Abstract
This article offers an analysis of embodied experiences and connections in social salsa dancing. Framed within a theoretical context that views bodily practices as both the enactment of normative ideals and as a negotiation of personal freedom against normative ideals, social salsa dancing offers a rich empirical context to explore how we make sense of our bodies, bodily practices, and embodied experience. Drawing on fieldwork conducted as part of a doctoral study in addition to a decade of personal experience, I argue that social salsa dancing cultivates kinesthetic, tactile, and musical senses, and emphasizes the value of attentive embodied interactions and momentary connections with others. I conclude that exploring the possibilities of these interactions and connections offers a potentially emancipatory way of working on one’s embodied self.
Highlights
The embodied self can be understood as an object, worked upon by bodily practices that enact and perpetuate normative ideals
The embodied self can be understood as a subject which engages in bodily practices as a way of negotiating personal freedom against normative ideals
The existing literature on social salsa dancing focuses on issues of ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and globalization, cultural commodification, and gender roles and relations
Summary
Theories of the self have struggled with the legacy handed down from Descartes and other key philosophers of the Enlightenment period in terms of conceptualizing the self as a conscious mind within a physical body. McClure and alienate them from their own bodily experience to the extent of triggering extreme behaviors with potentially severe health risks, as in the case of cosmetic surgery or eating disorders These theorizations all emphasize the scopic through their use of concepts such as observation, examination, and the gaze. One is paying attention with one’s body.” (138) In the field of dance studies, Dorothee Legrand and Suzanne Ravn argue that the bodily attentiveness developed through the daily praxis of dancers enables them to know themselves in a way that does not objectify their body as a visual image, but rather is better understood as a kind of self-recognition, an awareness of their own subjectivity-in-process. - 116 PhænEx dancers and sport more generally, have described positive, pleasurable, and transformative effects of developing enhanced somatic awareness—this shift is a more recent trend within the academy, linked to a growing acceptance and theoretical engagement across disciplines with three related areas of research: haptic and kinesthetic experience (see Bannon and Holt, Bacon, Shusterman, Barber, Manning); affect and emotion (see Wetherel, Leys, Clough, Halley); and practice-based or practice-led forms of research (see Mäkelä et al, Hamilton et al, Rust et al.)
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