Essay by Sara Jajou for Contextualising Practice 

 

‘The gaze…appears as an adversary, a knife, the evil eye…’ (Neugebauer (eds) et al 2021: 2)

The gaze is a knife pointed at my body. It seeks to dissect and dismember bodies like mine through glances and stares. The gaze possesses my body, misconstruing what it sees and fantasising about what it cannot. Beyond my knowledge, consent or action, my body is fashioned into an object and demarcated as different, as Other. The gaze that I speak of emerges from western imperialism. It is deployed as a systemising tool to understand and read – or rather misunderstand and misread – bodies through a code network fabricated by the colonial imagination (see for analysis of this Neugebauer (eds) et al 2021). For it is through the Western gaze’s claim to superior knowledge that the body is read and marked as savage, feminine, racial, animalistic, queer, grotesque, Oriental and ultimately dangerous. According to Said (1978), in doing so, the western gaze is wielded to manufacture consent for its imperial conquest and domination of the Other on a geopolitical scale – and it is extremely successful. For hundreds of years, the western empires have proliferated the gaze to render the Other’s body, and by extension the Other’s homeland, into a site justifiable of political intervention. It comes as no surprise when this masculine, paternalistic gaze is used to exploit women from the ‘Orient’ to fuel imperial inertia.

In this essay, I will be analysing my video performance work, Vanishing Act (2025), in relation to the layers of Otherness that arise in the distance between the western gaze and the embodied belly dancer. I will first establish the historical and colonial context of belly dance in order to situate my practice. Then I will discuss the obscured Other as obstructive to the western gaze, before exploring liminality as a hybrid space of displacing such binaries.

Performer as object

Vanishing Act (2025) is a single-channel video performance that casts me as a belly dance performer dancing to a musical arrangement performed by my father, Emad Jajou (keyboard) and Ben Afif (darbuka), and produced by my partner Jackson Elhage. In the video, I dance on the shore, underwater, and at night—during all of which my face is never revealed. I began conceptualising this work while I was questioning the politics of learning belly dance as an Assyrian woman in a western context by a non-source^[1] teacher. The dances that come from my motherland, the lands between Northern Iraq, Turkey and Iran, are predominantly folkloric Assyrian line dancing, which is also similarly shared by Iraqis and Kurds with differing footwork, styles and music. I learned these dances from my immigrant family in environments that felt so far removed from the western empire we were living under. I noticed over time that some of the dancing performed by women outside of line dancing involved pelvic, hip and shoulder isolations similar to those that I’d seen in popularised forms of belly dance. However, unlike line dancing that is taught without friction, belly dance in my family is suspended in taboo.

The western gaze has completely transformed, or rather invented, the practice of belly dance. The term ‘belly dance’ is derived from the French term ‘danse du ventre’, meaning dance of the belly, and was coined by the early Orientalists who homogenised hundreds of dance styles from Egypt and surrounding South West Asian and North African (SWANA) countries into a singular exoticised form (Lorius 1996:26). The colonial import of belly dance into the western empires, such as the United States of America (USA) and Australia, transformed it into an Orientalist performance that is steeped in colonial exploitation and as Stavrou Stavrou Karayanni states, “complicit with systems of impression” and “imperial domination” (2004:169).  I understand belly dance, the form that I learn now, to be the result of the power dynamics between the Orientalist’s gaze and the Other as Object. This is evidenced by the partial shift of classical Egyptian dance, called Raqs Sharqi, under British occupation (1882-1956) as it became incorporated into entertainment halls, nightclubs and cabaret venues in the 1920s. One such example is Badia Masabni’s ‘Opera Casino’ (1926), during which Masabni integrated elements of western dance such as choreography, ballet, the solo performer and most significantly the mythologising veil. Although Masabni’s venue did not outwardly cater to the resident European population, features of the dance style she popularised to be the standard of Raqs Sharqi reveal a political tension within the dancer’s own gaze. Under the Othering gaze of the West, a phenomenon arises whereby the Raqs Sharqi dancer becomes involved in self-exotification; perhaps a testament to the proliferation of the colonial gaze as a dominant force with the capacity to be inverted and redirected inwards towards one’s self.

