Blurring the boundaries of gendered encounters : Moorish dancing girls in nineteenth and early twentieth-century American fair exhibitions / Lhoussain Simour

Bibliogr. p. 157-159

Moroccan dancing women appeared as entertainers in 19th and 20th-century American fair expositions. Their physical and epistemological journeys and their performances on the fair midways have been largely missing from the histories of the Moroccan and American entertainment industries. Their experiences and narratives overseas are stimulating and worth recovering, because they offer suitable settings in which to engage with the complexities of cultural and racial contacts between self and other, and add an interesting dimension to the notion of travel and border crossing in which gendered routes contributed to the shaping of discourses about racial difference. This article looks at North African dancing women, often conflated in American international expositions under the term "belly-dancing girls" and in their local countries, pejoratively, as shikhat (public dancers in Moroccan dialect). I begin with a brief discussion of Deborah Kaption's Moroccan Female Performers Defining the Social Body (1994) as a pretext for moving beyond the rigid ethnographical discourses about cultural difference. This article sheds light on gendered encounters in the historical context of fair expositions, where live performances helped shape a tradition of self-referential knowledge about oriental dancing women as a site of fantasies, sexual prowess, and erotic desires. It then proceeds to deal with some experiences of the dancers themselves as "living exhibits" and how their live performances contributed to forming not only orientalist discourse but also the oriental and Western subjects. These dancers were individualized subjects and performers who challenged the conventional definitions about oriental female roles and subverted the American Victorian model of femininity