Impermeable bodies: Women who lion dance in Boston’s Chinatown

Abstract

Lion dances are an acrobatic form of ritual performance with roots in ancient China. Traditionally, men have performed lion dances to scare away evil spirits and protect themselves from harm. The members of Gund Kwok, an all-women’s dance group in Boston’s Chinatown, also perform the lion dance to resist nefarious energies and to neutralise unwanted aggression. In their case, however, the negative forces stem from the hypersexualised gaze to which they are subject as Asian American women. I argue that lion dance training creates a resistive, ‘impermeable’ bodily subjectivity. Using ethnographic research, I examine how lion dance training and performance promotes a sense of protection through embodied practice and by challenging and managing the public gaze. In doing so, this study builds on scholarship that investigates the impact of dance training practices on an individual’s sense of bodily identity. While much research has focused on more mainstream dance techniques and the specific ‘bodies’ that those forms create, this article focuses on a group of female artists who are re- envisioning a traditional performance practice, illustrating how a grass roots dance group can serve important purposes outside of formal dance training systems and the academy.

Keywords:

• lion dance
• independent dance practitioners
• embodied subjectivity impermeability
• Asian American women

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my anonymous reviewers, Dr. Anthea Kraut, Dr. Jennifer LeMesurier, Dr. Charmian Wells, Dr. Amy Swanson, Dr. Melissa Melpignano, and Dr. Sevi Bayraktar for their insightful feedback on this article. I am also grateful to the lion dancers who I interviewed in this study

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Casey Avaunt

Dr. Casey Avaunt is Assistant Professor of Dance in the Department of Performing Arts at Elon University. Her research interests include critical dance theory, Asian and Asian American performance, and the role of culture and gender in the production of choreography.