In the movie Sex and the City 2, there is a scene in a nightclub where Charlotte points at the belly dancers and, sarcastically asks Miranda, “Now, why are those women allowed to show their bellies and chest?” (emphasis added), to which Miranda replies, “Well, from my research, there’s some kind of nightclub-belly-dancer loophole.” Here, Charlotte’s question exposes a juxtapositioning of the veil-clad women signifying oppression versus the belly dancers signifying objectification. This dichotomous victimization of Middle Eastern women is extremely common in American media.
This article uses ‘belly dancing’ as a case study to deconstruct how this negative stereotype of the ‘hypersexual,’ ‘objectified’ Middle Eastern women translates into a positive stereotype of the ‘empowered’ white women, when the same cultural artefact is relocated from a Middle Eastern to a non-Middle Eastern context. I use the term ‘Middle East’ loosely for the purpose of this article, but it is important to note that the term itself is a colonial construct and represents a colonial gaze.
Discovering the ‘danse du ventre’: Early origins and the oriental gaze
The initial discovery of belly dance was by 18th and 19th century European travellers, who were documenting the ‘primitiveness’ of the colonised region of the Middle East. The “Orient” was conceptualised as a monolithic mass embodying all that the West denounced as immoral and backward. At the same time, the Orient was romanticised as a mystical place where ideas of spirituality and sensuality coexisted. It was this dichotomous conceptualization of the Orient that led to the creation of the ‘exotic.’ The ‘exotic’ refers to those aspects of the colonised culture which synchronously threatened and amused the colonisers. These cultural aspects were used as a justification for colonial domination while at the same time, selectively fetishized or sanitised for colonial consumption.
In the context of belly dancing, one strand of the Orientalist literature made grand efforts to trace the origins of this dance form and several claims attributing it to fertility rituals, religious ceremonies and scientific benefits were made. According to Anthony Shay (2003), a dance historian, these claims are arbitrary and lack empirical support - the dance was in fact performed by low-class men and women, simply for the purpose of entertainment. However, another strand of Orientalists came with the preconceived notions of Middle Eastern women as licentious and hypersexual. Belly dance was considered to be a manifestation of this uncontrolled sensuality, which had to be publicly denounced as ‘grotesque,’ but could be secretly consumed.
Keft-Kennedy (2005) provides an interesting account of why belly dance aroused a sense of awe and trepidation amongst its Western audience. Orientalist writings on these belly dancers contain descriptions of their body as ‘wriggling,’ ‘undulating,’ ‘shivering in an epileptic movement,’ ‘obese,’ etc. These dancers did not fit the Western ideals of feminine beauty- slender, restrained and corseted which unsettled the colonisers.
The negative overtone of these descriptions failed to appreciate any skill or effort of the dancers. This binary of the restrained and culturally superior white woman on one hand, and the flexible and culturally-deprived belly dancer on the other, gave birth to the negative stereotype that we witness today. Through this process the bodies of the dancing girls were not only interpreted for the White Man, but also reinterpreted for the natives.
Belly dancers up for Western consumption: 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition where belly dancers were first exhibited in the US as imported from Cairo was a step in the direction of cultural commoditization that would play an important role in the new age of modernization where a new type of consumerism would fuel capitalism.
The Exposition was structured in a hierarchical manner denoting the US civilizational pinnacle on one end and the primitive Oriental civilizations on the other end. In the Midway Plaisance, the Middle Eastern exhibit, an attraction-repulsion dynamic was created by contrasting the veiled women with the belly dancers to evoke the desired response of collective horror, disgust and ecstasy amongst the audience. The underlying implication was that both were enslaved and oppressed by Islamic patriarchy which the modernization project aimed at destroying. This Exposition played a crucial role in the sustenance of the stereotype as it created enough curiosity so as to consume the dance form as exotic, while tempering it with enough disgust to reaffirm the cultural inferiority of the Middle Eastern belly dancers.
Belly Dance as Empowering: Feminist Gaze of 1970s
After the 1893 Chicago Fair, belly dancers routinely performed in US clubs and bars but their performances were often sanitised to suit Western sensibilities of what was considered to be ‘sexy.’ It was in the US that the belly dance costume with the bare midriff and slits on the side of the pants was born. The Middle Eastern costume was not restrictive but neither did it reveal any skin barring the ankles. The dance was also codified by setting up academies. Initially, the belly dancers who performed were of Middle Eastern origin, but it was after the 1970s that the Middle Eastern belly dancer was replaced with the white empowered belly dancer.
The second wave of feminism which took place around 1970’s brought in a sexual revolution by urging women to embrace their bodies and explore their sexuality. Belly dance was seen by many upper class white liberal feminists as a way to break the existing taboos associated with the female body. According to Karayanni (2004), unfortunately the women who appropriated this Middle Eastern dance failed to acknowledge or address the history of colonial oppression of the Middle Eastern belly dancers because of which the dance was available to them in the first place.
Thus, the new stereotype associating belly dance to ‘female empowerment’ came about. But it is important to note that this stereotype is reserved for upper class privileged women who take up the dance form for the purpose of ‘body positivity;’ when the Middle Eastern woman does belly dance, however, it is construed to be because she is catering to the male gaze. Shay describes a process of self-exoticization amongst belly dancers of Middle Eastern origins, many of whom have never been to their native country, but have recreated an idea of what the Middle East must be like by consuming Orientalist literature.
Currently, the militant US policy towards the Middle East often cloaks their colonialist agendas with feminist narratives of ‘rescuing’ the oppressed Middle Eastern women - those who are sexually repressed like the veiled ones and those who are sexually objectified like the belly dancers. This has resulted in Middle Eastern countries taking a stronger fundamentalist stance with many countries like Afghanistan and Iran having banned belly dance although it continues to be performed illegally. Minoo Moallem (1999) summarises this discussion beautifully when she states that the strife between fundamentalism and modernization is based on the implication that women are signifiers of civilization; their bodies are constantly etched on to claim the superiority of the respective culture.
Divya Mahatme
