Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Appropriation or Just Plain Fun: Belly Up from Cairo to Las Vegas” is one of her clearest and most strategically framed interventions into the transnational history of belly dance. It addresses a question that has often been mishandled by both enthusiasts and critics: how can a dance be genuinely pleasurable, even transformative, for its practitioners and still be implicated in appropriation, distortion, and unequal cultural power? Sellers-Young refuses the consolation of a simple answer. The article is not an exposé of false enjoyment, nor a defense of cosmopolitan borrowing. It is instead a historical anatomy of mediation. What Americans call “belly dance,” she shows, is not a stable Middle Eastern tradition transplanted westward, but a form repeatedly “re-imagined” under the pressure of orientalism, feminism, commerce, and global entertainment.
The article opens with Arjun Appadurai’s formulation of “the imagination as a social practice,” and that choice is not ornamental. Sellers-Young needs a concept expansive enough to account for the fact that fantasy is not merely private misperception but an active force in markets, identities, pedagogies, and intercultural relations. Belly dance is her case study in what happens when imagination hardens into common sense. Images of the “Orient,” once circulated through world’s fairs, painting, film, nightclubs, exercise culture, and celebrity branding, do not simply represent a dance: they reorganize what counts as the dance. Thus the argument proceeds by historical scenes—Chicago in 1893, Arab American nightlife and second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, the Bellydance Superstars in the early twenty-first century—but these scenes are linked by a single problem: the production of an “imagined Arab body” that increasingly displaces the social and historical realities from which the movement vocabulary emerged.
What gives the essay its force is that Sellers-Young does not begin with a denunciation of “belly dance” as a false Western invention. She begins by establishing the complexity of the underlying practices. The solo improvised torso- and hip-centered dances grouped under the Western label existed, and still exist, across a broad geography, from Morocco to Iran, under different names and with distinct aesthetic emphases. She notes Moroccan pelvic lifts and drops, Egyptian abdominal articulation and hip shimmies, Turkish shoulder and breast shimmies, Iranian upper-body grace and facial expressivity. The point is not taxonomic display for its own sake. It is to show how the term “belly dance” collapses plurality into a singular consumable sign. The umbrella term is already a mechanism of cultural flattening.
Just as important is her account of social function. In Middle Eastern and diasporic life, these dances were “traditionally performed privately as entertainment by men and women in segregated parties associated with life cycle rituals such as weddings.” This framing matters because it relocates the dance from spectacle to sociality. It is not fundamentally a strip of erotic display for detached viewers, but a mode of communal joy, “cultural play,” and embodied self-expression within the regulation of family and gendered event-structure. Sellers-Young’s phrase “transmits joy” is precise here: it names dance not as static heritage but as affective social circulation. At weddings and related rituals, the form fosters participation and shared feeling, often under conditions in which segregation itself makes possible a freedom of bodily pleasure “devoid of sexual innuendo.” Such a description does not romanticize the dance as pure liberation; she is careful to say that this self-expression operates “within the confines of gender roles and expectations.” But neither does it accept the Western fantasy that pelvic movement is inherently salacious. The essay’s historical labor begins by uncoupling torso and hip articulation from the eroticized frame that American spectators have inherited.
This is why the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition becomes the article’s foundational scene. Sellers-Young treats the Midway Plaisance not merely as a famous episode in entertainment history but as a machine for producing an orientalist ideoscape. Actual performers from North Africa and the Middle East appeared there alongside fabricated fantasy environments such as the Moorish Palace and Persian Palace, and the distinction between ethnographic display and erotic fantasy was never secure. “The real dances of the Middle East were performed within the same spatial frame as the fantasy oriental version,” she writes, and that “discursive pattern” would persist. The insight is characteristic of Sellers-Young’s work more broadly: performance cannot be understood apart from event-context, and here the event-context is imperial display. Dance is not simply shown; it is framed, juxtaposed, moralized, and sold.
