To browse Academia. In this article I intend to examine the rising popularity of erotic dances as a leisure activity practiced in a feminist dance school situated in Brussels, and question what exactly it is these dancers are reclaiming when using a discourse about sexual liberation and empowerment. To address the complexity of gender, sexuality and performance, this study uses a queer post-structuralist analysis and an ethnographic methodology when studying erotic dances.
Based on observations and in-depth interviews with students and instructors, this study argues that writing off erotic dance solely as a hype within the trend to commercialize sexuality, is ignoring the useful and subversive ways in which these erotic dancers are investigating the production of their sexed bodies to disrupt and deconstruct normative ideas about sexuality and gender.
Heurtebise, J-Y. Though the Body is now a hot topic in cultural studies, philosophy of Dance is still in its infancy. However Dance, this living oxymoron, can provide to the philosopher a unique occasion to re-think the relationships between subject and object, artist and work, mind and body and overcome the traditional dualisms of Western Philosophy. Actually, because of its ambivalent understanding of the Body, classical philosophy seems unable to furnish the conceptual keys to understand the dancing phenomenon.
From Plato to Husserl via Descartes, the definition of human subjectivity and personal identity has been based on intellectual and rational characteristics. Analyzing Dance gives the opportunity to elaborate a new conceptualization of the Body, in its anthropological, aesthetical and ontological dimensions.
Firstly, the historical and structural links between the emergence of Modern Dance and the rise of Feminism will be analyzed. Then, the implications for the understanding of the constitution of dancing bodies will be developed. Finally the philosophical consequences of the dancing artistic practice on the redefinition of the Body will be addressed. Journal of African Women's Experiences, Two diametrically opposed discourses present themselves in relation to the topic of erotic dancing and striptease.
