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In the Olympics and Elsewhere, Patriarchy, Misogyny, and Racism Misdirect Our Rage and Fear

August 2, 2024 in Feminism, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Image of the Olympics rings imposed over the Eiffel Tower

If you look at news headlines or social media, it might seem that trans athletes have come out of nowhere at this year’s Olympic Games to violently pummel women.

Except that’s not what’s happening. At all.

First, I find it a bit odd that people who formerly didn’t give a shit about women and women’s sports are suddenly rallying to this cause. In just the U.S., “men received $252 million more in athletic scholarships than women” and athletes with other aspects of marginalized identities face even larger barriers. According to the Women’s Sports Foundation:

“Girls and women of color, those with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ athletes consistently receive less access to sport than their peers.

  • Girls at high schools where the majority of students are Black and/or Hispanic have only 67 percent of the opportunities to play sports that their male peers have, compared to their counterparts at heavily white schools, who have 82 percent of the opportunities that boys do.
  • And while women make up 44 percent of all NCAA athletes (compared to 15 percent in 1972), only 14 percent of female NCAA athletes are BIPOC.
  • In addition, of the more than 15,000 high school students who participate in adaptive sports, only 44 percent are female.
  • In a recent study,  77.6% of LGBTQ students avoided school functions, 71.8% avoided extracurricular activities, and 25.15 avoided school athletic fields or facilities because they felt unsafe or uncomfortable.”

Further, I’ve trained with boxers, and part of the sport involves getting hit. Sometimes in the head. Sometimes quite painfully. So it just shows me that people who know absolutely nothing about boxing are seeing footage of women boxing for their first time ever, and losing their minds about how violent it is. That is…just how the sport is? And there are rules to protect people as much as possible. And none of those rules were violated here.

You also may have noticed that whenever an athlete’s gender is called into question, that athlete is not white. Related to the above paragraph, it seems a lot of white people are conditioned to absolutely freak out when it looks like a white woman is being assaulted by a person of color. Which, yes, nobody should be assaulted! But in a sport where we see women of color getting ahead of their white peers, and suddenly it’s only women of color whose gender identity is being called into question? That speaks of the intersection of racism and sexism.

South African athlete Caster Semenya went through this. As ESPN documents in a history of gender tests in the Olympics, Indian athlete Santhi Soundarajan also went through this, and was disqualified. Both are poor women of color.

So, too, is Imane Khelif, who is certainly not trans (which is illegal in Algeria, among other reasons). This next bit gets a bit convoluted so please bear with me.

The IBA – International Boxing Association – filed a report saying that both Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting “did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential” and this confidential test “conclusively” that “both athletes did not meet the required necessary eligibility criteria and were found to have competitive advantages over other female competitors.”

Which sounds kinda official, but then again, what kind of testing was it? Did they conceal this information to protect the athletes’ privacy, or because their testing standards were perhaps not as rigorous as they might otherwise be?

Further, the IBA is currently discredited in the eyes of the Olympics. The International Olympics Committee (IOC) announced that it’s no longer recognizing the IBA due to issues like lack of financial transparency and not following procedures to ensure its integrity.

So in light of this, it does not seem like we should be listening to the assertions of a discredited organization, meaning, it doesn’t matter what (unspecified) testing these two athletes went through, if the Olympics Committee is like “nah, they are not trustworthy.”

In fact, the Olympics Committee has stated:

The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision, which was taken without any proper procedure – especially considering that these athletes had been competing in top-level competition for many years.

And this part is worth focusing on, because Khelif has competed in the Olympics before…and lost. According to the sports website Give Me Sport, Khelif has suffered losses at both World Championships and Olympics Games, notably losing to Irish boxer Amy Broadhurst, who said: “Personally, I don’t think she has done anything to ‘cheat’. I think it’s the way she was born and that’s out of her control. The fact that she has been (beaten) by 9 females before says it all.”

If her fellow athletes are saying she’s not unbeatable, then maybe we should listen to the people who know their sport.

Indeed, according to the National Organization for Women, trans women have been allowed to compete in the Olympics since 2004, and not a single one has medaled. That kinda destroys this narrative about trans people coming to sports to dominate and humiliate, doesn’t it? Not that Khelif is trans, but some ignorant people are saying that’s the case.

Because in athletics, a wide range of variation is allowed, as long as it’s not due to gender differences, apparently. The classic example is Michael Phelps, who according to the Washington Post has a disproportionately large wingspan and double-jointedness along with a different production level of lactic acid that allows him to dominate his sport…and his physical differences are celebrated, yet those of Caster Semenya and other more gender-ambiguous athletes are not?

In case you need a brief lesson on anatomical sex, it is not as binary as we’ve been led to believe. According to the Intersex Society of North America, there are a variety of conditions we might classify as having indeterminate anatomical sex, whether that’s seen in chromosomes or hormones or reproductive and pleasure anatomy. Some people have mosaic genetics, with some of their cells having XX and others having XY chromosomes in them. In all, around 1 in 100 people have some form of intersex display, whether it is medically knowable or so subtle that it has escaped notice until now, or ever.

I’ve never had genetic testing, and I doubt that you, dear reader, have either. The question of determining one’s biological or anatomical sex is so much more complex than it appears at first, and squeezing the amazing diversity of natural human variation into binary boxes is a clumsy method at best.

