Women Dancing Otherwise

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily E. Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Social Norms ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Choreographic Analysis

In twenty-first-century urban Chinese contemporary dance, gender and female sexuality are often constructed in ways that reinforce patriarchal and heterosexual social norms. Although “queer dance” as a named category does not exist in China, it is possible to identify queer feminist perspectives in recent dance works. This essay offers a reading of representations of gender and female sexuality in two works of contemporary dance by Beijing-based female Chinese choreographers: Wang Mei’s 2002 Thunder and Rain and Gu Jiani’s 2014 Right & Left. Through choreographic analysis informed by ethnographic research in Beijing’s contemporary dance world, this essay argues that Thunder and Rain reinforces patriarchal and heterosexual social norms common in Chinese contemporary dance, while Right & Left disrupts such norms. Through its staging of unconventional female-female duets and its queering of nationally marked movement forms, Right & Left offers a queer feminist approach to the presentation of women on the Chinese stage.

scholarly journals Deleuze Becoming-Mary Poppins: Re-Imagining the Concept of Becoming-Woman and Its Potential for Challenging Current Notions of Parenting, Gender and Childhood

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Donna Carlyle ◽  
Kay Sidebottom
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
War Machine ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Many ◽  
Post Humanism

In this paper, we consider the major and controversial lexicon of Deleuze’s ‘becoming-woman’ and what an alternative re-working of this concept might look like through the story of Mary Poppins. In playfully exploring the many interesting aspects of Travers’ character, with her classic tale about the vagaries of parenting, we attempt to highlight how reading Mary Poppins through the Deleuzian lens of ‘becoming-woman’ opens up possibilities, not limitations, in terms of feminist perspectives. In initially resisting the ‘Disneyfication’ of Mary Poppins, Travers offered insights and opportunities which we revisit and consider in terms of how this fictional character can significantly disrupt ideas of gender performativity. We endeavour to accentuate how one of its themes not only dismantles the patriarchy in 1910 but also has significant traction in the twenty- first century. We also put forth the idea of Mary Poppins as an icon of post-humanism, a nomadic war machine, with her robotic caring, magic powers and literal flights of fancy, to argue how she ironically holds the dual position of representing the professionalisation of parenting and the need to move beyond a Dionysian view of children as in need of control and regulation, as well as that of nurturer and emancipator. Indeed, in her many contradictions, we suggest a nomadic Mary Poppins can offer a route into the ideas of Deleuze and his view of children as de-territorialising forces and activators of change.

scholarly journals Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Moving from European Discourses on the Precarious and Art to the Realities of Contemporary Dance

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Annelies Van Assche ◽  
Katharina Pewny ◽  
Rudi Laermans
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Precarious Work ◽  
The Media ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Different Levels

In this article, we encapsulate several key debates in sociology, cultural and arts politics and the media industry on precarious work since its emergence at the turn of the twenty-first century. After setting out the fundamental discourses on precarity, we concentrate on contemporary dance artists as precarious workers and investigate the extent to which different levels of precarity affect them, distinguishing relevant aspects related to socio-economic, mental and physical precarity. We propose that the nature of their work is integrally connected with the ‘precarious’. To close, we conclude that protest against precarity itself is of a precarious nature.

Ugly Differences

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yetta Howard
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Differences ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
First Century ◽  
Symbiotic Relationship ◽  
Textual Practices ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Normative Models ◽  
Central Claim

Ugly Differences explores queer female sexuality’s symbiotic relationship with ugliness and offers a way to see worth in ugliness as a generative category for reimagining the inhabitation of gender, sexual, and ethnic differences. Ugliness, in this book, is a multipronged concept: it equates with the disagreeable and pejorative traits that are attributed to queerness; it aligns itself with nonwhite, nonmale, and nonheterosexual physicality and experience; and it refers to anti-aesthetic textual practices, which are located in/as underground culture. This study shows how late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts of ugliness register discontent with culturally normative models of queerness and why the underground is necessary for articulating difference. Locating ugliness at the intersections of the physical, experiential, and textual, the book’s central claim is that queer female sexuality needs to be understood as ugliness and the repertoire of underground cultural practices becomes its obligatory archive. In Ugly Differences, accounting for a minoritarian queerness associated with gender, sexual, and ethnic differences requires turning to marginal forms and, as reflecting ugliness, these forms provide options outside heteronormative modes of being that open up possibilities for envisioning deeply counterintuitive domains of queer world-making.

