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

• Published in: Leisure studies 2008-07, Vol.27 (3), p.311-327
• Main Author: Atencio, Matthew
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cultures and civilizations; Dance; Discourse; embodied subjectivities; Ethnic groups. Acculturation. Cultural identity; Females; gender; Minority Groups; post-structuralism; race; Resistance; Sociology; Sociology of knowledge and sociology of culture; Sociology of leisure and mass culture; space; Subjectivity
• ISSN: 0261-4367; 1466-4496
• DOI: 10.1080/02614360802018780

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.