Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article analyzes two popular Golden Era belly-dance films, Sigara wa Kass (A Cigarette and a Glass, 1955) and Habibi al Asmar (My Dark Darling, 1958), through concepts of queer spectatorship, queer time and space, homoerotic triangulation, and queer containment. The analysis centers women, attends to women's homoeroticism and nonnormative desires, and reads popular film as constituted by and constituting of mainstream conventions of gender and sexuality. It argues that mainstream belly-dance films made considerable space for homoerotic exchanges amid women. Golden Era belly-dance films reveal a rich gender and sexual diversity in Egyptian cultural production, rather than the Orientalist representation of an explicitly homophobic "traditional" Arab culture. In this sense, the article recovers women's nonnormative and queer legacies within popular Egyptian texts. It does not insinuate homosexuality as inherent but instead locates possible Arab cultural engagements with women's queerness that have been overlooked.

The European 'dancing manias' represent the first recorded episodes of 'epidemic hysteria'. These behaviours are typified within the psychiatric literature as spontaneous, stress-induced outbursts of psychological disturbance that primarily affected females. This depiction is typically founded on secondary sources or the selective use of period quotations by medical historians George Rosen and Henry Sigerist. However, based on a series of translations of medieval European chronicles describing these events, typically firsthand, it is evident that contemporary depictions of 'dancing manias' have been misrepresented by these misogynist scholars. Contrary to popular psychiatric portrayals, females were not overrepresented among participants, episodes were not spontaneous but highly structured, and involved unfamiliar religious sects engaging in strange or unfamiliar customs that were redefined as a behavioural abnormality.