The Board of Lady Managers is an especially revealing presence in her account. Their outrage at the “hips, pelvis and torso” as “blatantly obscene” did not suppress the performances but intensified their public visibility. Sol Bloom’s opportunism—renaming the form “belly dance” from danse du ventre—is treated as historically decisive. The term is not an innocent translation but a commercial condensation of scandal, sexuality, and spectacle. In one stroke a heterogeneous family of dances becomes an Americanized commodity. Sellers-Young’s title, with its teasing opposition between “appropriation” and “just plain fun,” echoes this history of euphemism and sensationalism: commercial culture is skilled at recoding the problematic as the pleasurable. Bloom’s talent lay in recognizing that protest could be monetized. In this sense he is the first modern entrepreneur of the form as American fantasy.
Yet the Chicago section does more than narrate the birth of a label. It also revises assumptions about gender. Sellers-Young reminds the reader that public performance in nineteenth-century Egypt included not only female dancers such as the Awalim and Ghawazee but also male Khawals. The notion that this is inherently a women’s dance is therefore not indigenous essence but a product of historical intervention. French and British colonial sensibilities, scandalized by male performance they read as feminine, helped suppress male dancing. The later feminization of the form is thus inseparable from colonial regulation. This point is crucial not only for the article at hand but for Sellers-Young’s larger corpus, where she repeatedly insists that gender in dance is historically produced and context-dependent rather than embedded in movement vocabulary itself. Here, as elsewhere in her scholarship, embodiment is never merely biological; it is socially interpreted and politically disciplined.
If the first movement of the essay establishes orientalism as the initial frame of American reception, the second shows how that frame is neither simply reproduced nor simply overcome in the era of Arab American nightlife and second-wave feminism. This middle section is the richest because it stages the most difficult tension. Arab immigrants and their descendants built communities and businesses in American cities, and venues such as Club Zahra created a public sphere in which food, music, social dancing, and professional entertainment could be shared. But those venues had to address multiple publics. To attract non-Arab audiences, nightclub owners often relied on the familiar iconography of Hollywood orientalism—harems, camels, pyramids, “dancing girls.” Sellers-Young is exact about the compromise: the clubs held together real communal practice and orientalist marketing. Men and women danced line dances and couple dances governed by kinship and propriety, while the featured professional dancer often appeared in a Hollywoodized costume for mainstream appeal. The venue itself became a zone of accommodation and strain.
This is one of the article’s strongest contributions: it does not imagine Arab American communities as simply the victims of appropriation from outside, nor belly dance culture as wholly external to them. There are musicians, venue owners, retailers, and performers whose livelihoods and artistic practices are entangled with the belly dance scene. But that entanglement does not remove the wound of stereotyping. Anne Rasmussen’s observation that orientalism enhanced immigrants’ “foreignness” and Mona Fayad’s vivid complaint—“I am haunted by the constant companion called the Arab woman”—make clear that the dance’s visibility could function as a trap. Arab American women in particular confront the reduction of a complex cultural identity to a single exoticized image. Sellers-Young’s handling of this tension is notably disciplined. She resists both a romantic communitarian model and a pure victim/perpetrator schema. What she offers instead is a social field marked by unequal dependence, tactical use of stereotype, resentment, and contest over representation.
The feminist turn of the 1960s and 1970s introduces another layer of ambivalence. Sellers-Young is too careful a scholar of embodiment simply to mock American women’s investment in belly dance as deluded orientalism. She knows, and says, that many women found in the form a real alternative to shame, passivity, and narrow beauty norms. Daniella Gioseffi’s testimony—“Accepting and being comfortable with my body was the last frontier for me”—is treated not as naiveté but as evidence of an embodied need unmet by dominant American culture. Belly dance could appear to offer another relation to the body: varied shapes and ages, pelvic mobility without apology, sensuality as agency rather than submission. Gioseffi’s hope that women might become “active rather than passive sexual objects” condenses a larger feminist desire to detach female embodiment from domestic constraint and reproductive destiny.
