‘The hips don't lie’: Dancing around gendered, ethnic, and national identity in Israel

Abstract

This paper examines a belly dancing workshop through a qualitative phenomenological methodology. It presents a case study of how a group of women in Israel (Muslim, Arab-Jewish, and Western Jewish) from a range of professional levels (lower administration to professors in the same university), through a belly dancing workshop, experience their bodies and construct their sexuality contextualised within the specific social and cultural realities of being a women of different religion, class, and culture, in Israel, all working in a patriarchal university context that refuses to fund the group. The women address personal, group, and social- political levels through their experience of their body and their re-definition of power and of sexuality through the belly dancing itself, and through their struggle to enable the group to continue.

Keywords:

• embodied experience
• phenomenological inquiry
• social and cultural constructions of experience
• women and dance