The science is complicated here too. I’d recommend talking to someone with a PhD in this stuff if you can get your hands on them, or reading some Anne-Fausto Sterling, a widely recognized expert in the field. If you don’t want the incomprehensible jargon, well first, I think you’re missing out on a chance to learn that the natural world is inevitably more wondrous and uncategorizable than we make it out to be, but I guess you can learn about the most relevant implications of all this in a Scientific American piece on sex testing in the Olympics and other elite athletics.

And beyond the physical attempts to categorize an individual’s sex, there are, of course, people who are gender-non-conforming in a variety of ways, whether they are transgender, or cisgender but leaning non-binary, or intersex and learning that a gender was arbitrarily imposed on them at birth to make them seem more normal (there is a horrifying history of surgeries and other interventions on intersex babies before the age of consent, which you can read about here and elsewhere).  And in case it needs to be said, gender-non-conforming identities are valid. They’re not sick or deluded, nor are they inherently predatory. We can and should allow gender non-conforming and trans athletes to compete in their chosen categories because they are – like Michael Phelps – just a normal human variation on the spectrum of what we generally see humans being and doing, sometimes a bit more towards the end of the spectrum, but rarely the ridiculously stark differences transphobes make them out to be.

As noted above, fellow athletes who have faced Khelif are like “yeah whatever, I’ll box here, it’s fine,” for the most part. Let the athletes make these decisions for themselves, in conversation with scientists where necessary…but again, the scientists are probably going to roll up with 100+ slides of a Powerpoint deck to explain why this is so damn complicated, and they won’t have concrete answers either, so let’s just go with the “trust athletes” angle I’m suggesting here, yeah?

Finally, to the title of this post: we are being sold a narrative that some men are so into the idea of hurting and violating women that they will put on dresses and try to pretend to be women to do so.

This is not what’s happening. It has never been what’s happening. Men violate women with impunity, without donning skirts, all the fucking time. According to the CDC, 41% of women experience intimate partner violence in their lifetimes. Do you seriously think that the perpetrators need to pretend to be women to get away with it? They get away with it—in homes, in bedrooms, in workplaces—all the fucking time. This is a worldwide problem; the UN states that one in three women have been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetimes. It happens everywhere in the world, all the damn time, and it is primarily being performed by cisgender men (those assigned male at birth, who continue to live as men).

Patriarchy misdirects us, though. Patriarchy says it’s only a handful of bad men committing such crimes, which cannot logically be true given the upsetting prevalence.

Misogyny misdirects us too; it says women are weak and must be protected from those bad men, or worse, those bad men who think they are women and use those disguises to gain access to women-only spaces like bathrooms and women’s sports.

Racism gets in on it as well, telling us that women of color are unnaturally masculine, needing policing, fit only for hard labor, not deserving of protection.

I get that a lot of women fear sexual violence; I do too, I have a “rape schedule” of when and where I do and don’t walk alone, just like my female college students do.

But if you are a woman who’s afraid, and you’ve allowed yourself to become afraid of trans people, or of women of color who seem a bit too masculine, then you have been sold a package of bullshit, because patriarchy and misogyny lie to us, and tell us to look around for convenient scapegoats that are already marginalized, instead of looking the actual problem—patriarchy—in the eye and refusing to hold men accountable for their abusive behaviors (not all men, obviously, but enough men that it’s a continual concern of who we can trust not to rape us when given the chance).

If you never gave a crap about women’s sports til now, you are responding to sexist and racist dog whistles about who the real threats are. Please read up on the history of gender testing in sports, and on how complex biological/anatomical sex actually is, and the harassment of women of color who excel in athletics and elsewhere and are then taken down a notch. Please listen to actual trans and gender-non-conforming people talking about their lives, because mostly they want to exist in peace and they are not the predators they’re made out to be—which, again, if you are paying attention, is exactly the same rhetoric that was weaponized against us gay/bisexual people from a few decades ago. Almost like it’s a convenient way to marginalize and oppress a group as it starts to gain equal human rights.

(oh, and credit where credit is due: women of color have been leading these discussions for a long time now, and for example, Imani Gandy has shared a lot of valuable resources on Twitter that I benefited from in composing this post; this tweet of hers said it best: “None of this hullabaloo is about protecting women. It’s about reifying gender roles and femininity.” Yes, yes, a million times (unfortunately) yes; cisgender women are already being stopped in bathrooms and so on because we don’t look feminine enough, and other similar nonsense things are happening, so a lot of this fuss is indeed about patrolling womanhood, which is discriminatory and gross)

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Workaholic Missives: Work Hard, Play Hard

February 29, 2016 in Observations | No comments

One of my “play hard” moments, on an aerial hoop at Cirque Indy.

Welcome to the next installment of my Workaholic Missives post series, wherein I talk about my philosophy behind work/life balance (or lack thereof, as some would have it).

I know it’s trite, but I try to live by the phrase “Work hard, play hard.” I like the website Get Bullish’s take on this: “If it isn’t extremely productive or extremely pleasurable, just stop. Either eat something healthy that takes five minutes, or have a huge decadent meal with friends for two hours. Either go to the gym and work every fucking muscle in your body like an Olympian, or stay home and find someone to make out with.”

