Spinning Outside of Our Selves: Pole Dance, Materiality, and Embodied Existence Beyond Colonial Binaries

Abstract

In this essay, I analyze three embodied experiences of pole dance: spinning movement, the continual material relationship between the pole and the body, and the unique movements of pole dance. I argue that these material experiences support an expansion of embodied existence beyond the foundational colonial binary of otherness: human/nature. My analysis illuminates how this is possible and provides conceptual understandings of material processes that enable reconfigurations of visual perception, embodied relations, and expansion beyond the colonial boundary of the “self.” These findings can support further research into how a more just future can be created and embodied.

Keywords:

• Pole dance
• decolonial feminism
• embodiment
• material rhetoric

Acknowledgments

I thank the anonymous reviewers and editor Dr. Marissa J. Doshi for their invaluable feedback; I cannot express how much I appreciate the time and energy you devoted to helping me strengthen this manuscript. I also thank Dr. Ziyu Long for her insightful guidance and encouragement as this paper evolved, Dr. Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager for her scholarly discussions on Othering and her unending support, Dr. Greg Dickinson for his reading of the manuscript, and Dr. Brian L. Ott and Gordana Lazic for their profound influence, without which I would not be in communication studies at all.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This feeling of uniquely unconditional support, community, and nonjudgment characterizing recreational pole dance environments (strengthened by participation in a practice that is often stigmatized, where participants can share experiences of othering by family, friends, colleagues, etc.) has been noted in academic literature, as well. See Dimler et al., 2017; Nicholas et al., 2018.