This article addresses the stark contrast between the reception of belly dance by American women in the s, and its reception in the s. I posit that the difference was caused by the widespread and popular eugenics movement in the period , and how that influenced and pervaded all aspects of American life.
In the s women overwhelmingly were repelled by belly dancing, and the racialized Arab women who performed it, while in the s American women overwhelming embraced it as a form of sexual empowerment as part of the second wave of feminism. Belly dance itself was not frozen in time, events in Cairo, the entertainment capital of Egypt and the Arab world, coalesced to create a new iteration of belly dance: Egyptian cabaret belly dance.
This was a far cry from the dance performed in , and the glamor of the new genre was eagerly greeted by American women in the s. In this essay, I characterize belly dance as a solo improvised dance genre, or perhaps better, a complex of genres, involving minute and, sometimes intricate articulations of the muscles of the torso, abdomen, hips, and breasts.
Today, the most well-known iteration of solo improvised dance in the West , indeed the world, is professional Egyptian cabaret belly dance, which I will argue is an almost new genre of solo improvised dance that came into existence in the period , alongside more traditional professional and domestic forms performed in Egypt into the present day. Shay and Sellers-Young The term belly dance is a translation of the French term danse du ventre dance of the abdomen that was given to it by the dashing young entrepreneur later congressman Sol Bloom 1.
One of the first questions that occurs to the careful observer and that I address in this article is: Why was belly dance rejected by American women of , and embraced by those, often their daughters and granddaughters of ? Badger , ; Bolotin and Laing , 20 He had seen the Egyptian and Algerian dancers and entertainers at the Paris World Exhibition of , and arranged to bring numerous entertainers and whole sets like the Cairo Street exhibit, together with one of the biggest attractions of the Paris exhibition, the belly dancers, to Chicago.
