![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
In Mozambique's northern coastal provinces, growing numbers of women are joining competitive dance groups that perform tufo, a popular song-and-dance genre. Originally performed by men for important Islamic celebrations, today tufo is danced by women, who perform feminine beauty ideals on stage at events, cultivating joy and animating forms of attachment through a shared, affective experience. In the post-socialist context, however, meanings and practices of women’s beauty are changing, which has moral implications for tufo dancers and complicates the socio-spatial mobility they enjoy as dance group participants. While onstage, dancers are icons of ‘traditional’ beauty and figures of morality, when moving offstage, they are increasingly perceived as a social problem that threatens to upend patriarchal gender hierarchies. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research as a member of a tufo group in the coastal town of Pebane, I situate dancer’s social power in relation to failing norms of masculinity to analyse how negative emotions such as jealousy can impede women’s movements. Affect, I argue, does not just create connections or bind communities but can also complicate relationships and disrupt movement as evidenced in the context of tufo, when the desirable dancer becomes the undesirable wife.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Carrama (also spelled karama) derives from the Swahili word karamu (feast). In northern Mozambique carramas are annual celebrations for groups from the same club team.
2 For more on tufo, see Signe Arnfred's study (Citation2004, Citation2011), and recent articles by Karen Boswall (Citation2019) and Regiane Augusto de Mattos (Citation2019).
3 A capulana (kanga in Swahili) is a brightly coloured cotton material, about 1.7 by 1m that forms the basis of the tufo uniform (equipa). One or two capulanas are wrapped around the legs and tied at the waist, while a third, called a lenço, is fastened on top of the head.
4 The Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) led the armed struggle against the Portuguese and has been the political party in power since independence in 1975.
5 For an example of women's beauty practices in southern Mozambique, see Heidi Gengenbach's work (Citation2003) on tattoos (tinhlanga).
6 Cristina F. Rosa's definition of ginga in Brazilian Bodies (Citation2015) overlaps with what I have observed in tufo. Ginga is ‘a swaggering way of sliding or tilting (parts of) the body from one side to another when walking or, otherwise, acting in society. It functions, more importantly as a central mechanism with which one may ‘juggle’ weight across time and space, while maintaining a cool and supple sense of flow’ (24).
7 For an overview of the variety of genital modification practices that are common throughout Southern Africa, see Bagnol and Mariano (Citation2011: 276). For a broader discussion of how these practices are a part of ‘Osunality’ – African eroticism – see Nzegwu (Citation2011).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ellen E. Hebden
Ellen Hebden is completing a joint-degree PhD in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and writes about the political economy of music and dance, gender and sexuality, and the politics of mobility in post-colonial, post-socialist contexts. Her dissertation research examines how these issues intersect within the activities of competitive dance groups in Mozambique, and was funded by a Fulbright Institute of International Education (IIE) Research Grant, the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 21st Century Award, and a Wisconsin-Mellon Dissertation Fellowship.