in which many women find themselves, and recognition of this double bind is where I expand on Bordo’s concept of postmodern plasticity.

When the social code states that beauty norms and standards are something that women choose freely, without regard to societal pressure and their subordinate position in society, all women are open to attack. Women who do not (or cannot) comply with beauty norms are seen as powerless, old, ugly “non-persons.” In contrast, women who do comply with beauty norms, and especially women who profit from their adherence to beauty norms, are sometimes blamed by men and other women as being bitchy, slutty, shallow, and having no sense of self. Socially

116 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved constructed as jealous, petty creatures who perpetually scrape the bottom of the barrel for scraps of attention, women are supposed to act this way when confronted with images of mainstream beauty – and this reaction is what keeps women in the perpetual cycle of body projects and consumerism.

This is a situation that puts all women at a disadvantage. In her book Body

Wars: Making Peace with Women’s Bodies, Margo Maine writes,

Our preoccupation with a narrow definition of female beauty renders women subordinate, insecure, powerless, and fighting Body Wars instead of living full lives. Let us return to the real definition of beauty – those things that ‘stir the senses or the mind at the highest level’ – and stop reducing females to physical appearance. It is time to quit trivializing and discounting women’s accomplishments and worth and to declare an end to Body Wars. It is time to allow women to have real power. (Maine, 2000,71)

In Beyond Killing Us Softly, a media educator shows students an advertisement for Pantene shampoo from the nineteen eighties of a beautiful woman with lots of hair and text that says “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful.” She goes on to talk about how this is an unfair depiction of women because in truth, women love each other enough to fight for each other’s rights, and they have been doing just that for the past century. I believe this is a most important message for men and women to consider – that women are not inherently competitive and petty creatures, but that perhaps our subordinate position within society has led us to employ this behavior as a means of secret power. This is one of the elements of feminine gender identity that I believe can be modified through cooperative, supportive, belly dance in a group format.

The Internalization of Cultural Body Norms

I previously observed the students’ writing relates to the concept that cultural body norms are perceived by women as nothing more than personal choice. In the student writings, this took two directions: one is blaming the women who choose to conform to and profit from these norms, as discussed above; the other is internalizing cultural body norms as personal choice while letting other women “off the hook.” In their discussions of the belly dancers, some of the students related that “imperfect” bellies – those that jiggle, roll, have cellulite, stretch marks, or are anything other than tanned, tight, washboard stomachs are acceptable for others to display, but not for themselves to display. One student says that she can appreciate the belly dancers’ confidence and their willingness to display their larger bellies, but that she herself would never do it until she is more “in shape.” I see this as a cultural expectation that has been internalized by the students and re-interpreted as nothing more than a personal choice or preference.

This internalization of cultural norms can certainly create an environment of tolerance when framed as “it is acceptable for other women to do that, but I choose not to,” but I still question how much that decision truly represents a personal choice, and how much it represents the unspoken judgment that lies beneath – the cultural judgment that declares women may only participate in certain activities or display their bodies in public when they are small, tight, and toned enough to warrant public approval.

As Engeln-Maddox writes, “It is clear from this study and from previous research that women are quite adept at critiquing the beauty standard created by these images, while simultaneously feeling bound by this standard and motivated to abide

118 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved by it.” (2005:1133) In fact, she claims that when women who have internalized mainstream beauty norms critique images of idealized beauty and then compare the images to themselves (a common practice), they actually feel worse about themselves.

Women’s tendency to behave in this manner is perhaps an expression of the way that they are objectified in society with appearance being the ultimate characteristic. The objectification of women is not only acted out by the commercial media, men, or the larger culture, but by women themselves, in relation to themselves. One antidote to this self-objectification is found in “Self-Objectification and That “Not So Fresh

Feeling”: Feminist Therapeutic Interventions for Healthy Female Embodiment”

(2004), in which the authors claim that girls and women’s acceptance of their bodies and bodily functions are the antithesis of self-objectification.

The concept of self-objectification comes back to the fact that women remain immanent, as objects for others, rather than being able to act creatively and openly for themselves in a transcendent matter. The ways in which the female gender has been constructed and women’s bodies have been used as fodder for advertising has created a truly complex situation that both enhances and perpetuates women’s relative lack of power in society. As Bordo writes, “The social manipulation of the female body emerged as an absolutely central strategy in the maintenance of power relations between the sexes over the past hundred years.” (1996, 143) In that time, the increasing availability of images and messages through technology, the advancement of consumerism, and the co-optation of feminism by commercial media have served to further complicate and compound women’s perilous social position. (Killbourne,

2000)

In asking how women may subvert the internalization of media images, I turn to Engeln-Maddox, (2005) who relates findings from two other studies that show how media literacy education may be useful in reducing the degree to which women internalize media images. Thompson and Stice (2001) found that women who participated in media literacy education were able to decrease their internalization of commercial beauty norms, consequently reducing their body image dissatisfaction.

