Barbara Sellers-Young’s 1992 essay on Raks el Sharki stands at an important juncture in her scholarship: early enough to retain the anthropological and historical clarity of her first ethnographic work, yet already unmistakably oriented toward the questions that would define her later career—how movement travels, how technique is remade by new bodies and institutions, how women use dance to negotiate identity, and how embodiment is never innocent of fantasy, commerce, or power. The article is ostensibly about American belly dance, but its real subject is larger and more consequential: what happens when a performance form crosses into a culture that desires it before it understands it.
Sellers-Young begins with a striking inversion. “The typical history of most performance forms related to a specific ethnic group,” she writes, is that they arrive “at the same time as the immigrant population with which it is associated.” The history of Raks el Sharki in the United States is “just the opposite.” That reversal is not merely anecdotal. It names the problem the essay will pursue. Americans did not first encounter this form through sustained cultural transmission from communities who practiced it in socially rooted ways. They met it through display, fantasy, theatrical mediation, and erotic projection—through the “hoochy-kootch,” world’s-fair sensation, Orientalist painting and literature, burlesque, and later restaurant entertainment. By the time large numbers of American women began learning “belly dancing” in studios, YMCAs, and recreation programs, the dance was already thoroughly mediated. It had become, in effect, available as an image before it became available as a practice.
The essay’s central accomplishment is to show that this prior mediation does not simply falsify the dance. It transforms it. What results in the United States is neither an authentic continuation of Middle Eastern and North African solo improvisational dance nor a mere counterfeit. It is a new performance formation produced by unequal contact, selective borrowing, commercial adaptation, pedagogic simplification, and the changing social desires of American women. Sellers-Young’s term for this process, explicitly or tacitly throughout, is transculturation: not transport, not preservation, but remaking.
The dance in context, and the context of its distortion
One of Sellers-Young’s characteristic strengths is that she refuses to let the American version stand in for the thing from which it derives. Before tracing the U.S. history, she sketches Raks el Sharki in its indigenous performance settings with careful economy. It belongs, she writes, to “a large solo and improvisational tradition of Islamic dance” focused on the torso rather than, “as in most western based forms,” on arms and legs. The arms frame the torso; the legs augment it. That description is formal, but it is not merely morphological. It matters because it immediately relocates meaning from spectacle to organization: what kind of body is being trained, emphasized, and perceived?
Just as important is her insistence on context. Traditionally, the dance appears both “privately as entertainment by women for other women within the confines of private parties” and publicly, often in weddings, where the performer may be a professional entertainer, though there are significant regional variations. This distinction between private female sociality and public festivity prevents the dance from being reduced to a single function, and it reminds the reader that the American fixation on erotic display is just that: a fixation, not an essence. At the same time, Sellers-Young does not romanticize an untouched origin. She notes that, “under western influence in the twentieth century,” related vocabularies had already become part of “folk companies, entertainment at restaurants and a popular movement style used in films.” Even before the American case becomes the focus, she has already dislodged any fantasy of pristine authenticity.
That double movement is methodologically important. The article is not an authenticity polemic. It does not claim that there once existed a pure original later corrupted by America. Rather, Sellers-Young distinguishes historically situated forms and asks how their meanings shift when their social grounds change. This is one of the earliest clear statements of a position she would refine throughout her career: movement cannot be extracted from event, pedagogy, audience, and institution without becoming something else.
Orientalism as precondition
The essay’s historical account of Western reception is concise but conceptually sharp. Sellers-Young places the entrance of Raks el Sharki into Western consciousness in the nineteenth century, “following Napoleon’s successful campaign in Egypt,” when travelers, painters, and writers sought the “exotic environment” of North Africa and the Middle East. Their representations ranged, she notes, from “the clinical” to “the picturesque.” But however different in tone, they shared a common framing function. They made the dance legible to Europe and America as part of an eroticized Orient.
