‘Freaky is just how I get down’: investigating the fluidity of minority ethnic feminine subjectivities in dance

Abstract

This article addresses a lacuna of research into minority ethnic young women’s leisure participation by specifically focusing on the experiences and embodied subjectivities of two ethnic young women participating in dance. In the context of a qualitative research study based in an American inner‐city, post‐structural theory is used to signal the operation of intersecting racial, ethnic, gender, and class discourses and power relations. This analysis focuses on how the two young women engaged with dance cultures that were underpinned by particular dance forms; these dance forms arguably reproduced specific versions of ‘normalised’ femininity. The article then illustrates how the young women actively negotiated their dance cultures in order to construct multiple and shifting minority ethnic subjectivities. Commentary from one young woman, ‘Carrie’, indicates that she used her high school dance spaces as well as festival and club dance spaces to take up fluid white, black and ‘mixed’ subjectivities. I then investigate how a Salsa dance space provided the discursive resources through which another young woman, ‘Jenny’, constructed a proliferating diasporic identity. While Jenny identified as both black and Haitian, her hyperbolic dance performances re‐enacted various other subjectivities. These accounts demonstrate the possibility that young women can take up multiple versions of femininity in their leisure participation. These femininities reflect both alignment and resistance to dominant discourses which have ascendancy within young women’s leisure contexts.

Keywords:

• embodied subjectivities
• post‐structuralism
• discourse
• gender
• race
• space

Notes

1. The term ‘minority ethnic’ is used throughout this article, since ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic minority’ are highly contestable identifiers. Ang‐Lygate (1997), for instance, suggests that ‘ethnic minority’ identifies ‘all peoples of colour inclusive of “white ethnic minorities”’ (p. 172). Thus, ‘ethnic minority’ fails to take into account the differentiated experiences of ‘visible minorities’ who are subjected to racist practices on the basis of their skin colour. Furthermore, ‘race’ is a socially and historically constructed signifier that is used to define particular human characteristics and categories. ‘Racial’ identities are thus open to contestation, even as they hold ontological value relative to notions of equality and difference (Nayak, 2006). While Nayak (2006) contends that ‘race’ as a signifier has been rendered obsolete, I follow Chick, Li, Zinn, Absher, and Graefe (2007) who argue that ‘racial’ and ‘ethnic’ identifiers both hold currency within our leisure cultures; this perspective suggests that these terms still require usage in order to unpack the material and symbolic inequalities faced by minority ethnic young women in their leisure participation.

2. The names of the city, the neighbourhoods, the local high school, a dance club and the names of study participants have been omitted or given pseudonyms in order to ensure that the participants remain anonymous.

3. This section elaborates on a position introduced in Atencio and Wright (2008).

4. Kwanzaa is a non‐denominational African‐American holiday incorporating African culture and ancestry.