Posavac, Posavac, and Weigel (2001) found that media literacy interventions had the capability to reduce the participants’ tendencies to make negative comments or express desire for increased thinness in response to media images. Engeln-Maddox writes,

Given that the results of this study indicate that most women do, in fact, already know how to challenge the beauty-related content of these images, it is difficult to surmise why studies that directly attempt to manipulate counterarguing seem to show greater promise in terms of the potential protective effects of media literacy. It is possible that these interventions simply teach more powerful or persuasive counterarguments. (2005:1133)

As Engeln-Maddox noted, and as I saw, women are already capable of criticizing media images and seeing how they do not represent women accurately or fairly. Media literacy education provides a framework that women can use to think even more critically about media images and question the agenda behind them.

However, I would suggest that it would be even more beneficial to combine alternative images and activities with media literacy education. This could further empower women – not only to question media images, but to begin creating and authorizing images of their own, images that are capable of including and glorifying a more diverse population of women in creative and intentional action.

III. Belly Dance: Creative and Intentional Action

One of the factors that initially led me to this project was the experience I had in belly dance classes. I had always been a dancer, and was involved in ballet for most of my childhood and young adulthood. But in my very first belly dance class, I noticed a significant difference – the heavy and grounded stance from which all of the movements originate. Far different from ballet, in which one strives to be always lifted – lifted from the toes through the legs, throughout the body through the top of the head, belly dance seeks weight and connection through the belly, hips and legs all the way into the ground. While ballet and other more Western forms of dance undoubtedly are performed with intention, it is a different intention in my experience.

I experienced the intention of ballet as escaping or minimizing the body. One always seeks to be lighter, more lifted, the limbs always extending away from the core of the body. In contrast, the movements of belly dance originate from the core of the body.

The intention in this dance is to pull strength from the body’s core and from the floor and project it outward. And, rather than lightness or airiness, the quality I learned to project through belly dance was power.

When beginning my research, I did not know what to expect from the students.

I did hope that they would have an empowering experience while learning to belly dance and that this experience would perhaps help them to see women’s bodies differently. But, I had no idea how they would view women’s bodies to begin with or what, if any, change they would experience. In Chapter IV, I relate how the students experienced many subtle shifts of opinion from their preliminary writings to their secondary writings. Overall, the students experienced a shift of perception through

121 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved experience. On the surface, their opinions of the belly dancers are not very much different in the second writing session than the first. But by reading closely, I see a change in the way they approach the images of the models and the dancers. I would describe this change as a shift to seeing belly dance as an intentional activity the dancers do for themselves, versus modeling, which they see as an activity through which women gain social status from an audience of others. The students link the intentional activity of belly dance with liveliness, confidence, body acceptance, higher self esteem, and happiness.

Immanence to Transcendence

In Chapter I, I discuss the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Iris Marion Young, who write about immanence: the tendency to experience life as an object for others, perpetually turned inward and absorbed by cyclical, non-creative work, and transcendence: the ability to experience life as an active subject, engaged in progressive, creative projects, turned outward toward the world. In one student’s writing, I saw what I perceived to be an important shift from immanence to transcendence. In the first session, Stacey writes about the pictures of the models and bellydancers as images, describing their hair and outfits. Her impressions of the models are generally negative and her impressions of the belly dancers are generally positive. In the second session, she makes a transition to thinking about both the belly dancers and the models as people engaged in activities. She sees the models as engaged in activities that are immanent, for the pleasure of others, and the belly dancers as engaged in activities that are transcendent, for the pleasure of themselves.

In the second session, Stacey says there is nothing beautiful or unique about what the

122 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved models look like or what they are doing, talking about them as people, not just images, but it is clear that she does not value the models’ chosen activities whatsoever. In contrast, her opinions of the belly dancers in the second session are as follows:

I much prefer the pictures of the bellydancers because they are individuals with their own goals. The bellydancers don’t look like they’re trying to be seductive, but they are seductive because they’re each unique and have their own story.

Echoing the sentiments of her classmates, Stacey does not approve of trying to be seductive or sexy for others. But, overall the students find that confidence, boldness and honoring one’s individuality are sexy, inherently. In Stacey’s writing, it is possible to see what characteristics she values in women – an ability to honor their individuality, their goals, and their own stories and she has attributed these values to the dancers. In the second writing session, Stacey has polarized the two groups of women – with the models embodying all that is “bad” and the belly dancers embodying all that is “good.” Stacey does not perceive that the models, too, are exercising personal agency in their activities by choosing to engage in a profitable profession. In some ways, Stacey’s expressions here are a further expression of how women tend to be objectified culturally, and dichotomized as either good or bad, dirty or pure, beautiful or ugly: another result of the social construction that women’s appearance is chosen as self-expression, without reference to the larger forces that influence it.

