Notes on the Sex Appeal of Belly Dancing (With Reference to the Case of Johara)

Ekaterina Andreeva (aka Johara)
Seems like a nice girl ...

I have to admit that, unlike Flaubert, I'm not a great fan of Eastern dance - or, as it is commonly known, belly dancing [1]. It's too obscenely sensual for my tastes I'm afraid and always makes me think of that old expression about jelly and jam.

Having said that, I quite like the costumes that some of the young women wear [2] and have no objection to them wiggling, wriggling and jiggling across a dance floor in order to earn a living if that's what they want to do. It clearly requires skill and discipline and performers deserve to be recognised as professional artistes continuing a long tradition of shimmy and shake.       

Although this style of dancing is found across the Arab world, Egypt has a special claim to be the home of belly dancing and the modern form (and modern outfits) originated in the nightclubs of Cairo. Many of the performers, however, are non-native; despite concerns that foreign-born dancers lack authenticity and didn't fully appreciate the folk traditions associated with the dance.

Unfortunately, as a more conservative form of Islam has taken hold across the Middle East in the contemporary period, dancers - as well as other female performers, including singers and actresses - have increasingly been villified by the authorities on the grounds that their immodest displays of flesh are haram.

In Egypt, for example, there are strict laws in place governing what dancers can and cannot wear; can and cannot do. Whether they wear a traditional bedlah or a more modern dress design with mesh-filled cutouts, is up to them. But they must cover their lower bodies, breasts and stomachs and retain their modesty (including modesty of movement and gesture) at all times.

Many dancers in Cairo ignore these rules, however, and they are rarely enforced. Having said that, there are multiple instances of foreign dancers being arrested - which brings us to the case of Russian-born Ekaterina Andreeva, known by the stage name Johara, meaning Jewel, who has been sentenced to a year behind bars in an Egyptian jail after she was filmed giving a performance which, the authorities claim, incited debauchery.

Not only was she said to be working without a licence, but, worse, she was clearly dancing without underwear! The ruling follows a video clip of her performance - on a boat sailing along the Nile - going viral and gaining her a large global following on social media: click here.         

Obviously, she's expected to appeal the sentence. And obviously I hope Miss Andreeva's conviction will be quashed. Though, equally obvious, is the fact that her performance is sexually provocative - what would be the point of belly dancing if it were not erotically charged? 

Not that there's anything wrong with that ... Indeed, I'm tempted to remind readers of Lawrence's view that sex and beauty are essentially one and the same thing, like flame and fire: "If you hate sex you hate beauty. If you love living beauty, you have a reverence for sex." [3] 

The greatest disaster that can befall any civilisation is a morbid fear of the body, its forces, its flows, its mysterious openings, and its desires. For this causes the instinctive-intuitive life within us to slowly atrophy. What we call sex appeal is really just the communicating of a sense of beauty and it will always invoke an answer of some kind:    

"It may only kindle a sense of warmth and optimism. Then you say: I like that girl, she's a real good sort. It may kindle a glow, that makes the world look kindlier, and life feel better. Then you say: She's an attractive woman, by Jove, I like her. Or she may rouse a flame that lights up her own face first, before it lights up the universe. Then you say: She's a lovely woman. She looks lovely to me. Let's say no more."

I'll let readers decide for themselves what level of heat Miss Andreeva produces and whether the fire of sex that she rouses is pure and fine, or something of which we should be ashamed ... 

Notes

[1] The term, belly dance, is a translation of the French danse du ventre, coined by an art critic in response to a controversial painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme entitled La danse de l'almée (1863). The picture is a classic example of pervy Orientalism, depicting a woman dancing, accompanied by musicians, before an audience of soldiers sitting with their legs spread in a fantasy setting. Eventually, this term came to be used for all dances of Middle Eastern origin in which a woman displayed her charms. It first entered into English in 1889.

[2] The costume most commonly associated with belly dance is the bedlah, which typically includes a fitted top or bra, a hip belt, and a full-length skirt or harem pants. The bra and belt are often decorated with beads, sequins, crystals, or coins. The modern bedlah style which originated in the early twentieth-century, is an amusing example of (Arabic) life imitating (Western) art, in as much as it took inspiration from Hollywood. I suspect my own forndness for the harem-look is due to childhood memories of Barbara Eden in I dream of Jeannie. 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), lines quoted are on pp. 145 and 147. 

It's important to note that Lawrence doesn't always approve of women exploiting their sex appeal: "There is, of course, the other side of sex appeal - it can be the destruction of the one appealed to. When a woman starts using her sex appeal for her own advantage, it is usually a bad moment for some poor devil." [148] Such thinking - clearly sexist in character - is unfortunate; as is his branding of these women as prostitutes and vamps.     

See also 'Pornography and Obscenity' in the above collection of essays and articles, where Lawrence develops his notion of sex appeal and admits "No matter how hard we may pretend otherwise, most of us rather like a moderate rousing of our sex. It warms us, stimulates us like sunshine on a grey day." [239] Those who deny this and are genuinely repelled by even the simplest and most natural stirring of sexual feeling, are, he says, perverts and puritans "who have fallen into hatred of their fellow men" [239]. That nicely sums up the theocratic morons who have brought the case against Miss Andreeva. 
 
To watch Johara doing her thing in another video on YouTube, click here.

This post is dedicated to my favourite Arab girl about town, Nahla Al-Ageli, creator and writer of the wonderful online journal Nahla Ink.