Choreographers and Musicians in Collaboration, from the Twentieth to the Twenty-First Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
South Asian ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Uk ◽  
At Home

Traditionally, dance has always needed music, although over the last century, this relationship has frequently been questioned. This chapter charts key historical shifts in choreomusical thinking, followed by a series of contemporary case studies demonstrating a range of approaches to, as well as commonalities across time in, the theories and practices of collaboration. Evidence shows increasingly independent, multidimensional, even oppositional relations between music and dance and a new fluidity in the behavior of artists, enabled partly by the advent of super-fast technology. In dance, relatively little information is available on the nature of creative processes, especially on musical issues. For the case studies, this chapter incorporates new interview material with choreographers and musicians based in the UK: Wayne McGregor, at home in both contemporary dance and ballet; Shobana Jeyasingh, who draws from South Asian classical and Western dance practices; and the performance duo Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion.

Sexuality as a Standard of Civilization: Historicizing (Homo)Colonial Intersections of Race, Gender, and Class

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 148-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Delatolla
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Twenty First Century

Abstract In recent years, acceptance and tolerance of homosexuality has become symbolic of Western liberal, social, and political progress. This has been noted in discussions on homonormativity, homonationalism, and homocolonialism. While some of these discussions have touched on the intersections between sexuality, race, gender, and class, this article argues that this relationship has been historically produced as a standard of civilization. It notes that the politics and governance of sexuality, and its intersections with race, gender, and class, have historical relevance in producing social and political exclusions. In building this argument, the article considers how the politics and governance of sexuality have maintained a “divided world,” from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, transforming from a hetero- to a homocolonial standard of civilization. It draws from a number of examples, from the nineteenth century to the contemporary period, using a diverse set of materials, including ethnographic research, fieldwork, and historical documents to explain temporal and geographic connections regarding the politics of sexuality.

Dancing the Land

2019 ◽  
pp. 610-634
Author(s):  
Melinda Buckwalter
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Traditional Cultures ◽  
Twenty First Century

What makes a mountain sacred? How do spirits come to dwell in rock or forest? Which rituals are performed to bring rain? Traditional cultures formalized their relationship to the land. This essay considers the work of contemporary dance-makers Jennifer Monson, Eiko Otake, and Suprapto Suryodarmo, who use experiential approaches, including improvised movement, to investigate the environment, whether urban or rural, from courtyards to local parks. The chapter argues that in so doing, these dance-makers create a contemporary geopoetics, propositions of relationship between the human body and a changing twenty-first-century landscape. In the industrialized world, a dichotomy of natural versus humanmade often arises. Through their work on site, these dance-makers disrupt this binary and suggest, instead, a continuum. By including human doings in their geopoetics, they help us to refind relationship within, offering a sense of integration with or embeddedness in the environment.

Navigating Patchwork Governance: Somalis in Kenya, National Security, and Refugee Resettlement

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophia Balakian
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Refugee Resettlement ◽  
Somali Refugees ◽  
State Actors ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Security Operations ◽  
National Borders

Abstract:Refugee resettlement is accomplished through the intersecting administration of state and non-state actors with competing claims and interests. These competing claims are caught between humanitarian imperatives to rescue the most vulnerable refugees on one hand and security demands to protect national borders from those deemed undesirable and undeserving on the other. Based on ethnographic research with Somali refugees in Nairobi from 2013 to 2015, Balakian examines the ways in which refugees maneuver through an unsynchronized assemblage of institutions to which they are subject; she brings this assemblage into relief through ethnographic accounts of Somali refugees as they attempt to navigate the resettlement system and are simultaneously caught in Kenya’s 2014 anti-refugee security operations. Based on this case, the research demonstrates that being subject to multiple, competing governing bodies is central to the condition of statelessness in twenty-first century Africa.

The Contemporary Dance Field in Turkey in the Twenty-First Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 308-310
Author(s):  
MÜGE OLACAK
Keyword(s):  
Performing Arts ◽  
First Century ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Working Models ◽  
Twenty First Century

Based on my experiences and observations as a dancer, performer, researcher and culture manager, this article aims to shine a light on the performing-arts field, particularly on contemporary dance, in Turkey in the twenty-first century. Given the current political, social and economic shifts in Turkey, which have doubtless affected artistic practice and structures, it is important to draw attention to and explore the emerging players in the field of dance – dance institutions, producers, artists and audience. In addition, it is necessary to create awareness about the new generation's efforts to develop the field in relation to new organizational and partnership structures, shifting from a vertical hierarchy to autonomous and collective working models.

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