Basically, the idea here is that if you’ve got limited time in which to be awesome, either spend it being as awesome as possible, or recharging as aggressively as possible. I know, the idea of recharging aggressively seems weird to some, but that’s how I’ve been exploring work/life balance in the last few years, and I’ve really enjoyed it. This blog post shares some of my strategies for making it work.

As a freelancer, I run the risk of always working. There’s always another proposal to write, a blog post to pitch, or a project to write, revise, etc. I know this is ingrained into me by academic culture to some degree (see my post on normalized weekend work at Conditionally Accepted), but I’ve also had to navigate the “you should be working more!” ethos of freelancing. Piling one on top of the other has not necessarily been that healthy for me.

Luckily, I’m all about the self-care interventions. And sometimes that means aggressive self-care: taking a weekend off to travel because I’m on the verge of burn-out, or scheduling a massage after a lunch date but right before a work date followed by rock climbing (a.k.a. last Tuesday). I take care to always meet my commitments to others, backing out only when it’s really dire, but I match that persistence with a commitment to myself as well: to engage in what is healthy and pleasurable as much as I can possibly fit in, justify, and/or afford.

The “work hard” part of the phrase means that I try not to waste time on things that are not-work, assuming that I have the energy and the mental focus to put in good work. Since I do a range of activities in my freelance life, it could mean deciding whether I have the attention span to do something related to a college class I’m teaching (lesson planning and grading papers tend to take the most focus, whereas small tasks like recording attendance are less strenuous) or whether I should do something on social media that’s less obviously related to a project I’m on, but could help promote my work in ways that might be fruitful later. It could be the difference between “work on my book proposal while I’ve got the brain power for it” and “send out inquiries about a performance opportunity for my dance troupe because those are halfway scripted already.”

The “play hard” hard of the phrase means that I take my relaxation seriously, and I try to fill it with activities that not only recharge me, but about which I’m passionate. That can be a tricky balance: for instance, I truly love dancing, but sometimes I’m just too tired from all my other stuff to really make a serious go of a night out dancing. So it might mean practicing at home a little bit, followed by watching performances by some of my favorite dancers, in order to get that creative charge going. When I’m totally worn out and can’t brain anymore, then I’ll do something low-key that I still really love, like reading a novel or spending time with someone I care about. Watching trashy TV tends to fall pretty low on the list… yes, even I have a few guilty pleasure TV shows, but I tend to combine them with social time (my life partner and I have a list of shows we’re working our way through) or with introvert time (like if I can write in my journal or knit while watching a show).

On the flip side, the “play hard” aspect means that if some relaxation or social activity doesn’t really appeal to me, and I don’t have a good reason to do it regardless, I’m probably going to turn it down. My free time is too limited for me to spend it in an activity that doesn’t serve me.

So, yes, I’m very mercenary in how I make my choices with my free time, in large part because of this need for balance that I perceive. On that note, time to make a shopping run for a dinner party, before working out, before a lunch date, before teaching a dance workshop, before spending the rest of the day working on grading and writing. Like ya do… if you’re me.

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In Flow, The Destination Is You

October 20, 2015 in Art, Dance | No comments

Me dancing with fire fans.

If you haven’t already, go read my post on flow vs. tech to get a sense of the terms I’m using here to describe how my experience of the flow arts is evolving.

As much as I love to get technical with belly dancing, I have this weird relationship with tech in the flow arts world, and I recently figured out part of why that is.

See, I’m a slow learner sometimes, and I need certain learning environments to succeed. I aced AP Calculus in high school and got a 5 on the AP exam (the highest possible score), but stopped taking math and science classes in college, because I knew that I wouldn’t do well in a class of 600 cut-throat pre-med students. Give me texts, narratives, and theories thereon, and I will rock out learning by myself, in small groups, in big groups, in practically any context. But specific things – like Foucault – also just take me longer to learn, and I’m trying not to shame myself for that.

It turns out that technical movements that are far outside my realm of experience fall into the overlapping categories of “takes me a while to learn” and “need to learn in a hands-on, small, learner-focused setting.”

This was an interesting realization to come to, because by participating in the flow arts world through hoopdance, firedance, and fan dancing, I’ve had to navigate the flow vs. tech divide in order to discover what works for me. I’ve taken tech-oriented workshops and classes and been frustrated to the point of tears and quitting, and subsequently realized that I’ve had to give myself more space and compassion before approaching tech topics at all. It’s not because I’m too stupid to learn the concepts – like what makes an antispin flower or a triqueta – but rather, I have a learning process that’s unique to me, and doesn’t always mesh well with highly technical concepts in large, depersonalized learning environments.

I’m not interested in criticizing tech-oriented teachers for not doing a good enough job of teaching their material in a way that minimizes shame because that’s not what’s going on here; even in really supportive learning environments, I’ve experienced shame because of when my body has quit on me. Rather, I’d like to describe how I came to eventually value tech as a necessary component to my flow.

This is not a new idea: most dancers and movement artists acknowledge that you need a baseline layer of technique (regardless of how complicated or “techy” it is) in order to be able to construct a practice and, well, have something to practice in it. You need moves or techniques to string together and drill so that you can work on flowing smoothly between them.