Stacey’s shift to thinking about the images as people could be attributed to many things – the fact that Stacey has just completed a belly dance course could cast her thoughts more in terms of action than image. Having spent that six weeks interacting with belly dancers (but not interacting with any models) could have

123 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved influenced her idea that belly dancers are real people who are not trying to be seductive, while models are elite people who exist somewhere else, outside of her realm. But I would also argue that the methods used to teach the class have something to do with Stacey’s shift of opinion.

In designing the curriculum, one of the most important qualities that Sherry and I incorporated was to communicate intention in dance. Some of the intentions discussed in class were strength, power, dignity, support and love for fellow dancers, and fun. We believe that not only are these intentions important in how students experience the dance, but they are communicated to the audience as well, if the dance is performed. It is widespread belief in ATS circles that one of the most important things a dancer can do in performance is to project these intentions herself and in relation to her fellow dancers, because it sends a message that the audience understands: We are to be respected and revered; this is not a “hoochy-koochy” show.

(Djoumania, YEAR) Using the mind and the body in unison to send this sort of powerful message makes an activity (any activity) more creative, intentional, and focused outward to the world… in short, more transcendent. In contrast, the intention of the models in their activity is left up to the imagination (are they doing it for the money, or are they really trying to seduce men and degrade other women?) which could have influenced the ways in which the students interpreted it.

The Path to Happiness

One element of the students’ writing that surprised me was how much they wrote about happiness. This seems to be a central criterion in how they evaluated the photo collages. Overall, they saw the models as unhappy and the belly dancers as

124 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved happy. My first impression upon reading their responses was that this discussion of happiness had to do with the fact that none of the models are smiling in the model collage and that five of the photos in the belly dance collage show smiles. In the first writing session, the models’ happiness is not a significant theme, but the belly dancers are overwhelmingly seen as happy. But upon further examination, the students’ perception of happiness and unhappiness has more to do with how they perceive two qualities. Most of the students link the dancers’ perceived happiness with liveliness and confidence:

These ladies look happy and full of life. These ladies look confident and strong. (Isabel)

They all look so happy. There are all different body types and no one cares. (Irene)

Everyone looks so happy and comfortable with themselves! (Amanda)

These women look very happy and comfortable with themselves and their bodies. (Maya)

These women look confident and they are glowing. These women are bold and happy. I admire them. (Tia)

They are all full of life and sexy in their own way. I like how happy the women look in the picture… (Nikki)

In each case, the liveliness and confidence mentioned here are on the dancers’ own terms. The liveliness they possess is not, for example, from drinking a can of

Coca-Cola or a Starbucks Latte. Their confidence is not seen as being due to a tummy tuck, a special diet, or a celebrity boyfriend. When taken in context of the writings as a whole, it becomes clear that these dancers are seen as being lively and confident because of the actions in which they are engaged.

In these statements, I think the students are describing the happiness of embodied subjectivity, which they see as different from the happiness of being made up, posed, and photographed as an object for others to gaze upon. I believe what they are seeing is the intention of being in the body, having a carefully chosen, self-selected message, and projecting that message through the mediums of mind and body. In her work on mind-body dualism, Sondra Fraleigh writes, “…dancing requires a concentration of the whole person as a minded body, not a mind in command of something seperable called body. (Fraleigh, 1987, 9) Creating this focus of minded body is an important characteristic of ATS as a dance form.

An additional concept that is later correlated with happiness is the idea that the dancers are honoring their own “stories,” their own individuality, rather than conforming to an outwardly imposed ideal; however, they see the models as epitomizing the mainstream beauty ideal, created by and fulfilled for an audience of others. This may be accurate to some extent, though not completely. Because, just like any social group, belly dancers tend to mimic one another in appearance. If one attends a performance of ATS dancers, one is very likely to see a proliferation of heavy makeup, false braids, turbans, full skirts, tattoos, and coin bras on all the dancers, albeit in various styles and configurations. However, perhaps the students are picking up on the nuance that while ATS dancers may choose to dress and make themselves up similarly, their bodies remain distinct. In any given troupe, it is quite typical to see a wide variety of bodies, from thin and svelte to medium sized, to large and voluptuous. In other words, adherence to a certain body type is most definitely not a requirement to be a belly dancer, but it certainly is a requirement to be a model.

In Beyond Killing Us Softly (Killbourne, 2000), feminist author Gloria

Steinem is interviewed about what she perceives to be the antidote to the marketing machine that degrades young women’s image of themselves. She responds that the most important thing she has found is just being around real women’s bodies, having these be the images her eyes take in most often, rather than the youthful, surgically altered, airbrushed, culturally ideal image. In my experience, this is an amazingly accurate statement. Just being in a large class of belly dancers and seeing the variety of body types, in different stages of life, has had an enormous influence on my ability to see what is real, what is possible, and what is beautiful in women.