What Sellers-Young exposes, however, is the cost of this liberationist narrative. The freedom American women sought was often projected onto “the Arab female dancing body,” which became a screen for Western longing. That projection does not negate the experience of empowerment; it contextualizes it. The article’s intellectual tact lies precisely here. It acknowledges the efficacy of the practice while historicizing the image through which that efficacy was accessed. This is an early and compelling statement of a position that would become central to Sellers-Young’s belly dance scholarship as a whole: experiential transformation can be real even when the historical stories that support it are weak or distorted. Empowerment and appropriation are not mutually exclusive categories.
Her discussion of the emerging American belly dance scene develops this point through pedagogy and style. Dancers such as Morocco, Serena, Dahlena, and Jamila Salimpour learned through imitation, restaurant observation, films, experimentation, and orientalist imagery. Their teaching helped create a non-Arab belly dance community large enough to become, for many Americans, “the physical manifestation of the Middle East.” This phrase is devastating in its calmness. It names a displacement by which a self-fashioned American subculture comes to stand in for a region and its peoples. Sellers-Young is particularly alert to what happens when representation expands into substitution. Once belly dance becomes the dominant visual sign of Middle Easternness in multicultural programming, conflict with Arab American groups becomes inevitable.
Her typology of the American scene—ethnic-representational dance, American Tribal, spiritual belly dance, goddess-based histories—is not merely classificatory. It shows the dance becoming a site for different modes of self-making. American Tribal uses “tribe” to create a collective psychic space for experimenting beyond normative gender display. Spiritual belly dance combines movement with yoga, t’ai chi, modern dance, and New Age metaphysics. Goddess narratives reconnect the dance to Inanna, Isis, Hathor, and a putative ancient feminine lineage. Sellers-Young’s judgment is measured but firm: these histories are “not necessarily tied to the countries or populations of the Middle East” and are sustained despite “no definitive historical proof.” Their power lies not in factual accuracy but in their capacity to authorize practice. By disseminating a myth of ancient, pan-female continuity, the community secures legitimacy while loosening the dance from Arab ownership or specificity. The move is intellectually revealing because it demonstrates how universalism can function as a strategy of dispossession. To make the dance belong to “all women” is also to evade the asymmetries of cultural borrowing.
This line of argument places the article at an important moment in Sellers-Young’s own development. Earlier feminist attraction to the form is not disowned, but it is now subject to historical critique. The essay belongs to the phase in which her work on belly dance shifts from celebration of bodily possibility toward a sharper analysis of orientalism, mediation, and commercial circulation. Even so, she does not lapse into policing authenticity as if there were some pure source untouched by history. The very examples she chooses—Arab American clubs, hybrid pedagogies, globally circulating myths—make clear that the form has long been mixed, translated, and strategically staged. Her concern is not purity but visibility: under what conditions does the “real Arab body,” socially situated and historically differentiated, become obscured by fantasy?
That question comes to its most concentrated expression in the section on the Bellydance Superstars. Here Sellers-Young’s historical sense allows her to read early twenty-first-century commercial spectacle not as a new phenomenon but as a repetition in altered conditions. Miles Copeland, like Sol Bloom before him, is “an astute reader of popular culture.” He sees an existing amateur community, recognizes its appetite for aspiration and celebrity, and packages belly dance accordingly. The parallel between Bloom and Copeland is one of the article’s most elegant structural devices. One sold scandal; the other sells branded stardom. Both operate by identifying what the public already desires and intensifying it through naming, framing, and merchandise.
The troupe itself reveals a shift in body politics. The Bellydance Superstars are chosen for technique and presence, but also for bodies “more in common with Hollywood versions of Middle Eastern dancers than with the more voluptuous dancers of the historical or contemporary Middle East.” Sellers-Young’s description of “long, lean, muscular bodies” drawn from the visual economy of fitness and fashion is pointed. The dance that had been embraced in the 1970s partly because it seemed hospitable to women of many shapes is now reabsorbed into a mainstream commercial ideal. In one of the essay’s sharpest closing formulations, “the feminist dance of liberation has been absorbed by the image of the superstars of belly dance.” The phrasing matters: not simply replaced, but absorbed. Commercial culture does not annihilate prior meanings; it metabolizes them, preserving enough of their aura to remain attractive while redirecting their social force.