But I’ve been resistant to tech in the flow arts in a way that’s been somewhat confounding. In belly dance, I’ll do tech all day if it means a chance to work on my American Tribal Style® skills and thus do improvisational dancing (as seen in this performance wherein I dance with my troupe), or if it means I can bust out some neat muscle isolations in layered combinations that are challenging and visually interesting (as here, in a solo that I really enjoyed putting together). While my ATS® dancing and my solo dancing each incorporate slightly different skills from the belly dance toolbox, both are quite technical in nature and requires lots of drilling to become competent.

So it’s not that I’m incapable of learning tech, since I’ve clearly managed it with belly dance. I think, instead, that with the flow arts, and hoopdance in particular, tech is rarely interesting in and of itself. I just don’t care about fancy, complex moves if they aren’t also visually appealing, dramatic, expressive, or otherwise a means to an end of dancing creatively, putting on a compelling performance, or getting into a flow state. Yes, I know that any technique, once learned well, can be an entrance to flowing. But it takes me longer to get there with the flow arts than with belly dance, for whatever reason.

What it boils down to for me is this: when you prioritize flow over tech, as I have with my flow arts, there is no prescribed route or path to success. The destination is you: your experiences, your satisfaction, your own unique learning process. When flow is your goal, your body and your creativity will tell you which paths to explore, and will guide you in getting there. Attuning to flow is an experience of deep listening to your body and your process, which can be difficult at first, since I doubt there are many things in contemporary American culture that encourage the same dance of movement and stillness that it takes to tune in. It’s really rewarding, though. I spent my first few years hooping focusing solely on flow, and only in the last year or two starting to learn tech and tricks. This runs counter to what you see a lot of other hoopers doing, but I’m accustomed to being the odd one out.

Focusing on flow rather than tech – or rather, letting flow guide my process, and help me figure out when to incorporate tech – has been a really fruitful approach for me. It helps me create performances like this one, to Unwoman’s cover of “Take Me to Church”, where I’m really focused on improvising and expressing, rather than fitting in techy tricks. I know my hooping style will continue to evolve, but I really love where I’m at, slowly dipping a toe into tech, but still letting flow be my teacher.

I love dissecting and discussing artistic processes in general, and I’m curious to hear what others think. How does flow help you find yourself? How do you decide when to focus on flow vs. tech? What’s your process?

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Thoughts on Flow vs. Tech

September 30, 2015 in Dance | No comments

Me performing hoopdance at GenCon 2015. In this moment I’m more focused on flow than tech.

I’ve been struggling with finding my way in the flow arts since I began, roughly five years ago. This post is for both outsiders and insiders to this community, to explain two of the key concepts that permeate it, but are also found elsewhere in life and culture.

I define the flow arts as pursuits that are both creative and physical involving a combination of prop manipulation and dance. So, examples of the flow arts would be hula hooping, poi or staff spinning, juggling, and dancing with any of the above lit on fire. There are tons more props than I could list here, and there are about as many ways to engage with the flow arts as there are people who do it. Some folks use it as meditation, others as exercise. Some do it to perform, others teach, and still others do it at home for fun.

One of the concepts in the community that gets a lot of attention is the flow state. Richard Hartnell explains it beautifully in this video, but basically it’s a state of effortless engagement, where time melts away and you’re immersed in the experience. While practicing the flow arts provides an effective portal to the flow state, most people have experienced it while doing other things, such as cooking, playing an instrument, or any number of activities where you’re somewhat competent but also challenged.

We use “flow” to mean something else in the flow arts community: the experience of not only being in the flow state, but also engaging with your prop in a way that, well, flows. Flowing with your prop means dancing with it, playing with it, not pausing to redo a move you fumbled, because perfection isn’t the aim. Being in the flow is. Describing a flow artist as “flowy” or complimenting their “flow” is usually a positive thing. Flowy prop manipulation is beautiful to watch. I like this fire contact staff performance by Linda Farkas as an example of a flowy dance.

In contrast, we have the concept of “tech,” short for technique. Tech has connotations of endless drilling, trying to perfect a move or sequence or combo, going for things that incorporate ever-more-complicated planes and geometry. Describing someone’s prop manipulation as “techy” means that they’re at their top of their game when it comes to controlling their prop, or at least moving in that direction. It says little of their ability to dance or get in flow, though most well-rounded flow arts folks (or “flowks” as we’ll say colloquially) don’t just focus on tech in their training. As an example of a more tech-oriented performance, check out this fire contact staff routine by Aileen Lawlor.

I like to pair these performances when I teach about the flow arts in a college setting (as I did when teaching a class on Dance, Gender, and the Body a few semesters ago) because they involve the same exact prop, handled in very different ways. Both performers obviously incorporated both tech and flow; a performance that was all tech but no flow might be graceless and boring to watch, while a performance that was all flow but no tech would probably be based solely on the performer’s subjective experience, and maybe even clumsy.

In my home dance form, belly dance, we don’t use this terminology as much, but the ideas are there: some dancers focus more on technique and nailing individual moves, while others are more emotionally involved and expressive. As always, it’s about finding a balance, which is something I’m constantly working on.

There are a lot of ways to discuss flow and tech: as opposites, as the end points on a spectrum, as complementary aspects of the practice and drilling we all should be doing. I’ll wrap up this blog post here, as I wanted to lay the ground work for what I’ll discuss in my next post, about how this impacts my personal dance and performance practice.

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Removing Shame from the Dance Classroom

August 19, 2015 in Dance, Education | 7 comments

Me performing at Tribal Revolution, June 2015. Photo by Carrie Meyer.

