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Articles Conference Reviews |
The 4Cs JamThe 4Cs Jam Dancing is an odd thing to write about at an academic conference. By odd, I mean it may appear, on surface to have no scholarly value, but that is a presumption I would like to address. For example, in many indigenous cultures, dancing is ceremonial. It is magical. It is communal. It is transcendent. It is restorative. At the 4Cs Jam on Friday night in the Marriott Ballroom, all these dimensions in the dance narrative were expressed; and most notably, through the orality of the feminine body. The Cartesian split between the mind and body speaks to the broken link between consciousness and the material body. As a language, dance unifies this separation by reconnecting identity and rhetoric as a fight against identity subjugation. In our classrooms, this “dance” is no different because we help our students affirm and legitimize their multiple voices, rather than surrender to the larger and dominant narrative of conformity. Like dance, writing is ceremonial, communal, magical, transcendent, and restorative, which led Hélène Cixous to proclaim, feminine writing is “the language that women speak when no one is there to correct them” (21). Thus, the dance narrative is an apt metaphor to view writing as a ceremonial and rhetorical act for feminine empowerment To see the rich tapestry of womanhood expressed through the ceremony of dance is transformative. At the 4Cs Jam, the visual element was striking—black bodies, white bodies, brown bodies, small bodies, medium bodies, and super-sized bodies all affirming their shared womanhood through the rhetorical act of dance. There were no repressed bodies on the dance floor—they were expressive. No broken roots between the mind and body evident while we danced to Lady Gaga, Cyndi Lauper, and George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic. In repelling masculine and cultural criticism through the liberating act of self-definition, heterosexual women can dance with lesbian women who can dance with bisexual women who can dance with both heterosexual and lesbian women. There is a freedom in that. We must “discover the secret of this touch [dance] to extend it” (45) and teach this freedom of expression to our students. We must continue to meet in spaces of shared womanhood and celebrate. We must dance. Work Cited Cixous, Hélène. “Coming to Writing.” Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. 1-58. |