Postmodern Approaches to Literature 3: The Pleasure of the Text (Part I)

Marilyn being pleasured by James Joyce

The Pleasure of the Text, published two years after 'From Work to Text', clearly picks up from where the latter left off. It offers us not a poetics, but an erotics of reading. And, also, a challenge to all forms of moral asceticism and militancy which have no time for sensual pleasure and despise the body. Barthes explained to an interviewer at the time:

"I felt that today’s intellectual language was submitting too easily to moralizing imperatives that eliminated all notion of enjoyment, of bliss. In reaction, I wanted therefore to reintroduce this word [pleasure] within my personal range, to lift its censorship, to unblock it, to un-repress it." [1991]

This, actually, was quite a daring thing to do and it lost Barthes many friends and supporters (even as it won him a new, wider readership). I suspect that a lot of the continued hostility aimed towards postmodern approaches to literature and to life is that they don’t take themselves too seriously and concern themselves with pleasure. Nothing enrages the puritan more than this - unless it's logical inconsistency and The Pleasure of the Text opens by imagining a figure who "abolishes within himself all barriers, all classes, all exclusions, not by syncretism but by simple disregard of that old spectre: logical contradiction" [1990].

Over the course of some 46 fragments spread over 67 pages and arranged alphabetically by title (i.e. arbitrarily), Barthes speaks in favour of such an anti-Socratic hero who mixes every language and endures the mockery of moral-rational society without shame. And he reveals him to be "the reader of the text at the moment he takes his pleasure" [1990].

But for Barthes there are two types of pleasure; the pleasure of the text, which he terms jouissance and the pleasure of the work, for which he uses the common word plaisir. Of course, there is no absolute distinction between them and Barthes freely admits that his use of such an opposition is here, as elsewhere, purely provisional and strategic:

"The opposition 'pleasure/bliss' is one of those voluntary artificial oppositions for which I’ve always had a certain predilection. ... These oppositions shouldn’t be taken literally; for example, by asking if such and such a text belongs to the order of pleasure or of bliss. These oppositions are intended above all to clear more ground, to make headway - just to talk and write." [1991]

But, having said that, Barthes does then qualify this statement by adding: "the difference between the two words is still quite real ..." [1991]. What, then, is this real difference?

In ‘From Work to Text’ Barthes puts it this way:

"Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work ... I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac ... But this pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them ... and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works ... As for the Text, it is bound to jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation." [1977]

Throughout The Pleasure of the Text he expands upon and plays with this distinction, using a libidinally material and perverse language of gay desire; words such as cruise, for example, coming to prominence. The language used is also significantly informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan, famously, the unconscious is structured like a language and the subject - thought of primarily as a desiring subject - is perpetually seeking out the lost object of their desire. As Mireille Ribière writes:

"The prime function of language, and hence literature, is to signify this fundamental sense of loss. Therefore, desire is the force that drives reader and writer endlessly to go from signifier to signifier in search of fulfilment and pleasure."

The most erotic aspect of a text, for Barthes, is not found in any sexual description or pornographic representation as such, but in the language deployed and the very structure of sentences. This is what he loves most about the writings of Sade for example; the pleasure of reading him clearly proceeds from the fact that not only does he bring together different types of writing and create many new words and concepts, but that "pornographic messages are embodied in sentences so pure they might be used as grammatical models" [1990]. Emphasizing the erotic aspect of jouissance, Barthes concludes his fragment on Sade:

"The pleasure of the text is like that untenable, impossible, purely novelistic instant so relished by Sade’s libertine when he manages to be hanged and then to cut the rope at the very moment of his orgasm, his bliss."
[1990]

What Barthes is excited by then, is the thought of a limit or of an edge between two terms and the pathos of distance (or break) between them. He doesn’t want the destruction of culture or of narrative; he wants these things to be taken to the point at which they are lost and we too lose ourselves in some manner.

Can classic works promise us this experience of bliss or are they strictly tied to a form of pleasure which simply reaffirms cultural convention and our sense of self? Barthes, often thought of as a champion of the nouveaux roman, surprisingly still seems to have a lot of time for the works of the great 19thC authors. For he suggests that if we read them in a writerly manner - unconcerned with the integrity of the text - and at our own pace or rhythm - bypassing those passages or pages which we find boring - then we may yet find them newly pleasurable: "Thus what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again." [1990]

Of course, this has "nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself" [1990], but it does mean that we can develop an approach to literature which allows us still to read a work like War and Peace without nodding-off and having the book fall from our hands. Ironically, the only way to read the more avant-garde texts is to go slowly and carefully through them in a leisurely, aristocratic manner. Try to read a novel by Philippe Sollers or Maurice Blanchot quickly and it will become "inaccessible to your pleasure" [1990].

And so, to reiterate, we have two types of text: the text of pleasure that "comes from culture and does not break with it", linked to a "comfortable practice of reading" [1990]; and the text of bliss that "imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts ... unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language" [1990].

The reader can thus enjoy the satisfaction of plaisir which guarantees their subjective consistency, or the promise of its loss via jouissance.


Bibliography

Roland Barthes, 'From Work to Text', essay in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977).

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, (Basil Blackwell, 1990).

Roland Barthes, ‘Twenty Key Words for Roland Barthes’, interview in The Grain of the Voice, trans. Linda Coverdale, (University of California Press, 1991).

Mireille Ribière, Barthes: A Beginners Guide (Hodder and Stoughton, 2002).

Note: this and the two related posts have been assembled from extensive notes made for a course entitled Postmodern Approaches to Literature, that I taught at Morley College, London, in the Spring of 2010. To read PAL 1 click here. To read PAL 2 click here. To go to part two of this post click here.

This post is dedicated to Gail who asked 'Why read Barthes?'