I attended the Woodhull Summit on Sexual Freedom last weekend, and while there, took part in an excellent workshop on shame led by sex educator Charlie Glickman. As I was taking notes and live-tweeting as much of Glickman’s fantastic content as I could, I began to notice some points of overlap between shame resilience techniques and the way I teach dance.

The first point of overlap is that when we’re talking about shame, we can discuss not only what it is and how it feels, but also how it looks on the physical body. Glickman defines shame as the sense that one is a bad person, and that shaming oneself or others is often destructive, but it can also lead to positive outcomes, such as giving one an incentive to not do certain unhealthy things again. Yet the discussion of shame can go much deeper than emotion & reaction; we can also talk about the physical behaviors that embody shame.

This is where it gets really interesting to me, since I’m a huge fan of discussing embodiment. According to Glickman’s research, shame gets embodied through:

  • Looking away or breaking eye contact
  • Physical disconnection
  • Closing off one’s heart or slouching
  • Silence

If anyone has seen Amy Cuddy’s TED talk about posture, you’ll know that she basically substantiated through research a correlative relationship between posture and performance. People who hold confident “power postures” perform better on all sorts of tests and by all kinds of measures, and people who do the opposite do worse. The lower-confidence, less-powerful postures all align with shame embodied states.

This is where teaching belly dance comes in. Specifically, I teach American Tribal Style® Belly Dance, wherein posture is supremely important. We borrow a lot from flamenco, which accounts for some of our uplifted posture, and ultimately, much of the dance form’s overall aesthetic emphasizes lifted lines, which you can see in the photo of me performing that’s at the top of this blog post. By merely teaching this dance form, and by constantly reminding my students to maintain their posture, I’m helping them with a small mental hack to improve their emotional states. It might be a tiny thing in the context of their lives, and I don’t have peer-reviewed research to back this up, but I believe that I’m doing something to combat shame-induced posture and thereby contributing a little bit of positivity to my dance students’ lives.

The second point of overlap has to do with my teaching practices. There are a number of things that feed shame, such as unspoken rules, bigotry, and unhealthy hierarchy. Guess which things I don’t allow in my dance classes? I make all of my classroom rules explicit, and I do so with gentle humor, like when I correct someone’s “I can’t!”speech to a phrase of “I can’t…yet.” (example: “I can’t shimmy!” “If you’re going to say ‘I can’t’ remember to throw a ‘yet’ in there, so you can’t shimmy yet, but you will.”) I don’t let my students get away with body-shaming statements, even when they sound completely innocuous because they’re so dang common in our culture. I encourage an open learning environment by constantly asking if they have questions, and always making it safe to ask, or to take time for self-care, or really, anything they need.

It might sound like I run a loosey-goosey dance class but believe me, my dance students learn. They drill. They achieve really wonderful things. I try to tell them how proud I am of them, in blog posts like this one and in person.

I’ve felt shame in the dance classroom before, and it’s no fun. I try to structure my dance classes in such a way that my students will rarely go to that place, and if they do, hopefully we can work through it together to get somewhere useful. As Glickman noted in his presentation, not all shame is bad; it can be an adaptive response, depending on how you handle it and what you draw from the experience of it. It’s my hope that if shame ever surfaces in my dance classroom, we’ll work with it and through it together.

The final point I’d like to make is that shame is about disconnection, and its opposites (love, growth, healing, and community) are about connection, emotional and otherwise. My teaching style encourages a sense of trust in the dance classroom: in fellow students, in me, and in the wonderful improvisational dance language we practice together. In a broad sense, my hope is that by teaching a style of dance that gently pushes students into connecting with one another through eye contact and trust (because as a follower you have to trust the leader giving the cues for the next move, and when you lead, you have to trust the followers to be synced up with you), I’m paving the way for connection rather than disconnection, for empathy and love rather than shame.

I know that the sense of connection I found through tribal dance has benefited me in innumerable ways, including saving my life during a rough patch. This discussion of shame vs. connection is still a little abstract, and again, I don’t have empirical studies to back me up here. But when I see my dance students returning session after session and sticking with the style, I see them blossoming and incrementally becoming more trusting of each other when they dance, and more confident in general.

Sometimes people remark on how I do such disparate things in my life – writing, folklore, sex education, dance – and this is one example of how everything ties together. I went to a sexual freedom conference, attended a fantastic panel on shame, and realized that my dance teaching style is implicitly geared toward removing shame from the dance classroom in order to foster connection, confidence, and caring. How cool is that?!

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Teaching, Touching, and Pleasure

June 9, 2015 in Academia, Dance, Gender & Sexuality | No comments

Teaching a belly dance workshop. Photo by Pauline Shypula.

Teaching a belly dance workshop. Photo by Pauline Shypula.

I just got back from the annual conference of the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT). Since I’ve started doing more work as a sex educator, it made sense for me to go, and while I learned tons about sexuality, it also provided me with valuable opportunities to reflect on the connections between teaching, touching, and pleasure.