At first, I found it rather shocking to see women in class who culturally

“shouldn’t” be dancing or showing their stomachs (including myself). Yet, after a short while, my shock wore away and I was left with impressions of their individual skill, beauty, presence, and intention in dance. After being in this environment of diversity for a year, I found that my own conceptions about “who should” and “who shouldn’t” display their bodies fell away entirely. As the students expressed, I also feel that this type of realization leads to a great deal of individual and collective happiness. Reflecting the students responses and my own experience, an article in the

Journal of Women and Aging notes that positive body image is a major contributor to overall life happiness in women. (2003)

Changing Bodies to Changing Minds

In the first writing session, most of the students judged the way the models looked and found their look unappealing. However, this judgment was tempered by wistful longing in relation to the models’ bodies. Even as they judged the models “too

127 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved thin,” the students related desires to be thinner, larger breasted or more toned. Some of them talked about being chubby in childhood and their fear and loathing of returning to chubbiness again. They convey a poignant picture of the confusion and inner conflict mainstream images of beauty can create in women, and they mirror the findings of Engeln-Maddox (2005) that women’s tendency to compare themselves to mainstream images can make them feel worse about themselves. I was reminded of the media literacy educator Gail Dines in Beyond Killing Us Softly, who says to her audience of students, “When I look through the pages of beauty magazines, I think ‘I hate it, I hate it, I want to look like that, I hate it...’” (Killbourne, 2000) Even though many women today are aware of the impossibility of these images, the images still beckon with an irrational appeal to women’s sense of possibility and potential of what could be achieved if only they tried hard enough.

A significant change I observed in the students’ perceptions was that their desire to change their bodies was altered in the second session. They still expressed interest in changing themselves, but overall, the desired change was not to have larger breasts or a flatter stomach, but more confidence and better dance ability. In The

Body Project, Brumberg writes about American girls’ preoccupation with the body as a project that is endlessly worked on as a means of self improvement and how this is a phenomenon that has developed over the past hundred years. (Brumberg, 1996) The students express a shift in their writing from thinking about their bodies as projects to searching for a different type of self-improvement: becoming more proficient at an activity, and changing how they feel about themselves.

It could be that the students gathered that this is what I was hoping to hear and so reflected my wishes in their writing. However, I hope that their experience of belly dance mirrored my own experience in that they truly were able to alter their sense of

“body as project” and move toward something healthier, becoming more accepting of the body itself and instead taking on the project of thwarting the messages of commercial media through greater self-awareness and confidence. I feel that the format of ATS itself is conducive to this shift in perception.

Body Acceptance and Self Esteem

As much as possible throughout the class, I muted my opinions and removed myself from the power position of instructor. When the students began their second writing session, I asked them to re-read their original perceptions and then write their current perceptions, stating openly that their perceptions need not have changed at all.

However, it is possible that the students were responding out of a desire to please me as the researcher, by picking up on my own bias and the gist of my study.

In light of this, perhaps the most moving experience I had when coding and analyzing the students’ writing was when I realized just how much they had written about acceptance of their bodies and their self-esteem in the second writing session.

In this session, several students link bellydance, increased acceptance of their own bodies, and increased self-esteem. Not only do the students write clearly that belly dancing has increased their ability to accept their bodies and feel better about themselves; some of the students also apply this concept to a larger audience, stating that other women and society in general could benefit from this experience.

As detailed in Beyond Killing Us Softly (Killbourne, 2000), groups of media literacy advocates, feminist thinkers, and therapists have been researching how to remedy the self-esteem gap in girls. Research shows that little girls are full of dreams and goals, and have confidence in their ability to achieve them. But once they reach puberty, their confidence in themselves degrades, and their identity becomes much more about their bodies – how attractive, sexy, toned, thin, or blond they are. They often lose their sense of ambition in adolescence and begin, more than ever, to perceive themselves as objects. This state continues into young adulthood and sometimes for life.

The focus of this documentary is to discuss this problem and the individuals who are finding ways to remedy it. The therapist Catherine Steiner-Adair discusses the findings of her research: young women benefit especially from being together, doing meaningful activities and having meaningful interactions with other women.

The example given is of a summer camp where girls gather together with female counselors; the focus is on learning new skills, doing activities together in nature, and appreciating strong female role models. Girls are actively discouraged from worrying about the appearance of their bodies. Settings like this, it is argued, help girls to see what is real and beautiful about themselves and other women, as embodied beings and not as objects for others. Beauty is experienced by each individual through the group experience.

I believe that the students in my class experienced a similar benefit of group activity through dancing together. The trust and cooperation that are necessary to dance in the ATS format lend themselves to the type of experience that increases

130 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved women’s ability to accept themselves and others as more than mere objects, thus increasing self-esteem. In the belly dance class the students had to depend on each other in order for the dance to work, and they were amazingly adept at doing this.