What does it mean then, to learn and perform ‘belly dance’, Raqs Sharqi, Raqs Baladi (folk dance/dance of the country) or any other styles of Egyptian and SWANA dances which have been appropriated and homogenised by western colonial occupations? I contend that what is learned in western belly dance classes is not simply just a dance, but the codifying language of the Other’s body as told by the western gaze. This is alarmingly the case in classes taught by non-source dance teachers. In my dance classes, it is jarring to hear the names that have been ascribed to movements of the body, such as ‘snake arms’ and ‘camel’, in this form of disciplined belly dance. In these moments, I feel dissonance in my body as I realise that a character is being taught and performed in my dance classes. It is me, the Other.

This language about the Other originates from Orientalist dancer Jamila Salimpour, an American woman of Italian ancestry who was exposed to dances from SWANA countries through imitations of the Ghawâzı Egyptian dancers by her father, who was stationed as part of the Sicilian Navy under Italian colonial expansionism in SWANA in 1910 (Sellers-Young 2016:70). From the USA, Salimpour developed an interest in the Orient, analysing and imitating footage of dancers from Egypt’s Golden Era (1930-1960s), such as Tahia Carioca (Sellers-Young 2016:71). It is said that Salimpour is the first to develop a vocabulary of belly dance, though it would be more accurate to clarify that she was the first to do so in the west. Here, the gaze returns as a knife against the Other. In positioning herself as spectator, Salimpour dissected and codified movements of the Other into ‘isolations’, and arguably not only developed a new dance style but a system of teaching embedded with western ideologies, that Loris (1996: xii) notes, is dubiously complicit with Orientalist discourse. Salimpour’s appropriation is evident; her relationship to belly dance was made possible in both her and her father’s intergenerational role as spectators of the Other. Western dancers and teachers like Salimpour are an exemplary, but not rare, demonstration of Orientalist agenda at work and the extent to which the western gaze is utilised to flatten, imitate and produce imagery of the caricaturised SWANA woman.

I once walked into my previous retail workplace wearing a short-cropped shirt, to which my coworker John, a white man in his 60s, jokingly said, ‘you look like you’re gonna start belly dancing!’. Another coworker, a woman of a similar demographic, joined in with similar comments and laughter. Against my consent and action, the singular element that caused and catalysed this experience was the gaze of my coworkers rendering me into an object. To cast your gaze upon someone and mark them as the Other is a demonstration of the inherent power embedded in looking, and to borrow from Sartre (1953:277), ‘it is never eyes which look at us’, but the spectator as subject. At this point in my life, I had not begun belly dancing. Yet, the only context that these racist and sexualising comments truly require is the gaze’s conception of the Oriental heterosexual woman. Women from the ‘Orient’, SWANA, are objectified as being harem girls or belly dancer characters. As the feminine Oriental Other, SWANA women are flattened into caricatures that are sexualised, mystical, alluring and erotic. In Imagining Arab Womanhood, Amira Jarmakani (2008:5) clarifies the mythologies of veils, harems, and belly dancers as being ‘second order sign systems’, detached from their subjective histories and appropriated as new signifiers of western ideologies. The ideologies that are now projected onto the feminine Other’s body are ones of heterosexual male power and desire in tandem with western modernity and neoliberalism. To bring such ideas to life, the Oriental woman is simultaneously represented by the western gaze as veiled, submissive, voiceless and oppressed by antiquated extremist Arab patriarchy. Here, the dichotomy lies between images of the fetishised woman made visible through imperial, masculine fantasy, and the veiled woman, subjugated by her ‘hiddenness’ and therefore in need of Western salvation.

Obscuring the subject’s gaze

In an iridescent mask and a translucent, fluorescent orange costume, I step into the role of the performer and assume the character of the Other (Shay and Sellers-Young et al 2003). Oscillating between the rising tide and the various modes of visibility from day to night, my face is never known to the audience. At times, I am not even wearing a mask. In Figure 3, I am in fact smiling during my dance, yet this is something that is never revealed to the audience. Instead, I am obscured by the sunset backlighting my silhouette. As the performer, I am ‘veiled’ in a sense from the gaze of the spectator. Here, the veiled SWANA woman, abstracted and unknown to the western gaze, not only invokes colonial fantasies of exposure but also the threat of concealment. As Mansbridge (2016) argues, to expose the veiled woman, to make her public and known, is to make her possessable by the western colonial gaze. As depicted in Figure 4, the mask then emerges as a subversive motif against the gaze, and denies it the knowledge and possession of the performer as object. The Other is not only hidden by her mask, but natural elements such as light, which allow her to move in realms that the gaze cannot access.

