EMBODYING DIFFERENCE: ISSUES IN DANCE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Jane C. Desmond

A man and a woman embrace. Each stands poised, contained. They look past each other, eyes focused on distant points in the space. Like mirror images, their legs strike out, first forward, then back. As one, they glide across the floor, bodies melded at the hips, timing perfectly in unison. They stop expectantly. The woman jabs the balls of her feet sharply into the floor, each time swiveling her hips toward the leading foot. The man holds her lightly, steering her motion with the palm of his hand at her back. This is tango ...

Most readers of this passage probably have some image of the tango in their minds, whether from dancing, watching others dance, or seeing representations of the tango in Hollywood films. Most, if pressed, could even get up in their living rooms and demonstrate some recognizable if hyperbolic rendition of the tango. Few of us, however, have given more than passing thought to such an activity or have chosen to include it in our scholarly work. Dance remains a greatly undervalued and undertheorized arena of bodily discourse. Its practice and its scholarship are, with rare exception, marginalized within the academy.

But much is to be gained by opening up cultural studies to questions of kinesthetic semiotics and by placing dance research (and by extension, human movement studies) on the agenda of cultural studies. By enlarging our studies of bodily "texts" to include dance in all its forms—among them social dance, theatrical performance, and ritualized movement—we can further our understandings of how social identities are signaled, formed, and negotiated through bodily movement. We can analyze how social identities are codified in performance styles and how the use of the body in dance is related to, duplicates, contests, amplifies, or exceeds norms of nondance bodily expression within specific historical contexts. We can trace historical and geographic changes in complex kinesthetic systems and can study comparatively symbolic systems based on language, visual representation, and movement. We can move away from the bias for verbal texts and visual-object-based investigations that currently form the core of ideological analysis in British and North American cultural studies.

Cultural studies remains largely text-based or object-based, with literary texts still predominating, followed by studies of film texts and art historical objects. Even excursions into popular culture are concerned largely with verbal or visual cultural products, not kinesthetic actions. Much current work on rap music, for instance, focuses primarily on the spoken text or legal and economic aspects of the music industry. Even the now popular subfield of critical work on "the body" is focused more on representations of the body and/or its discursive policing than with its actions/movements as a "text" themselves. In part this omission reflects the historical contours of disciplinary development within the academy. In addition, the academy's aversion to the material body, as well as its fictive separation of mental and physical production, has rendered humanities scholarship that investigates the mute dancing body nearly invisible. That dancing—in a Euro-American context at least—is regarded as a pastime (social dancing) or as entertainment (Broadway shows), or, when elevated to the status of an "art form," is often performed mainly by women (ballet) or by "folk" dancers or nonwhites (often dubbed "native" dances, etc.) also surely contributes to the position of dance scholarship. However, these omissions signal reasons why such investigation is important. They mark clearly the continuing rhetorical association of bodily expressivity with nondominant groups.

The rhetorical linkage of nondominant races, classes, gender, and nationalities with "the body," to physicality instead of mentality, has been well established in scholarship on race and gender. But the implications of those linkages, their continuance or reworking within the context of daily bodily usage or within dance systems per se, have yet to be investigated fully. Nor have the complex effects of the commodification of movement styles, their migration, modification, quotation, adoption, or rejection as part of the larger production of social identities through physical enactment, been rigorously theorized.

Such analysis will be responsive to many of the tools already developed in literary theory, film theory, Marxist analysis, and feminist scholarship, as well as ongoing theoretical debates about hierarchies based on racial, ethnic, and national identities. Pierre Bourdieu (Outline), for example, refers to the physical embodiment of social structures in his concept of "the habitus," but this idea has not been greatly elaborated. But it will also require the acquisition or development of new tools as well—tools for the close analysis of movement and movement styles (already well developed in the dance field itself), just as such tools have been developed for detailed analyses of specific books and objects in literature and art history.

Dance scholarship, with a few notable exceptions, has until recently remained outside the influence of the poststructuralist shifts that have reshaped the humanities during the last twenty or so years. And conversely, cultural analysts have evidenced little interest in dance, although literary, filmic, and art historical texts have garnered great attention. But there is evidence that this is changing, both within the dance field itself and with isolated excursions into dance by literary critics and philosophers in the recent past.

Movement Style and Meaning

Of the many broad areas of movement investigation sketched out above, I specifically want to discuss dance as a performance of cultural identity and the shifting meanings involved in the transmission of dance styles from one group to...