There’s a lot of concern in sexuality fields (particularly counseling and therapy) about maintaining ethical boundaries when practicing with a client. Obviously the same concern applies to sex educators too, but it seemed less pronounced. I attended one panel on the ethics of touch, which focused on touch-based practices like sex partner surrogacy and sexological bodywork. There’s so much ethical grey area around these professions that long-time AASECT board members were dodging the question of whether an AASECT certified therapist can even ethically recommend these kind of hands-on treatments to a client (even when it seems like the best modality to help that client). I listened in on related conversations, too, and those helped me put into context the real fear of bodily connection that many people in the sexuality field seem to have, because of how connecting through touch is seen as dangerous both since it risks intimacy that can compromise a professional relationship, and because it just looks bad to an erotophobic culture like ours (plus there are potential legal ramifications, because getting paid to touch people in certain ways is illegal in many parts of the world). Touch – especially sexual and/or pleasurable touch – is incredibly suspect to people today, and that’s a shame in my opinion, because it can definitely be healing.

The two main venues I teach in – the academic classroom and the dance classroom – allow me to handle connection in different ways. In the academic classroom, it’s rare that I have a reason to touch my students, which is fine by me. We do, however, spend a lot of time connecting intellectually. I believe that face-to-face conversations offer hugely important ways of conveying both information and critical thinking strategies, and I think my teaching would suffer if I had to give up the live, face-to-face component.

Unlike touch, I do try to incorporate pleasure into my academic teaching. I let it show when I’m excited about a topic. I praise students when they pick up a concept quickly or bring a pertinent example to class, knowing that many will receive a compliment with pleasure. I try to make things “fun” without capitulating to an all-play, no-work atmosphere. Pleasure is a frequent guest in my classroom, and I like it that way. If teaching and learning weren’t pleasurable, I’d wonder where I was going wrong. I think this helps in the creation of a safe space: my students trust me not to drag them through unnecessarily tedious or unpleasant stuff all the time, and to make topics fun and exciting, and so that when we do have to buckle down and do the hard work, they’ll be ready to come with me on that journey (at least, that’s what I like to believe is happening).

In the dance classroom, I do touch my students. I try not to do it very often, and I certainly keep it appropriate. I ask consent very frequently, even though they sign waivers before stepping into the studio with me. Here, as with the academic classroom, I believe it’s important to establish a precedent that involves a fair bit of trust. I think they need to trust that I won’t unexpectedly come up behind them and touch them without warning, which carries over from social norms in the rest of life. As in other areas of life, I try to model good consent practices, in part because lots of people don’t get this information elsewhere, and in part because it’s central to how I choose to live my life.

Pleasure also figures significantly in the dance classroom, especially for my main style of dance, belly dancing. It’s pleasurable to learn to skillfully move your body, and to adorn yourself to practice. I make a point of complimenting students when they do things right. The thrill of learning to improvise, as we do in American Tribal Style® Belly Dance, carries its own unique sense of enjoyment. As a dance teacher, I try to harness these modes of pleasure and give my students multiple opportunities to explore them.

Learning can be plenty intimidating: fear of failure, feeling stupid, not getting things right, feeling overwhelmed, ramifications for failure (like with grades or wasted money on a class), and so on. Having solid boundaries around touch (when it has a role in that kind of classroom) and incorporating pleasure can both be ways of engaging students and making them feel connected. I don’t think my use of touch or pleasure in either context is inappropriate, but the more I get into the sexuality field, the more I see people scrutinizing – and in some cases fearing – touch and pleasure. In these cases, I want to figure out what’s really going on, and then continue to do what I pride myself on: putting the students first.

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Embodied Shame & Pain

February 2, 2015 in Dance | 3 comments

Me doing hoopdance at Snow Flow Fest in 2011.

Sometimes my body reminds me that I inhabit it in ways that cut and sting. We’re all residents of our bodies, and while I reject mind-body dualism, sometimes I go far too long without encountering my own bodily limits. When I push and extend myself to the point of almost breaking, my body sharply reels me back, and occasionally this is a prompt for shame.

Shame is such a stealthy emotion: it often disguises itself as something else, and resists attempts at investigation. We all experience shame differently, too. It can feel like a vise squeezing my heart, or a fog dimming my vision and dampening my head. When I feel shame in my body, I know I’m onto something, something real, something that nestles in my heart and needs to be recognized.

I was at a hoopdance workshop recently, and came face-to-face with shame that I didn’t even realize I had. The workshop was definitely a safe space, not at all judgmental or competitive, and the instructor and fellow participants did a wonderful job of making sure everyone felt equally valued and competent. Perhaps that safe space contributed to my breakdown.

We were learning a trick that involved balancing the hoop on the back of the hands. I don’t normally have that kind of technique in my repertoire, but I thought I’d given it a shot.

I forgot about my recent eczema diagnosis. The skin on the backs of my hands, especially around my knuckles, is prone to cracking and bleeding. I’ve got a steroid cream and a barrier cream, and they’re both helping. I wear gloves to wash dishes and try to avoid labor that involves gripping things with enough intensity that it’s like making a fist. This seems to be a chronic condition, so I’m still making changes to accommodate it.

When I first tried the hoop trick, I sorta got it. When the surprise wore off, the pain crept in. My hands hurt. They weren’t bleeding yet, but the more I tossed and caught my hoop on the back of my hands, the more intense the pain became.

Now, I’m no stranger to pain. I’ve run a marathon. I rock climb. I have tattoos and piercings. I don’t really enjoy pain, but I can take it.

Still, this hurt. And the more it hurt, the more I became convinced that there was something wrong with me. After all, I was standing in a circle of two dozen other hoopers of varying levels and they were all getting it. Why couldn’t I?

