FROM VIBRATION TO VISUAL AESTHETICS: POLITICAL ECONOMIES OF ATTENTION IN CAIRO’S CONTEMPORARY BELLY DANCE INDUSTRY

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to answer the question: how have foreign dancers come to seemingly dominate the belly dance industry in Egypt, in spite of most Egyptians’ negative evaluations of foreigners’ competence in the skills essential to Egyptian belly dance? Through answering, I also argue that the shifting values of the senses and beauty standards towards what sells best on social media exemplifies what I am calling “aesthetic colonization.” Foreigners are only dominating the parts of the industry visible to the general public — those whose marketing is entwined with social media — while Egyptians continue to predominate in venues operating largely outside of social media. In the latter, the aesthetic favors attunement to senses of vibration (sound, affect) and attention as interpersonal care is bought and sold, cultivating relational value. In the former, the visual aesthetics of Instagram prevail, and female beauty and attention are commodified to circulate online. The movement from prioritizing senses of vibration to a visual aesthetic is symptomatic of ongoing colonization processes, in particular the expansion and intensification of neoliberal capitalism and with it the increasingly onerous discipling of bodies. Due to the coloniality of power, proximity to whiteness and wealth are valued, putting foreign dancers at an advantage over Egyptians in contexts where the visual is more important than the vibrational. Furthermore, as discipline in the Foucauldian sense is based on the threat of possible attention and women in Egyptian society are generally supposed to avoid drawing attention to their moving bodies, the visibility demands of media capitalism and its attendant political economies of attention are dangerous to Egyptian women in ways that often don’t apply to foreign dancers. Thus, I argue that attention is both a resource and a weapon, and in both cases, is used to further discipline women’s adherence to gender norms and beauty ideals, intensifying as the visual becomes more important than the vibrational.