Discussing improvisational dance, Fraleigh writes:

“the group must move spontaneously together as an interconnected world-body, moving in the moment – obviously according to some plan but within an energy created through the whole, as the dancers adjust naturally to each other, meeting the requirements of each moment…even as it disconnects…the group – and its exaltation – remains the dominant theme. (Fraleigh, 1987, 208)

I believe Fraleigh’s concept of “energy created through the whole” is the healing factor mentioned in Beyond Killing Us Softly. This energy, achieved by the group, transcends the power of any of its individuals, and is capable of creating a sense of peaceful self-acceptance and empowerment within the group, leading the group forward in the direction of its chosen intention.

Chapter VI

Endings and Beginnings

Introduction

In this final chapter, I will first discuss my observations on the belly dance class that was created for the purpose of my research, revealing the things I found successful and those that created opportunities for learning and reflection. Then, I will move into a discussion of the future projects and research that could potentially arise from my study.

I. Observations on the Bellydancing Classs

Successes

In the first writing session, I realized how different the demeanor of college classrooms is from the demeanor of bellydance classes. That day, the students sat very still and politely listened to all I had to say, not moving much and with very little facial expression or vocalization (although the floor was very hard). I realized that we were going to have to jam the college classroom culture a bit to create an environment of playfulness, mutual appreciation, and creativity among the students (which is culturally typical of an ATS belly dancing classroom).

Sherry and I worked toward this end in our curriculum by including exercises in which the students had to use their voices to show appreciation for each other and for the instructor and her assistants. Sherry told jokes and gave copious encouragement and we continually made it a practice to invite students to the performances and events of our performance troupe, giving direction and facilitating rides for students who needed transportation. Toward the end of the class, when the

132 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved students had started to become more comfortable, we included an exercise in which the students “tried on” different personas, including Goddess, Queen, Maiden, and

Vixen. I was amazed and pleased that the students were able to do this in a very supportive, playful, and mutually respectful way. By the last class, their demeanor had changed considerably. They sprawled out on their stomachs when writing, smiled and called out to the dancers during their performance; several asked me to stay afterward to dance with them, which I was delighted to oblige.

We experienced another success regarding our method for teaching ATS. The way that Sherry typically teaches ATS moves at a much slower pace than the method we used within this classroom. Typically, she gives students many months of working on the movements and combinations as part of a group of followers before introducing them to the concept of leading fellow dancers. Even then, her students are sometimes not comfortable in the leadership role and insist that they are not ready for it. Based on my own experience with ATS at workshops with other instructors, I had a hunch that students would respond favorably to leadership if it were required of them early in the class, not given as an option. I perceived that timidity is a highly valued trait in the gendering of women, so that even if a woman feels herself capable of leading others, or curious about leading others, more often than not she will forgo the experience of leadership, saying that she is not interested, or not capable of doing so.

Unfortunately, it is much more socially acceptable for young women to appear timid and uncertain than it is for them to appear sure, confident, and capable of leading others.

In this class, we gave the students two classes in which to learn the movements by following Sherry and the teaching assistants. In the third class, after giving a brief demonstration with her teaching assistant and me, Sherry asked the students to form groups of three and take turns leading each other. She emphasized that this exercise was for fun, just to practice and get the feel of it, and that at any given time, the dancers in the “follower” position were to do all they could to encourage the leader. In other words, there was to be absolutely no ridicule of anyone’s dancing. Some of the students were clearly wary of our request that they lead, and one even said she was uncomfortable and chose not to do it. But to my satisfaction, all the other students in class that day took part leading and following each other with respect, joy and laughter. In cases where a leader didn’t get her movements exactly right, I watched her followers gamely go along with her, mimicking her as best they could.

The concept of “switching leads” was one of the most important in our curriculum and we repeated these types of exercises in every class thereafter, eventually working up to groups of students in the “performance” role approaching other students in the “audience” role. The performers were taught how to project strength, dignity, and confidence to the audience and the audience members were taught to project love, admiration, and encouragement to the performers. Each student tried both roles.

In the last class, our leading and following training culminated in a group chorus line, one of the classic ATS group formations. In this exercise, each dancer took turns playing each of four roles: leading the chorus, following the chorus leader,

134 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved following Sherry in a duet observed by the rest of the class, and leading Sherry in an improvisational duet. How inspirational it was to see the students, who had initially been quite timid, becoming so comfortable leading and following each other fluidly, in an atmosphere of mutual support and love. I was particularly impressed that they were all able to find the confidence to lead their teacher in a duet, even if their movements were not always perfectly polished. I believe that the concept of fluid, shared leadership in ATS is one of the most fundamental ways in which a sense trust, intimacy, and community is established among dancers of a “tribe.”

In Sherry’s typical belly dance classroom, students of all ages and skill levels come together. In any given class, there are first-time beginners, intermediate students, and more advanced students who are part of her performance troupe. There are typically a full range of body types, from petite to “goddess” sized dancers.