Tears welled up. I did the responsible thing and excused myself to sit down and stretch a bit, since I didn’t want to cause a scene (though in all likelihood, any of these lovely folks would’ve been happy to take a few minutes to talk to me about how I was feeling). Tears kept coming. So I walked to the bathroom, and sobbed for about ten minutes straight.

While crying, I realized that the pain in my hands was fading, but the tears kept coming. That was my entry point into realizing that this was about more than pain: the pain was a gateway to shame.

I’ve always been competent at lots of things, especially in the dance world. If there’s something I don’t get, I’m usually pretty certain that I’ll learn it eventually. Especially in hooping – which is less of a priority for me than belly dancing – I tend to be pretty chill when it comes to learning new tricks. I know it’s fairly unlikely that I’ll go pro, so I’m in no rush to Master All The Things (if such were even possible!). This mentality – enjoying the process, lingering in the headspace of a beginner – has been very helpful for me in quelling my inner competitive side who is annoyingly perfectionistic.

But here, I ran into something ugly inside myself: shame that wells up from colliding with something that I physically cannot do. Shame at not being able to learn something, when I’ve made a lifelong vocation of being a dedicated learner and teacher. And there was really nothing I could do about it. I mean, I could keep trying to learn the move, and make myself bleed in the process. But that obviously wasn’t a good idea. Even in my pain-addled teary state I could tell that much.

So I sat with the pain, eventually stopped crying, dried off the tears (and mentally thanked myself for buying the high-end makeup that doesn’t smear or run as easily), and returned to the workshop. We moved on to working on other aspects of hoopdance, and I was able to continue participating.

Even though I didn’t learn what I set out to learn during that portion of the workshop, I still learned something: that I carry around this shame inside myself, like a poison seed or parasite. There’s no rational reason to feel like I’m a failure if there are things I can’t do, and I suppose this is something that many people learn in more immediate, raw ways. Bleeding hands ranks pretty low on the list of life-altering disabilities, after all.

And I should clarify: I’m not writing this to shame that workshop instructor for selecting things to teach that aren’t accessible to everyone. I’m pretty clearly an outlier in this regard, since most people’s hands don’t bleed upon contact. I’m not saying that anyone should’ve handled anything differently, or noticed my absence and immediately rushed to soothe me.

In one way, this post is me oversharing as a political and personal act. But it’s also me affirming that shame affects many, many people, and that shame can manifest in embodied ways, perhaps triggered by physical pain. My shame about inability is both unique to me and common in that many people experience shame for many reasons.

Shame can be isolating, and that’s a major cause for me to write about it publicly and acknowledge that experiencing it doesn’t make me a bad person, or an unworthy one, or a weak one. Hopefully other people can reach similar realizations about shame, pain, and their value as human beings.

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New Props; New Challenges

December 22, 2014 in Dance | No comments

Mini hoop portrait by Hannah Root.

Mini hoop portrait by Hannah Root.

I know I write a lot about belly dancing, but I also do hoopdance. Yes, that means dancing with a hula hoop, though we don’t really call tend to them that in the hoop community (since modern hoopdance has nothing to do with hula dancing).

Mostly I dance with a “normal” sized hoop, which is one that you can feasibly spin around your body and keep there using momentum and your body’s natural movements. Here’s a representative example of one of my hoopdances, in case you’ve not seen much hoopdance before.

Hooping is fun, and great exercise, and a welcome break from my oh-so-serious belly dance career. I find it very expressive, and challenging too. But since I can’t ever seem to sit still and focus on just one thing, I’ve decided to also start working with mini hoops. In the picture to the right, you can see me posing with one mini hoop, which is just a smaller hoop that would be tough to keep up on your body. Instead, we tend to use mini hoops more on our hands and maybe arms, spinning them and making shapes and patterns in the air.

I’ll readily confess that I’m pretty terrible with mini hoops. When I took my first ever minis/doubles workshop with local hoop guru Lynn Spencer-Nelson, I gave myself a bloody lip. Yep. It took me a few years to decide to pick up minis again, and I’ve definitely knocked myself in the head a few times while practicing.

The nice thing, though, is that hooping with minis is bringing me out of my comfort zone, in much the same way that yoga does. Maybe I’ll perform with them someday, and maybe not, but for now, it’s nice to have a new prop to play around with and just explore creative movement with.

The other thing I’ve been doing to challenge myself with hoopdance is attempting weekly challenges that one of my hoop mentors (Caroleeena) generates for the online hooping community. Each week we focus on a different aspect of the dance, such as using our hands more, or our hips, or, as in this video I just made, using traveling steps and footwork. It turns out that these weekly challenges are making me think about hoopdance in ways that I hadn’t before, and additionally, watching myself on film at least once a week – while it used to be a cringe-worthy pursuit – is helping me spot areas I can work on improving.

So between picking up mini hoops to play (a.k.a. flail) with, and between doing weekly challenges on incorporating different facets of dance into my hooping, I’m feeling pretty creatively stimulated right now. This has been great fun, and it also makes me wonder if I can apply these two ideas (1. try a new prop/technique/whatever that feels TOTALLY unattainable and 2. do weekly challenges) to writing, teaching, belly dancing, cooking, and other areas of my life. If nothing else, it’ll keep things fresh, right?

