Exotic Identities: Dance, Difference, and Self-fashioning

In this article, we present two independent ethnographic studies—one examining belly dancing by white women in Central Ohio and one examining the salsa dance scene in the culturally diverse municipalities of Northern New Jersey—in order to complicate our understanding of how and why people draw upon traditions of cultural Others in their expressive behavior. We argue that dancers' accounts of their dancing experiences reveal these practices to be forms of self-fashioning aimed in part at liberating the dancing subject from restrictive and disciplinary identity categories. Through ethnographic comparison we explore embodied practices as distinct from representational practices of exotic othering.