Students are often found in all walks of life, from young girls to middle-aged women, to pregnant women and older women. The exposure of the body encompasses the spectrum as well – some women wear loose T-shirts and pants, while others wear fitted tank tops and skirts, and still others wear the belly-revealing choli tops and harem pants that are typical costuming elements of this dance. Usually, women in

Sherry’s class start with their bellies tightly covered. As they continue to learn and gain confidence in their abilities and their bodies (usually over several months or more), they often start revealing their bellies. Some women (myself included) become so accustomed to the benefits of seeing their bellies doing the movements and the comfort of not having their bellies covered that they choose to always dance with their bellies uncovered.

Since our classroom at NAU was more homogeneous than Sherry’s typical classroom, we thought it was important to give the students different models for dance, to give them an idea of the diversity of ages, body types, and clothing that can be worn in this dance. For all but the last class, we had various teaching assistants of different ages with different types of bodies participate in the classes so that the students could see the movements on a variety of bodies and become accustomed to the idea that this dance is not limited to any particular body type. Each teaching assistant wore what she usually wears to rehearsal or class, conveying the message that it is not required to bare one’s belly but it is certainly acceptable if one chooses to do so. The students in this class always had their bellies covered, although some expressed interest in obtaining patterns to make cholis. Six weeks was a short time for women to feel confident in revealing their bellies, especially when none of their fellow students were doing so.

Learning Opportunities

Shortly after I had finished advertising the class across the NAU campus and in the student newspaper, I had a couple of young women call me who were interested in taking the class, but who were worried that their body shape and size would not be appropriate for belly dance. Although I assured them that the class was suitable for all shapes and sizes of women, they ended up deciding not to register for the class. I wished that I had included in my flyers and advertising a statement such as “all shapes and sizes are welcome.” Although a statement such as this would not necessarily have brought in a different group of students, it may have encouraged some women who

I learned how important the ambience of a dance classroom can be on the first day of class. The facility we used was generously donated by the NAU Recreation

Center. It was a large room with many mirrors and ample room for the students.

However, the acoustics in the room were poor. Sherry had to use the microphone to be heard, and the microphone was not working well. The lighting was very dim and had a greenish cast to it. The state of our room did not do much in terms of developing the intimacy and trust that are so important in ATS. After the first class, we realized we needed to do more to create a feeling of enjoyment, trust, and intimacy among the students, so we added some partner stretches and more exercises done in a circle to create more face-to-face and physical contact among the students and with the instructor. Once new light bulbs had been installed, the following week, the atmosphere of the room was somewhat improved. I think that having a comfortable space with appropriate lighting and acoustics would increase the success of the class in general.

I regret how the class reduced in size, and wish I knew more about the reasons for this. In the registration period, I had so many students interested that I had to turn people away because the class was becoming too large. Sherry and I decided to limit the class to thirty-five students so that each student would still be able to receive a quality level of instruction (only twenty-two of these met the research criteria of being undergraduate with no prior belly dance experience). In the first dance class, twenty- nine students were present. By the third class, fifteen were present, and at the sixth

137 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved class, the number had dwindled to only eight. Some of the students who were most consistent in their attendance were actually those who were not included in the research group. This could possibly be because they were older, graduate students, or had previous experience with belly dance and therefore more interest and commitment.

During the course of the class, I had seven students contact me and tell me that they were missing classes due to illness, financial difficulty, or family issues. Many of these ended up attending the class periodically. However, nine students only attended the first or first and second class before dropping out. At the completion of the class, I sent each of them an email, asking if they could share their reasons for leaving the class, emphasizing that they did not need to worry about offending me and that the information was for purposes of my study.

Three replied, giving the reasons of back pain, being out of town, and having too much homework. I wish I knew more about their reasons for leaving. If I were to speculate about their reasons, I would say they may be a combination of the class not meeting their expectations or being too challenging or not enjoyable. Additionally, most of the students in the class were age eighteen or nineteen; the newness of their college careers may have created difficulty in balancing their schedules and commitments. I have one other theory as to why so many dropped out – many people have impressions of belly dance from the way it has been constructed through a patriarchal lens – as a dance of titillation and seduction, for audiences of men. And, truthfully, some belly dance classes are taught with this being a primary focus. I

II. Implications for Future and Projects and Research

Project: Adolescent Girls and Belly Dance

When I began this project, I wanted to see how ATS would affect adolescent girls. For a variety of reasons, this proved difficult and I decided to switch my focus to college students. It was easier to gain access to college students because they are already legally adults and can give their own informed consent. Finding a space to hold the class was possible on the university campus, and I felt that my study was not compromised because young undergraduate women face many of the same issues that adolescents do in terms of body image and acceptance. In Am I Thin Enough Yet?,

(1997) Sharlene Hesse-Biber writes that college campuses are breeding grounds for food and weight obsessions, with six to twenty-five percent of female students being affected by anorexia, bulimia, or a combination of the two. She attributes this to the fact that college campuses have typically been the niche of middle or upper class women, who come from a population that values thinness in women (although increasing numbers of working class and ethnic women now live on college campuses and they become increasingly susceptible to the mainstream beauty image). Hesse

Biber also links this trend with the fact that college campuses are “semi closed” environments in which competition for attention can cause outbreaks of unhealthy eating habits, and the importance placed on the dating scene in college, in which the most important criteria for women is thinness.