Her brief performance description of the Sacramento show is equally telling. The evening mixes American cabaret, tribal style, Polynesian dance, Indian reference, drum solos, amplified concert aesthetics, projected images, and lobby merchandise. This is not offered as evidence of artistic illegitimacy in any simple sense. Rather, it exemplifies globalization as recombination: styles circulate, detach, and are reassembled as marketable experience. What is lost in this process is not some static authenticity, but the communal and affective conditions named earlier by tarab, “enjoyment, reciprocation of emotion and communication between performers and their audiences.” The article contrasts this participatory aesthetic with spectacle that remains visually arresting but increasingly abstracted from the social worlds that sustained the form.
The concluding pages gather the argument into one of Sellers-Young’s most lucid formulations of mediated embodiment. Appadurai’s imagination as social practice meets Susan Bordo’s insistence that the body is “always mediated.” The result is a theory of dance history in which movement cannot be separated from the fantasies through which it is apprehended. “The history of belly dance,” she writes, is “an example of the impact of the desiring imagination on the (re) definition of a cultural form.” The crucial phrase is “desiring imagination.” Desire here is neither purely erotic nor merely commercial; it is civilizational, feminist, nostalgic, aspirational. It seeks the sensual East, the liberated woman, the marketable star, the ancient goddess. Under those layered desires, “the dancing Arab body, male and female, has been reified within the imagination of Orientalism and so propagated by the forces of commercialization that the real Arab body simply cannot be seen within the transnational imaginary.”
That sentence crystallizes much of what would remain durable in Sellers-Young’s later scholarship. First, bodies are never self-evident. They are apprehended through narrative, image, and training. Second, technique and style are inseparable from regimes of perception. Third, intercultural movement is productive but ethically fraught, because what is borrowed is often already mediated by fantasy. Fourth, pleasure does not absolve power; indeed, pleasure is one of the means by which power becomes durable. Finally, dance offers an especially acute instance of these problems because it involves not only looking at other bodies but moving one’s own body through images of otherness.
The article also marks an important transition in her career-long attention to the social life of dance. Her early ritual studies in Sudan had already taught her to read performance as event-context, social technology, and bodily arrangement. Here that analytic disposition is turned toward global popular culture. Belly dance is no longer approached primarily as ritual or lineage but as a traveling form whose meanings are generated in world’s fairs, immigrant businesses, women’s studios, college campuses, and branded tours. Yet the underlying method remains recognizably hers: movement must be placed within the larger ecology of institutions, fantasies, gender norms, and communal practice that make it legible. What changes is the historical problem. The issue is no longer only how performance expresses social structure, but how circulation itself remakes what bodies signify.
For dance studies, the essay remains valuable because it refuses both reductive condemnation and easy multicultural celebration. For theatre and performance studies, it demonstrates how spectacle, display, and audience fantasy produce intercultural objects before any explicit theory names them. For feminist scholarship, it offers a sober account of how bodily liberation can depend upon appropriated images without therefore becoming insincere. And for Sellers-Young’s own intellectual trajectory, it stands as a pivotal statement of a question that would continue to deepen across her writing: how can one honor the transformative force of embodied practice while refusing the historical amnesia that often accompanies it?
“Appropriation or Just Plain Fun” is therefore best read not as an adjudication between two alternatives posed in its title, but as an analysis of why the alternatives cannot be cleanly separated. Fun is historical. Empowerment is mediated. Appropriation may be pleasurable. A dance can become a site of self-acceptance, spiritual symbolism, commercial fantasy, ethnic ambivalence, and cultural erasure all at once. Sellers-Young’s achievement is to hold those truths together without collapsing them into cynicism or apology. In doing so, she makes belly dance legible not as a marginal curiosity but as a revealing archive of modernity’s moving desires.
Reflect with VABS