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Dance, Yoga, and Humility

October 24, 2014 in Dance | 2 comments

Backbends: another reason belly dance and yoga go together. Photo by Paul Patton, from Bloomington Belly Dances 2013.

Backbends: another reason belly dance and yoga go together. Photo by Paul Patton, from Bloomington Belly Dances 2013.

I’m in the middle of a 30-Day Challenge at my local hot yoga studio (the goal is to do 30 consecutive days of yoga), and it’s not only thoroughly challenging me, but also inspiring me to reflect on the different things I get out of yoga and dance.

With dance – specifically, American Tribal Style® Belly Dance – I’m kinda at the top of the local food chain. I’m a certified teacher of the style, and I run a troupe, and we even get paid to perform (sometimes). I’m deeply honored that my students trust me to be their teacher. I love this dance form, and I love finding ways to challenge myself, up my game, and improve my technique.

But for the most part, for me to view dance with new eyes, I need to play in another sandbox (or dance style). I’ve been doing some of that too recently, which has been more rewarding than I can really put into words right now. Still, the feeling persists: when it comes to dance, I’m a pretty okay dancer. The things that challenge me are things I’ll eventually get a handle on. For the most part, I’m competent at it.

With yoga, though, I feel like a complete beginner every time I unroll my mat. It’s very humbling, and I love it. I fall all the time in balancing poses. I can’t do a handstand or even a headstand yet. My warrior lunges are frequently shaky and need correction.

I am grateful to have yoga in my life right now, in part because it feeds into my desire for a healthy body, in part because it helps calm my jittery anxious mind, and also in part because it serves as a contrast to my “yep, I got this” attitude as a professional dancer. When I do yoga, I’m reminded of how much I have yet to learn… and the fact that it’s okay to be a perpetual beginner. I think it’s good for me to have a regular practice that involves both mind and body that is explicitly NOT about achievement, goals, and status. Because while I love building the local tribal belly dance community (which relies on me promoting myself as a competent teacher/performer hence all that achievement/goal/status stuff coming into play), I like having other modes of exploring what my body can do.

I doubt it’s just me, either. I would hazard a guess that a lot of people could benefit from having parts of their lives where they funnel their achievements, and other parts where they aim simply to show up, be present, and enjoy. I know I’ll be both relieved and sad when this 30-Day Challenge is over, but hopefully I’ll carry forward this experience of enjoying humility.

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The Self is the First Audience

September 29, 2014 in Art, Folklore | No comments

This semester, I’m teaching a class I designed on Body Art. It’s cross-listed in anthropology and gender, women’s, and sexuality studies, but it’s really a folklore class (surprise, surprise). One concept that my students have really latched onto is the idea of audience, and the first audience for any expressive display being the self.

Photo by Curtis Claspell.

Me wearing a shawl from Kamakhya Temple in Assam, India. Photo by Walking Contradiction Photography.

The main text we’re reading is The Grace of Four Moons: Dress, Adornment, and the Art of the Body in Modern India, by Pravina Shukla, a professor of folklore at Indiana University (who was also one of my mentors while I was there for my PhD). I assigned this book for a few reasons: it’s well-written and is on the whole a beautiful book, it lays out the study of body art as a genre of material culture quite clearly, and it foregrounds the study of both daily dress and special occasion wear.

A lot of students came to my body art class expecting to spend the whole semester talking about tattoos and other permanent or extreme body mods. We will certainly discuss those things, but I’m also trying to give my students vocabulary and concepts for studying the daily clothing choices that surround them. I’m assigning a handful of fieldwork projects, for example, that could include looking at tattoos and piercings, but will mostly be about observing the clothing of people around them. I like to think that I’m giving them tools to critically interpret the visual culture of clothing, in order to perhaps be a bit more savvy about brands and advertising and the commodification of bodies.

Body image is one topic that I’m looking forward to discussing with my students. We’ve talked about the idea that when you get dressed in the morning, you’re the first audience for your stylistic choices. Your entire life history, your sense of body image, your self-esteem, your struggles with your weight… those all are foregrounded when you decide what to wear when dressing to go out. This is one area where my class design dovetails nicely with gender studies: women and men get radically different social messages about what’s appropriate to wear, and what’s considered “normal” for outfits and attractiveness.

One thing I’ve noticed when thinking about audience and body image in conjunction is that we are usually harder on ourselves than others are. If I’m trying on an outfit, I’ll probably notice imperfections and inconsistencies that no one else would see. I’m seeing the accumulation of my years of body image anxiety that no one else sees when they look at me, since I manage to appear outwardly confident (sometimes intimidatingly so). If I am my first audience, I am truly a harsh critic… and while I haven’t done the research on this yet (though now I really want to!) I’m guessing this trend is true of many other folks. It’s probably gendered, too, from what I gather based on informal conversations with friends and fellow dancers.

So if the self is the first audience, I wonder: do we owe it to ourselves to be kinder audiences? Do we seek fault with ourselves so that we can beat others to it? When do we allow ourselves to see the most beauty in our self image? Are there links between allowing ourselves creative freedom in body adornment (c’mon, who else still plays dress-up?) and feeling more satisfied with our body image?

The semester’s only just begun, so I hope to dig a bit deeper into these topics with my students. But I also hope to start some dialogue with the wider world, because we all could stand to be a little kinder to ourselves, and to see ourselves as beautiful.

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