The French term danse du ventre already registers this translation. The name isolates a body part and converts a culturally embedded movement form into a spectacle of anatomy. That naming is a small but telling instance of the essay’s broader argument: a dance begins to change when it is redescribed through a foreign perceptual regime. Sellers-Young explicitly invokes Edward Said here, and rightly so, but she does not remain at the level of literary critique. Orientalism in this essay is not simply a discourse hovering above performance; it is the condition through which bodies are watched, copied, sold, and eventually inhabited.
The world’s fairs are therefore pivotal. At Philadelphia, Paris, and especially the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exhibition, performers billed as “Little Egypt” rendered the form both notorious and lucrative. Their performances were “considered highly erotic to the western eye” and “quickly imitated” in burlesque as the “hoochy-kootch.” This is the first major American translation of the form: from situated solo dance to commercialized fantasy of Eastern female sexuality. Sellers-Young’s phrasing—“to the western eye”—is crucial. It locates eroticism not only in the dance but in the gaze that produced it. What was made visible was not simply the dance itself but a Western desire for the East as sensual, available, and displayable.
That insight would become a central feature of Sellers-Young’s later belly dance scholarship, where Orientalism is never treated as an abstract ideology alone but as an embodied structure of reception. Already here one sees the beginnings of her mature refusal of simple binaries. The dance is neither inherently erotic nor free of erotic charge; rather, its erotic significance is historically organized by who watches, who performs, where, and under what assumptions.
From fantasy to participation
The article’s most original historical move is to explain not only how the dance was sexualized but how it became available to ordinary American women as something to do. For decades, Sellers-Young suggests, the form remained largely an object of distant fantasy, encountered through stage exoticism, film, and Orientalist imagery. Women could desire or imagine through it, but they did not yet occupy it as a widespread embodied practice. The decisive shift comes after the Second World War.
Sellers-Young correlates this change with several converging developments: women’s greater mobility after wartime labor, increased leisure in postwar domestic life, Mediterranean-themed popular films, postwar immigration from the Middle East, and the proliferation of restaurants featuring live performers. What had been “far away and inaccessible” became local and repeatable. This is a subtle but important account of cultural transmission. The restaurant is not simply a venue; it is a mechanism of domestication. There the dance becomes proximate, observable at close range, imitable. Women are “not separated from the performer by the proscenium arch or the screen.” They see not a distant Orient but “regular entertainment at the local ethnic restaurant.”
The essay’s account of the 1960s and 1970s then introduces a second enabling condition: the period’s broader revolt against bodily repression. The “flower children’s” repudiation of puritanical attitudes and belief in “the body’s natural expressiveness” created a climate in which belly dance could appear not merely as exotic entertainment but as a usable movement language. Women “at first watched and then tried to imitate” the dancers they saw. In this sentence, imitation is historical hinge. Watching becomes doing; fantasy becomes technique; spectatorship becomes pedagogy.
By the 1970s, the scale of the phenomenon is national. The article notes instruction in “studios, YMCAs, and local park and recreation departments,” the publication of codifying manuals, and media claims that more than a million American women were taking classes. Sellers-Young’s point is not simply that the dance became popular. It is that popularity depended less on straightforward ethnic continuity than on a specifically American need: a search for embodied sensuality outside the dominant options offered by Western theatrical dance and everyday gender norms.
Pedagogy as cultural engine
If the essay has a hidden conceptual center, it lies in Sellers-Young’s treatment of teaching. Later in her career she would insist repeatedly that technique is not neutral, that pedagogical systems produce kinds of consciousness. Here that argument appears in germinal form. She identifies three types of teachers in the United States: professionally trained Near Eastern performers, second-generation immigrants who learned at family gatherings, and American women who learned from the first two groups and then taught others. The third became “the largest group.”
This demographic fact matters because it explains the formal and conceptual reorganization of the dance. Most classes, Sellers-Young observes, did not follow systematic Western dance pedagogy, but neither did they sustain tightly bounded regional traditions. Instead they typically followed “the oriental pattern of watch and imitate,” yet in fragmentary fashion. The classes often lacked warm-ups, structured combinations, or cumulative sequencing. Rather than transmit a coherent stylistic system, they offered “a series of separate steps or movements picked at random from the teachers’ own repertoire.” A class might teach “a step from Egypt followed by another from Morocco, or Turkey, or Iran.” Improvisation might be added at the end, and once a student seemed ready she was encouraged to costume herself and perform.