Doing this study with college women was fulfilling and well worth the effort.

However, future research could include the study of adolescent girls and ATS. While they face many of the same issues that undergraduate women do, they also in the midst of experiencing bodily changes through puberty, the power struggles of adolescence, pressing choices about their level of conformity to gender roles, and the blossoming of their sexuality their peers’ sexuality. I feel that ATS could provide a topic rich for study when used with adolescent girls.

In particular, I think that a curriculum combining media literacy education and

ATS belly dance could be valuable for adolescents and young women. I did not address any media issues with the students in my study because I was trying to see what the women had to say after their experience of dance, without additional information to bias their opinions. However, I think that the juxtaposition of talking and thinking about media images, learning how to digest these images critically, and then engaging in a physical activity that provides a contrast and alternative to mainstream images could be a powerful combination. I would like to develop a curriculum such as this in the future.

Project: Belly Dance in Therapeutic Settings

Throughout this study, I have been curious as to how ATS may be used in therapeutic settings to help women who are suffering from illness or trauma. One example of this might be working with women suffering from eating disorders as a kind of support group that extends beyond a typical “talk therapy” group. The students in this class opened up to each other and their teacher, learning how to express trust, cooperation, and encouragement through dance in such a short period of

The tenets of eating disorders are so often isolation, secretiveness, and the need to strictly control oneself while the world outside falls apart, and the formation of a tribe through ATS dance provides an environment of support and encouragement that women may otherwise have trouble finding. It is my opinion that the shared leadership of ATS gently forces women out of their prescribed passive role dictated by gender and into an arena of shared creativity and cooperation. Perhaps its emphasis on feminine strength, and its acceptance and celebration of a variety of feminine bodies would be an ideal fit for anorexic and bulimic women to begin expanding their concepts of beauty and body image.

Another example of this could entail using ATS with women who have experienced sexual trauma. Since this dance form is focused so much on women’s ownership of their bodies and their choice of the message they project with their bodies, it could lend itself to the recovery of women who have had their bodies violated sexually. The feeling produced by the dance is generally one of well being, being grounded, and being strong. The emphasis on pelvic movements, and the history of the dance as fertility and birthing ritual, prayer to Mother Earth and the cycles of nature lends itself to healing women who have had their sexual energies disrupted by violence. The strong creative component tends to give women joy and confidence in their abilities. I believe the sense of community that forms in an ATS tribe lends itself to support and recovery in a variety of therapeutic settings.

Research: Women’s Relationship with Food

After completing the second writing session, some of the students stayed for an impromptu discussion about my research. I told them, for the first time, what the study was about and they had interesting feedback. One of the themes I heard echoed several times was how the images of commercial media have made the students’ relationship with food confusing and problematic. Several students talked about dieting as young children and being ashamed of their bodies since childhood. Another talked about more recent dieting, to lose thirty pounds in time for prom by severely restricting her carbohydrate intake. One student talked about how she believes it is important to eat healthy foods in order to nourish the body and not worry so much about controlling the size and the shape of it. But I was left with an impression that overall, the students were at a loss for how to go about doing that; food, far from simple nourishment, has simultaneously been constructed as women’s enemy, best friend, temptation, salvation, shameful addiction, and tool for self-improvement.

(Bordo, 1996)

This discussion made me contemplate how women’s body acceptance is only partially explored by ATS. ATS is part of a feminist, artistic realm that places value on women accepting themselves as they are, without needing to conform to diets, breast enhancement, or other painfully artificial beauty enhancements that are so commonplace in our society. This in itself is a wonderful thing, and long overdue.

However, it only addresses one facet of the problems that women experience in regard to their bodies. We in the West are living in a society of over-consumption that affects our health in many ways. According to the Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention, in the United States an obesity epidemic threatens the health of some

142 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved thirty percent of Americans. (http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/obesity) Fast food, processed food, and sugar comprise the majority of the food that Americans eat.

Weight-related problems increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other chronic, fatal conditions. Conditions previously limited to older adults are now rampant in children who are often served soft drinks and fast food in school cafeterias.