My performance plays with the paradoxical perception of the hidden feminine Other’s body as both a site of desire and fear under the western gaze. The masked character that I play is neither a seductive belly dancer nor a readily available harem girl – her disappearances on camera reveal a capacity for her to engage with a pictorial realm of agency. The video performance starts in silence, accompanied by a visual described as ‘mesmerising’ and ‘beautiful’ by my peers during a group critique. The enjoyment derived from watching a beautiful exotic dancer on the beach, a scene so clichéd it could be from a Hollywood movie, is cut short when the music stops. Here, the audience of Vanishing Act is never afforded full access to the performer’s body on screen. The veiled SWANA woman, abstracted and unknown to the western gaze, not only invokes colonial fantasies of exposure but also the threat of concealment. That to expose the veiled Muslim woman – to make public and known – is to make her possessable by the western colonial gaze.

The performer appears on screen as both simultaneously hidden and revealed, wearing a dark mask and yet a translucent costume. Neither her visibility nor invisibility positions her as a caricature to be exploited by the western gaze. The attitude of unveiling Othered women, and thereby saving them from a perceived brutal regime, is inseparable from the domineering western ideologies of freedom and democracy that must be brought to uncivilised countries. As Barba (1988) has noted, the body can also be understood as a country in a sense. To not be entirely seen by the western gaze not only undermines its values of democracy, modernity and neoliberalism, but also threatens its claim to know bodies and countries.

While the performer begins dancing in perfect view of the gaze, the sound and image disappear suddenly. The immersive qualities of sound are emphasised in the gaps between the dance, as the image returns; this time with the gaze of the performer meeting that of the spectator audience. The viewer is transported into the world of the Other, with the sounds of crashing waves surrounding the viewer and the Other in an encounter. The work reveals itself not only to be cinematic but also confrontational, and the passive exploitation of the Other is no longer possible without implicating the Western audience in a sense of discomfort. The Other looks back, but she cannot be fully known (Doukhan 2012).

The liminal zone

In her final appearance, the performer manifests underwater before gradually disappearing into the dark water as depicted in Figure 5. In these moments, the binding relation between identities of Other and western gaze, object and subject, is displaced in what Glissant (1990:197) describes as the ‘liminal zone’. The sea then becomes a transient space of transformative quality, where fixed elements can be dislodged by postcolonial negotiation and translation. The performer, who spends much of the dance between the tide and sand, finally enters the water. In this way, the shore can also be read as representative of borders and boundaries. Water makes possible the disruption of fixed identities, meanings and power structures, and so Bhabha’s (1994) notion of hybridity emerges as a direct consequence of the diasporic dancer in a colonial encounter. This in-between zone where new meanings arise is known as the ‘Third Space’, Bhabha (1994:2). Moreover, the ocean as a liminal zone of encounter and flux is perhaps what Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi (1997:45) refers to when she speaks of the ‘opportunity to express many different selves’ when belly dancers situate themselves in their political contexts. Rather than emulating Orientalist characters that fix the Other under a gaze, the ocean reminds us of the multitude of subjectivities possible outside of colonial binaries.

Refusal

In this enduring imperial moment, the feminine ‘Middle Eastern’ body is relentlessly exploited into a site of imagination. When she is flattened, the West can enact both its sexualised fantasy of exposure and imagined fear of the unknown Other. Hidden from the gaze, she must be unveiled. Only then can the West enact its ultimate fantasy of domination. However, for the feminine Other, the states of Otherness that arise from Western projections are not fixed in the body, and neither is the power of the western gaze. As Vanishing Act reveals, refusal is not only a possibility but a recurring event. For it is through embodied performance that subversion, renegotiation and transformation of such binaries can be made visible.

Notes

^[1] A source dancer is a cultural practitioner who comes from the cultures of origin responsible for belly dance, such as those in South West Asian and North African regions or their diasporas. A source dancer’s practice is often informed through lived experience, heritage and tradition rather than formal instruction.

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