Bump and Grind: Dances of the Youth

"Fear and restraint of buttocks power, especially the dancing buttocks is a fundamental component in Christianity's dialectic on the corporeal capacity for sin. In an essentialist fashion the early church differentiated itself from 'pagan' practice by its radical stance regarding the (dancing) body." - Brenda Dixon Gottschild

"Perhaps in common with many other women, my butt memories take me into the larger cultural arena where women are ogled, commodified, and categorized according to degree and volume of 'tits and ass.' How can I explain, or explain away, that backward but primal female desire to attract that, scurrilous though it may seem from a position of critical distance, at a certain tender adolescent age seems to celebrate and affirm one's entry into the mysteries of womanhood? It is a craving to be included in the culture's contexted narrative of femininity. . . ." - Brenda Dixon Gottschild

As a recent chaperon of a dance held for teenagers, I realized I'm officially old. But in addition to any personal nostalgia and realizations, there has been debate and discussion about the "quality" of the dancing with teenagers. Various adults find the dancing offensive and inappropriate for teens. My first reaction is: "Well I was that kid that had to be pulled apart at dances and at that point had yet to even have a first kiss." It has never made sense the presumption that risque dancing is a "gateway drug" to more inappropriate sexual behavior. It certainly wasn't true for me. My experience was that those few hours of risque behavior were in a way carnivalesque. Dances allowed me to express and release the first feelings and urges of sexuality. These dances allowed me to explore, in a safe space, urges that I had little to no experience acting out. It gave me a moment to purge pent up sexual energy and explore the burgeoning womanhood into which I was blossoming. These dances were moments wherein I could express a side of myself that was inappropriate to express at every other setting in my life. It also gave me a power of a fuller knowledge of self and voice in terms of how I chose to dance and with whom I chose to dance. For me, my upbringing as a southern belle dictated that I did not speak unless spoken to. I did not assert myself too forcefully but instead acted with grace and decorum. Until these moments of powerful expression at social teen dances, I had not experienced the courage and power to either accept, reject, or influence the interest of males. It was deemed inappropriate no matter what my hormones were telling me at that age.

But that was my own personal experience. I would not expect or demand that my experience be the rule. So beyond my personal experience, I had curiosities about how to talk about this phenomena of adults objecting to and feeling uncomfortable about the dances of young teens. My first thought is that the phenomena is part of some sort of cultural cosmic order in which teens push the limits and adults establish where that limit should be. Is this sort of issue a sort of social yin and yang in which adults and teens keep each other in some sort of balance by pushing against each other? By objecting do adults simply make the actions more appealing to youth? Where is an appropriate boundary and how do you articulate or define that boundary for kids? Are children challenging us as adults to define and articulate our own sexual boundaries to then expect them to abide by the same?

In asking myself why I found this particular topic so fascinating, I realized that it was part of my research interests around dance, religion, and society. Much of what I hear as the issue of concern from adults is that teens are expressing publicly with their bodies ideas, urges, and curiosities around their bodies as sexual objects. But what I think is important to understand is that our ideas about sex and ways of expressing one's sexuality are culturally relative. Each individual's way of expressing themselves with their bodies (sexually or otherwise) is dependent one's culture, personal experiences, personal preferences, and family upbringing. I think there are some adults that are under the assumption that their expectations of propriety and how one expresses themselves are static, clear, and universal. I think some may be unaware that even one's expectations of how one expresses their body differs from household to household, from culture to culture, from country to country. The expectation of appropriate dance may vary from a conservative Muslim Moroccan-American household, to a catholic Latin-American household, to a Protestant French-American household.

What I find valuable about this dialogue on teen dance is the potential to learn about various points of view, various thoughts in terms of the causes and effects of risque teen dance, and various connections to each individual's personal values around dance, the body, and sexuality. In this discussion what I think is most important is to realize that each person's value and expectation is culturally specific and not necessarily the belief of others. So should we tell teens to avoid provocative dancing as a way to avoid unwarranted advances, or should we tell teens to practice taking ownership and responsibility for their corporeal voice, values, and expression? I don't know. But I find the discussion to be a valuable one.