Ambiguous Masculinities: Gender and Sexual Transgression in Contemporary Dance Works by Senegalese Men

Abstract

Contemporary dance in Senegal emerged and thrives at the interstices of the local and the global. Multiple expectations and values, of which gender and sexuality are no small part, converge at the site of creation and production, enlisting choreographers to navigate oftentimes conflicting ideologies. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines three works by Senegalese men that employ gender and sexual transgressions alongside the artists’ seemingly contradictory verbal articulations of their work. Using the local-global entanglement as an analytical framework, I argue that these works offer ambiguous assemblages of masculinities that challenge conventional masculinity in Senegal, thereby elucidating the potentiality for contemporary dance to transcend singular meaning-making capacity.

INFINITE REPERTOIRE: ON DANCE AND URBAN POSSIBILITY IN POSTSOCIALIST GUINEA by Adrienne J. Cohen. 2021. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 216 pp., 42 illustrations. $105.00 hardcover, ISBN: 9780226762845. $35.00 paper, ISBN: 9780226781020. $34.99 PDF, ISBN: 978022678167

“…However, her primarily ethnographic methodology is also one of the project's central strengths as the observations it mobilized illuminated interactions and phenomena unfolding on– and offstage that strengthened Cohen's overall argument. Infinite Repertoires joins literature outlining contemporary African dance in postcolonial settings, including Hélène Neveu Kringelbach's Dance Circles: Movement, Morality and Self-Fashioning in Urban Senegal (2013); Amy Swanson's “Ambiguous Masculinities: Gender and Sexual Transgression in Contemporary Dance Works by Senegalese Men” (2019); Catherine Cole's Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice (2020); Mlondolozi Zondi's “Venus and the (R)uses of Power: Nelisiwe Xaba's They Look at Me and That's All They Think ” (2020); Sabine Sörgel's Contemporary African Dance Theatre: Phenomenology, Whiteness, and the Gaze (2021); and Ketu H. Katrak's Jay Pather, Performance, and Spatial Politics in South Africa (2021). Dance studies has a critical need for further research on contemporary African dance practices, and Cohen's work makes indelible marks in this lineage by illuminating the particularity of postsocialist transition in Conakry, an underrepresented city in the field of African dance studies.…”