Not only does our over-consumption contribute to disease within our bodies, it is part of a consumer culture that has changed the ways in which we perceive ourselves, our activities, our beliefs, and our values at a fundamental level. Bordo writes,

In advanced consumer capitalism…the regulation of desire…becomes an ongoing problem, as we find ourselves continually besieged by temptation, while socially condemned for overindulgence. (Bordo, 1996, 199)

In this consumer culture, our ability to navigate choices and beliefs is increasingly influenced by marketing, which is carefully constructed to create a sense of perpetually unfulfilled need within us. The patterns of our lives are constructed as individually chosen, without constraints of the cultural and political hierarchies of the past. This tendency of consumer culture appears benign and even benevolent; however, it inherently contains the assumption that individuals will define their behaviors and beliefs not through allegiance with a group of people, but through allegiance to the products and services they consume. In order to be a good consumer, careful planning and a diligent work ethic are required (which are enforced by marketing); however, consumer culture contrasts this message (through marketing) by encouraging consumers to escape their rigid, productive lives by indulging their

143 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved passionate, hedonistic inner natures as they indulge in buying cars, vacations, clothing, beauty treatments, and the like. Hence, consumers enter into conflicted relationships with themselves, constantly trying to construct their lives around artificially imposed needs, whose fulfillment often has unintended consequences and requires further consumption.

(http://uk.geocities.com/balihar_sanghera/conoutlines.html)

It is my belief that this consumer culture has particularly affected the ways in which women perceive their bodies and their relationship to food. To give one example, starting in childhood, girls are bombarded with images of beautiful Disney princesses who are extraordinarily beautiful and have impossibly hourglass-shaped figures. As they grow older, the messages about their looks and their bodies only intensify. The message is deeply imbedded in our culture: in order to matter, women need to be young, beautiful, shapely, and thin. Simultaneously, starting in childhood, girls are bombarded with images of foods that they are supposed to love: candy, cupcakes, and ice cream. These foods are constructed as “fun” foods – foods that girls use to have a good time together, feel better when they are sad, and fantasize about.

Like the cultural body messages, the messages about food only intensify as girls grow into women and have access to even more media exposure.

This aspect of the consumer culture has created a double-bind for girls and women. Some of the earliest messages that girls receive paint a picture of femininity that is confusing and contradictory. Even in the best of circumstances, women cannot be perpetually young, beautiful, and shaped like hourglasses and especially not when they constantly use sugary foods as their social network, emotional support, and

144 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved fantasy realm. The consumer culture provides solutions to the problems which it creates in the form of more products, surgical alterations, specialty diets, and extreme exercise.

I feel that women’s ability to accept and love themselves as they are in all phases of life is an essential part of the equation in their ability to become fully authorized members of a sustainable society. An equally important part of that equation involves women everywhere having access to safe, healthy, whole food that nourishes their bodies, access to information and resources on how to properly sustain themselves, finding a balance between nourishment and over-consumption, and removing guilt from the act of eating. Research exploring the connections between belly dance, women’s relationship with food, and body image could add valuable information to this conversation.

Research: Media Literacy and Social Sustainability

The sexist environment that contributes to women’s poor sense of body image exists at the intersection of other cultural factors, such as racism, classism, and violence toward women and girls. All of these elements affect the ways in which women perceive their bodies and their relationship with the world, and in many ways these elements must shift to create social sustainability. These problems are part of the very fabric of our society; shifting them would require massive social, political, and economic change.

One of the elements that both reflects and shapes our culture is commercial media. Again, I think that creating increased awareness of the agenda, disjointed images, and impossibility of the mainstream beauty ideal that are used to sell products

145 © 2007 Hilary Giovale All Rights Reserved could begin a shift of the power imbalance created by this type of marketing. The effects of this marketing are well documented; not only does it negatively affect women’s sense of their bodies, but it transmits messages that are racist, classist, sexist, and violent, causing men and women to suffer from the homogenizing ways in which gender is portrayed. (Killbourne, 2000) Every child that grows up with these images, uninterpreted and presented as benign, develops a construction of the world that is colored by a capitalist agenda – to make a profit, no matter what the cost.

Research that explores the relationship between media literacy education, and the forces of racism, classism, sexism, and violence would be a valuable asset. In addition to critiquing media images and thinking about them critically, an important quality in this research might be what Gloria Steinem suggests in Beyond Killing Us

Softly (2000). Her personal antidote for the pervasiveness of the mainstream beauty image is surrounding herself with real women, real bodies, and real activities. If we are not only able to critique contrived images, but feed our eyes with images that are real, perhaps we can ease some of the boundaries that divide and polarize our culture, and look toward a new vision of sustainability.

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Appendix A

Informed Consent - Page 1

Informed Consent - Page 2

Appendix B

Flyer for Advertising Class

Picture Sheet - Page 1

Picture Sheet - Page 2

“Dance Moves and Cues” Class Handout - Page 1

“Dance Moves and Cues” Class Handout - Page 2

Bellydance References Class Handout

Bellydance Costuming Class Handout - Page 1

Bellydance Costuming Class Handout - Page 2

“Isolation Exercises and Movement” Class Handout

“Instructor’s Introduction” Class Handout – Page 1

“Instructor’s Introduction” Class Handout – Page 2

“Upcoming Events” Class Handout

Lesson Plan – Page 1 of 5

Lesson Plan – Page 2 of 5

Lesson Plan – Page 3 of 5

Lesson Plan – Page 4 of 5

Lesson Plan – Page 5 of 5

170