This is one of the essay’s most significant insights. Transculturation does not happen only at the level of representation or ideology; it occurs in class structure, sequencing, memory practices, bodily preparation, and the very scale at which movements are taught. A repertoire detached from social occasion and regional coherence becomes available for recombination. Out of this pedagogy emerges “a medium of its own commonly referred to as belly dancing.” In other words, American belly dance is produced not merely by misrepresentation but by the practical conditions of learning.
Sellers-Young is not contemptuous of this process. She does not dismiss the resulting form as fake. But she is exact about what has occurred: steps from multiple traditions have been combined into a new genre adapted to American social and performance needs. This anticipates her later larger claim that dances travel through bodies and institutions, not as stable essences but as repertoires reorganized by new desires, markets, and systems of training.
Restaurant choreography and the making of spectacle
The essay’s detailed description of the American restaurant solo is exemplary in Sellers-Young’s oeuvre because it shows how close description can itself be argument. She outlines a performance of roughly twenty minutes divided into several distinct sections: entrance in a decorated two-piece costume with veil; a lively opening in common time; veil work built around “reveal and conceal”; a more sharply accented folk-like section; perhaps a dramatic floor descent such as the “Turkish drop”; a slow floor sequence featuring “splits and undulating backbends,” sometimes with sword or tray balancing; a rapid drum solo with shimmies and upper/lower torso opposition; and a concluding circulation through the audience encouraging the tucking of dollar bills into the costume.
This is not just ethnographic inventory. It is a map of Americanization. The sequence intensifies visual tease, virtuosity, gymnastic novelty, and direct audience transaction. It packages movement into an entertainment arc designed for consumption. Sellers-Young’s earlier distinction between indigenous contexts and American ones here becomes palpable. The dance has been restructured by the restaurant/nightclub economy into a form that rewards revelation, contrast, climax, and tipping. What matters is not simply that this differs from Middle Eastern practice, but that the differences disclose what U.S. audiences expect a female dancing body to provide.
The “bellygram” sharpens the point. Performed often for male birthday celebrants, it adapts the restaurant solo into a more overt ritual of heterosexual embarrassment and flirtation. Sellers-Young calls its “obvious sexism” what it is, and she notes the ambivalence many dancers feel toward this work. Yet she is equally attentive to economics: bellygrams pay substantially better than restaurant engagements and often subsidize costumes, workshops, and even professional survival. This refusal of moral simplification is characteristic. The same form that enables women’s bodily confidence can also reproduce male-centered sexual entertainment. Commercial agency and objectification are not cleanly separable.
What emerges is an understanding of dance as socially multivalent rather than ideologically uniform. A dancer may dislike the sexism of bellygrams and still depend on them materially. She may perform avant-garde feminist ritual one night and dance in a “rather seedy Greek restaurant” the next. Sellers-Young’s ethnographic imagination is especially strong when she shows that contradictory meanings do not cancel each other; they coexist in the same performance economy.
Female power, ritual invention, and the uses of borrowed form
The article’s most delicate and perhaps most controversial section concerns those American performers who treated belly dance not primarily as entertainment but as a medium of female power. Sellers-Young discusses figures such as Dionella Gioseffi, whose Earth Dancing framed the movement style as a means for women to recover an “inherited female power” residing in the body, and a Seattle-area circle of performers—Laurel Gray, Tahia Alibeck, Delilah, Kathleen Balducci—whose work fused belly dance vocabulary with ritual structure, goddess imagery, and feminist theatre.
Sellers-Young is careful here in ways that later scholarship would only amplify. She does not claim that these works preserve ancient Middle Eastern ritual or that their goddess cosmologies are historically continuous with the dance’s source cultures. Rather, she shows how American women used belly dance vocabulary to invent symbolic structures adequate to their own needs. In Phases of the Moon; Faces of the Mother, for example, the four goddess figures—virgin, lover, mother, destroyer—are staged through a recurring ribbon device and a sequence of solos, all articulated in what has “become identified as belly dancing”: “undulating torso, arms and hands with movements that constantly extend away from the solar plexus and then return to it.” The movement remains recognizably tied to the genre, but its semantic horizon shifts from ethnic entertainment to feminist cosmology.
