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Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Critical Race and Whiteness Studies www.acrawsa.org.au/ejournal Volume, 10, Number 1, 2014 SPECIAL ISSUE: EDWARD SAID—INTELLECTUAL, CULTURAL CRITIC, ACTIVIST Dancing the East in the West: Orientalism, feminism, and belly dance Krista Banasiak York University Belly dance is a popular form of exotic dance in the West. Women are drawn to this dance which is marketed as offering access to an ‘ancient’ and ‘timeless’ culture that is an alternative to Western cerebralism and material pursuits. However, from the point of view of critical second–wave feminist and Orientalism scholars, belly dance is interpreted as rife with oppressive tropes of Orientalism. What can account for the discrepancy between the social scientific literature’s denouncement of belly dance and its current popularity? The visual focus of gaze theory has contributed to the neglect of embodiment in these accounts. The body, which ought to be central to any research on dance, has been curiously absent in the critical literature. My ethnography and interviews with belly dancers lead me to argue that second–wave feminist and Orientalism scholars’ reliance on gaze theory limits their ability to fully capture and appreciate the lived experience of belly dance. Dancers’ interpretations draw on systems of meaning that neither of these schools of thought would expect. My participants experience empowerment through the corporeal, sensual and liberatory aspects of the dance that redress societal messages about the female body. They experience the gaze as a reciprocal relationship where positive energy is gained through the flow of power between subjects. Finally, my participants express certain discomforts around Orientalism and appropriation and have implemented strategies to negotiate these perceived tensions. The relationship between belly dancers’ bodies, subjectivities and cultural discourses is explored to provide a nuanced account of this practice. Keywords: orientalism, feminism, gaze theory, belly dance, embodiment, ethnography ISSN 1838-8310 © Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association 2014 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10.1 Introduction Belly dance is a popular form of exotic dance in the West. Many women are drawn to this dance form which is marketed as offering access to an ‘ancient’ and ‘timeless’ culture that is an alternative to Western cerebralism and material pursuits (Dox, 2007). Belly dance communities are flourishing in urban centres and on-line, while websites devoted to the dance’s history, technique, and costuming are emerging in abundance. Academic evaluations of belly dancing, however, have been less than favourable. Scholars adhering to a second-wave feminist perspective, which “takes as its starting point the politics of representation” (Humm, 1997, p. 197), argue that due to its use of revealing costumes and highly sensualised movements, belly dancing objectifies and oppresses female dancers (Koritz, 1997; Savigliano, 1995; Shay, 2005). Meanwhile, Orientalism literature (Dox, 2006; Said, 1978; Savigliano, 1995; Shay & Sellers-Young, 2005) criticises contemporary belly dance for its disassociation from its roots in North Africa and the Middle East and its stereotypes of mysteriously veiled women and harem settings. Thus, these scholars argue that contrary to popular understanding, a history of Orientalism, appropriation, and exoticisation informs contemporary belly dance practices. In fact, only sparse and speculative records are available from prior to the 19th century that depict the dance, its origins and its social roles (Deagon, 1998). Therefore, it is nearly impossible to say with confidence what ‘traditional’ belly dance looked like or how it was practiced. The first belly dancers appeared in the west during the Chicago World Fairs of 1893, a series of exhibitions meant to parade the conquests of Western imperialism. Western audiences interpreted the dancers, who wore pantaloons and vests and made sharp pelvic movements and body gyrations, as unattractive, lascivious and vulgar, having read these movements as communicating an overt and potentially threatening sexuality (Shay, 2008, p. 128). It was only after the dance underwent a process of Orientalisation and exoticisation that it became aesthetically pleasing to Western audiences (Shay, 2008, p. 131). Inspired by 18th and 19th century Orientalist writings and art in which women were depicted as large-breasted, scantily-clad, and overtly sexualised performers, existing to entertain and seduce men in harem settings (MacMaster & Lewis, 1998, p. 123; Said, 1978, p. 207), Maud Allen, Ruth St. Dennis and Loie Fuller, and other modern dancers of the early 20th century offered westernised interpretations of belly dancing (Shay & Sellers-Young, 