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DTSTAMP:20140213T204155Z
DTSTART:20140218T170000Z
DTEND:20140218T180000Z
SUMMARY:From Exoticism to Empowerment: The Belly Dancing Body in Raja Ama
 ri's Satin Rouge (2002)
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DESCRIPTION:Second seminar in MES Research Seminar Series\, 2013-2014. Du
 ring the French colonial era\, belly dancers were defined in terms of th
 eir somatic alterity and their bodies were constructed as sites of degra
 dation\, lasciviousness\, exoticisation and eroticisation. Though belly 
 dancers remain key signifiers of Eastern exoticism in both Eastern and W
 estern societies today\, a number of feminist critics and practitioners 
 have (re)claimed the belly dancing body as a space of agency and empower
 ment (Keft-Kennedy 2005\; Moe 2008). This paper argues that Raja Amari’s
  film\, Satin rouge (2002)\, contributes to such debates through its unu
 sual focus on a Tunisian housewife and mother’s (sexual) liberation thro
 ugh belly dancing and her body. Through close analyses of key sequences 
 in Satin rouge\, I argue that Amari (re)conceptualises the belly dancing
  body as the primary means by which her protagonist is able to resist th
 e restrictive roles of mother\, housewife and widow imposed upon her by 
 dominant Tunisian society. Reading the film alongside Reason and Reynold
 s’ (2012) work on ‘kinesthetic empathy’\, I illustrate how Amari draws t
 he spectator into an empathic kinesthetic relationship with her heroine 
 that undermines the distance necessary for visual objectification and op
 ens up new\, more ethical ways of representing the belly dancing body. T
 his paper concludes that Amari’s film resists dominant orientalist image
 s of Maghrebi femininity and reinvents the belly dancing body as a symbo
 l of (female) power\, agency\, subjectification and resistance. 
STATUS:TENTATIVE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
LOCATION:A102\, Samuel Alexander Building\, Manchester
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