Similarly, Delilah’s The Calling of the Oracle is described as a journey from conscious to unconscious movement, layered through costume, nature imagery, synthesized sound, and a culminating use of movement from the zar. Sellers-Young’s interest lies less in adjudicating authenticity than in showing how ritualized theatricality emerges when a borrowed movement vocabulary is asked to bear new symbolic burdens.
This is the article’s boldest claim: that women turned to this non-Western form because “established artistic mediums” did not allow them to express certain dimensions of embodied female experience. Her strongest phrasing comes in the conclusion, where she writes that until belly dancing became popular, “there were no forms historically rooted in western theatre that expressed the cyclical process of the female’s natural reproductive powers.” That sentence belongs unmistakably to a moment in feminist discourse shaped by the 1970s and 1980s, and from a contemporary perspective it invites scrutiny. Its language of “natural reproductive powers” and female essence is historically situated; later Sellers-Young would become more cautious about such formulations and more alert to the risks of grounding gender in biology or myth. Yet within the essay, the claim is not merely essentialist assertion. It is an attempt to explain why this particular dance, already burdened by Orientalist fantasy, could nonetheless feel necessary to American women seeking a bodily language of sensuality, cycle, and power.
The article’s distinctive value lies in the fact that it neither dismisses this feminist use as fantasy nor accepts it as timeless truth. It registers the attraction and the tension.
Authenticity, theatrical adaptation, and blurred categories
Another important thread concerns those dancers and companies who sought greater fidelity to regional traditions. Sellers-Young notes performers and teachers such as Aishi Ali, Ibrahim Farrah, and Morocco, who studied with culture-bearers or traveled abroad in order to understand the form “as it is presented in the Middle East.” Yet even here she is attentive to the complications of transmission. Once learned, these dances are often adapted “for the theatre,” incorporating movements in ways “pleasing to a Western audience” and not necessarily authentic to their original environment. Only in cases such as the Reda Company, where choreographies were created for theatrical presentation within the country of origin and then restaged abroad, does the issue take a somewhat different shape.
The key point is not that authenticity is impossible but that staging itself is transformative. In the American belly dance world, regionally distinct female dance forms, folkloric reconstructions, social dances, and cabaret solos become intermingled to the point that “many participants, either performer or audience, are unable to keep the two separate.” This blurring is not an unfortunate side effect; it is constitutive of the transcultured field Sellers-Young is describing. The American category “belly dance” does not just contain multiple things. It actively collapses distinctions that mattered elsewhere.
Here again the essay anticipates later Sellers-Young. The question is not whether a form is “really” authentic in some absolute sense, but how different claims to authenticity operate in specific institutional and perceptual settings. The theatre, the workshop, the ethnic restaurant, and the feminist concert all authorize different versions of truth.
Male dancers and the destabilizing of gender essence
One of the essay’s most useful correctives appears in its discussion of male performers. Having outlined feminist appropriations that tie the form to childbirth, fertility, and goddess power, Sellers-Young introduces an important complication. Belly dancing in the United States, though “primarily performed by females,” also has “well-known male proponents.” Their presence unsettles any easy identification of the movement vocabulary with women’s reproductive bodies.
Her formulation is telling: in the United States these male dancers have “moved the interpretation of the movement from its identification with the female body and child birth to its more generalized association with sensuality and fertility.” Even if one finds the term “fertility” still too broad or metaphoric, the critical move is clear. Gendered meaning does not inhere permanently in the steps. It is made in context. A movement vocabulary that some women experience as a way of recovering specifically female bodily knowledge can also be used by men to explore pleasure, grace, and sensual expressivity.