2005, p. 7). These dancers, wearing bejeweled bras and head pieces, modeled their movement on bodily posturing of Eastern dance, incorporating more arm movement and wrist twists while steering clear of accentuating the hips (Shay, 2008, p. 7). Such Western interpretations of belly dance—today known as ‘cabaret’ style—became popular and were taken up by Egyptian dancers aiming to please Western tourists and upper class residents whose tastes were formed in relation to European and American dictates. Thus, Shay (2008, p. 128) argues contemporary belly dance represents a conceptual break from its Egyptian origins and constitutes an almost entirely new, Orientalised and auto-exoticised dance genre that retains only fragments of the earlier belly dance aesthetic. Orientalism and second–wave feminist theorists interpret this history as problematic due to its appropriative nature, and condemn the structuring of belly 2 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10.1 dance to please heterosexual male and colonial gazes. To inform their analysis of belly dance, both schools have relied mainly on theories of the gaze which describe our awareness of being looked at and evaluated through particular frameworks, male or colonial, that are indicative of unequal power relations between men and women or white West and racialised ‘Other’, respectively. Each form of the gaze privileges its own perspective about the criteria by which the objects of the gaze are to be judged. Gaze theorists understand these evaluations to lead individuals to live their lives as objects that at any moment could be subjected to a gaze, and to continually adjust their appearance and behaviour accordingly (Bartky, 1988; Foucault, 1995; King, 2004; Mulvey, 1975; Said, 1978; Savigliano, 1995). Yet, on the ground, the number of women taking-up belly dance professionally or as a form of serious leisure (Stebbins, 2001) has been increasing since the 1970s (Keft-Kennedy, 2013, p. 68). What can account for the discrepancy between the social scientific literature’s denouncement of belly dance and its current popularity among women? My interviews with belly dancers lead me to argue that the reliance on gaze theory by scholars adhering to Said’s construction of Orientalism and second-wave feminists limits their ability to fully capture and appreciate lived experience. As Manning (1997) discusses, gaze theory has been criticised for making subjects passive, altogether stripping them of agency. In interpreting dance, feminists and scholars of Orientalism who use gaze theory regard “dance as text”, taking a postmodern vantage point from which movements, costuming, and choreography are analyzed for meaning (Wainright, Williams, & Turner, 2006, p. 536), and in particular for how dance represents and (re)produces power relations (Wright & Dreyfus, 1998, p. 95). In so doing, they overlook the experiential aspect of dance; just as readers do not passively consume texts (as Radway’s (1983) study of women reading romance novels has shown), dancers do not passively dance. Rather, they bring their life histories and social positions to the process of experiencing, interpreting, and using it in their daily lives. In this paper, I use ethnography and interviews to argue against the position that the only legitimate interpretation of the practice of belly dance is that dancers are unreflective pawns of the gaze who have ‘drunk the Kool-Aid’ of sexism and Orientalism and dance to ‘exotically’ appeal to men. Dancers’ own interpretations, it turns out, sprawl beyond what feminist and Orientalist perspectives can contain, enabling third-wave or ‘post’ feminist subjectivities. Methods I draw on data collected through semi-structured interviews with women from Arabesque Academy and The Dark Side Studio, two popular belly dance studios in downtown Toronto. These studios were selected purposively to facilitate collection of data on the issues pertinent to my topic: the gaze, Orientalism, feminism, and embodiment. Each studio is owned and operated by a white Canadian female artistic director, and both studentships are almost exclusively female and from diverse racialised backgrounds, with the majority being white. Studying both Arabesque Academy and The Dark Side Studio permits comparisons due to their different philosophies, aesthetics, and dance styles. Founded in 1987, Arabesque Academy defines its style of belly dance on its 3 Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 10.1 promotional material as a “shameless display of femininity” (Arabesque, 2013). The academy prides itself on being an ambassador of Middle Eastern dance, music and history in Canada. It focuses on teaching traditional styles of dance from Egypt and Syria, along with folklore styles such as Saudi Arabian Khaleeji, in which long jeweled dresses
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