This is a small section of the article, but a consequential one. It marks Sellers-Young’s resistance to simple bodily essentialism even from within a feminist frame that often flirted with it. In her later work on male raqs sharqi dancers, this tension would become central: gender in dance is not fixed by anatomy but negotiated through costume, audience, lineage, social respectability, and representational history. The 1992 essay already contains that revision in embryo.
Contradiction as structure, not failure
The article’s concluding pages are especially revealing because they gather the disparate scenes—burlesque descendant, bellygram, restaurant entertainment, ethnic study, feminist ritual theatre, male performance—without forcing them into a single evaluative hierarchy. “Belly dancing in the United States bears little or no resemblance to Raks el Sharki and its related forms,” Sellers-Young writes. Yet what follows is not denunciation but a mapping of contradictory uses. The dance has “served as a means by which women find power within themselves and their bodies.” It has also catered to “male fantasies.” It has enabled female performers to define “their sensual identity” in different environments. It has supported experimentation in lifestyle and self-conception; it has also functioned as wage labor in commercial settings.
The quotation from Audre Lorde is strategically placed. The erotic is “a resource,” “a considered source of power and information,” corrupted when oppression suppresses it. Sellers-Young uses Lorde to name the experiential force many women found in the dance without denying the compromised cultural machinery through which they found it. This balancing act is the article’s real intellectual intervention. The dance is not reducible either to exploitation or to liberation. It is a contradictory social form in which both can occur, often through the same body.
Such an argument now seems familiar in dance and performance studies, but in 1992 it was a significant reframing. Much writing on belly dance tended toward one of two simplifications: celebration of timeless female wisdom or dismissal as Orientalist kitsch. Sellers-Young instead treats American belly dance as a modern cultural formation whose complexity is precisely the point. It is made out of fantasy, yes, but fantasy can still become a vehicle for real bodily change. It can commodify, but commodification does not exhaust the meanings practitioners create. It can borrow inaccurately, but borrowing may answer experiential needs unmet by dominant forms.
A career taking shape
Within Sellers-Young’s larger body of work, this essay is consequential not because it offers a fully matured theory—much of the later nuance around appropriation, tarab, improvisation, and historical specificity is still to come—but because it formulates several enduring commitments with unusual clarity.
First, it establishes performance as a diagnostic of social transformation. The changing meanings of Raks el Sharki in America track shifts in women’s public life, leisure, pedagogy, sexuality, and artistic aspiration. Dance is not background decoration to these changes; it is one of the ways they become physically thinkable.
Second, it begins Sellers-Young’s sustained insistence that borrowed forms do intellectual and affective work in their adopted settings. American women turned to belly dance because it offered a bodily syntax not readily available in Western concert traditions as they encountered them. Whether one accepts every formulation of female embodiment in the essay, the larger claim remains strong: movement forms become important when they solve problems of expression that existing forms leave unresolved.
Third, the article introduces pedagogy and performance context as active agents of transformation. A dance becomes something else not only because it is ideologically misread, but because it is learned through fragmented imitation, taught by heterogeneous instructors, staged in restaurants, monetized through tipping and bellygrams, and recoded in workshops and theatres. This practical attentiveness to how forms are transmitted would later become central to Sellers-Young’s scholarship on Japanese dance, actor training, and somatics.
Finally, the essay reveals an early version of the ethical tension that would persist throughout her career. Cross-cultural embodiment can be genuinely transformative; it can also be appropriative, romanticizing, and historically flattening. The answer is not to deny either side but to hold them together. This article does exactly that, even when its own period language bears the marks of the discourses it studies.
What remains most valuable in Raks El Sharki: Transculturation of a Performance Form is its refusal to settle too quickly what American belly dance “is.” Sellers-Young shows instead how the form becomes a field of negotiations among Orientalist display, immigrant contact, women’s self-fashioning, theatrical reinvention, and shifting gender codes. The dance travels, but not as a stable object. It is remade by the bodies that learn it and by the worlds that ask it to mean. In that sense, the essay is already doing what Sellers-Young’s later scholarship would do with greater theoretical range: demonstrating that movement is where culture does some of its most consequential thinking.
Reflect with VABS