Final Paper - Flamenco

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ISTANBUL BILGI UNIVERSITY

Performing Arts: Concept and Management

Final Paper

Empowering Women Through Flamenco


Table of Contents

1. Introduction ………………………………………………………………………… 3

2. Body as a discursive phenomenon …………………………………………………. 3

3. Modern discourse and a woman …………………………………………………….5

4. Flamenco and empowerment ………………………………………………………..9

5. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………. 10

6. References …………………………………………………………………………...12
1. Introduction

EMPOWERING WOMEN THROUGH FLAMENCO

Our bodies are affected by our surroundings. A hundred years ago women were liberating

themselves through dance. Stars like Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, and Isadora Duncan

were the engines of progress that played a vital role in the story of women’s liberation. With

surroundings, being unstable, bringing well-being to the bodies in various practices gets more

important day by day. I feel the need to look for and try as many relevant solutions as possible,

especially since the topic of empowerment is immediately connected to both aspects to which

dance is connected as well – bodily and psychological ones, which has a reasonable chance to be

successful.

The study of the beneficial effects of dance on an individual’s physical and mental health was

researched by many scientists. Moreover, flamenco’s effect on patients was studied in the

context of dance, music, or body psychotherapy for trauma survivors.

The current article investigates the ways flamenco can liberate and empower women in day-to-

day life as well as the traits of flamenco that can make it possible.

2. Body and Discourse

Michael Foucault defined the body as a discursive phenomenon (McWhorter, 1989).

To start with, let’s define what a discourse is. According to Michel Foucault, discourse is

attributed to the “ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of

subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them.
Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. They constitute the 'nature'

of the body, unconscious and conscious mind, and emotional life of the subjects they seek to

govern” (Weedon, 1987, p. 108). He also refers to discourse as: “…a form of power that

circulates in the social field and can attach to strategies of domination as well as those of

resistance”. (Diamond and Quinby, 1988, p. 185).

From this point, driven by the topic and problematic of the research, we can assume that

discourse forms the body, the mind, and the emotional life of an individual.

According to Foucault, the body cannot be identified clearly, it’s an object that is in constant

change, experiences growth, decline and death, so it’s unstable, cannot be predicted, it’s evasive

and cannot be understood completely. Foucault opposes putting body into the duality between

nature and culture and into the discussions, risen by this duality. For Foucault body acts as not as

an equivalent of nature that is in opposition to culture, but as an opposing element for those who

want to find a definite and unique source of liberation through nature. Body is not apolitical,

ahistorical, or clean.

So, following Foucault’s thought of body as a discursive phenomenon we can deduce that an

individual’s body and the emotions are under the constant influence of society, politics, and

history.

Language is a system. The existence of a language is explained by the purpose, which is

communication. When we make this system work to create communication, we use discourse,

where we create meanings in context. (McCarthy & Clancy, 2019). Following J. Butler in her

essay “How Can I Deny” (1997) we’ll see that the body is dependent of the language “as actively

producing or crafting a body every time we use, implicitly or explicitly, the language of

discursive construction” (p. 2).


Since women and their liberation is in the center of my article, H. Cixous’ essay “The laugh of

the Medusa” is of great value (1976). In her essay Cixous appeals to all women were driven

away by the course of the male history from writing and from their bodies and encourages them

not to be afraid and go against the capitalist machine and phallocentrism, that has been imposed

by parents or a partner. Cixous (1976) thinks than “men committed the greatest crime against

women” (p. 878): this all lead to the situation where women became their own strongest haters

and got their own strengths mobilized against themselves and resulted in the concept of anti-

narcissism for women, which can be a synonym for anti-love. Men’s conquest of women in the

course of the history made females leave their borders and lose the connection to their bodies. By

censoring the woman’s body, Cixous (1976) says, “her breath and speech also get censored”;

her body “must be heard” (p. 880) and taken, owned by a woman herself. Cixous calls to

decensor the relation of a woman to the sexuality of hers, even though women were taught to be

modest and not to express it, and to get her bodily territories back, the territories where a woman

saved so much space for guilt and shame of her own strength (1976). Through this, Cixous

(1976) believes, a female can become a “new woman” (p. 880) who takes and initiates “her own

right in every symbolic system, in every political process” (p. 880). She admits that a woman’s

personal history is a blend of histories: of all women’s, national and world histories as well as

that a woman is an essential, intrinsic part of all liberations. (Cixous, 1976).

3. Modern Discourse and a Woman

Modern discourse and a woman have a complicated relationship. Jean Elshtain formulated the

problem as: “the oppressive power of language as a tool of control over those who had been
silenced throughout history, leaving those wanting to resist that control with the task of

discovering new modes of communication.” (Saxonhouse, 2015).

Women are one of the groups that have been muted and repressed throughout history, mostly by

noble white men. The environment created by them, the environment that surrounds women

hides many dangers, which usually escape the attention of the men themselves as they don’t have

to deal with the challenges females face.

Since we’ve deduced in the previous chapter, that an individual’s body and emotions are under

the constant influence of society, politics, and history, we can notice that women as an oppressed

group experience greater hardships than an average white man.

Different factors of the modern environment can bring struggles into the life of a modern

woman. The most significant among them are:

 Physical impairment,

 An abusive partner or a family member who can inflict physical and psychological

traumas,

 An unhealthy domestic environment that causes constant stress and psychological tension

which for its part creates muscle clamps that lead to an unhealthy posture, which brings

physical and emotional discomfort and self-doubt.

Modern life is unthinkable without political discourse as well. The research study of Yarar shows

us the scale of the political influence on one woman’s body and it doesn’t bode well (2020). The

study has been performed in the framework of Turkish politics, to be exact – AKP’s politics of

female bodies which in recent years has moved from the position of liberalism and reforms onto

the rails of authoritarianism. In the early years of AKP, the party promoted an image of a
successful, educated woman, who wondrously managed to balance her work life and the house

duties which remained in place, waiting for her. Later, gender and body politics began to change:

with the appearance of new neoconservative feminism, the definition of female sexuality

changed its direction to conservative. The new political program of AKP is, as Kandiyoti states,

“a politics of resentment that encourages the projection of hatred onto groups or communities

seen as either privileged and exclusionary or as potentially treasonous (and sometimes both).

The country’s metropolitan, secular middle classes have long been routine targets of this

discourse” (2016, p. 105). It’s noteworthy to say that the AKP politicians together with pro-AKP

intellectuals and government-organized non-governmental organizations (GONGO) (Diner,

2018) developed a neoconservative feminist position and let it build up a new power block while

making other feminist and queer discourses illegal and enforcing conservative family values. The

neo-conservative power regulates the female body not only from the perspective of clothing and

behavior - but also from the point of reproductive decisions, “abortion, sexual orientation, and

pre-marital sexuality” (Yarar, 2020, p. 129). The ideology of AKP’s regime has also normalized

violence in everyday politics and practice (Kandiyoti, 2016). One of the main issues is that the

leading staff of the party advocates their perception of women’s problems in a destructive way

and uses it as a cannon to any group that stands outside of the national community defined by

AKP themselves (Yarar, 2020).

The next issue we’re coming to is “big man politics”, as defined by White (2015) and the

conservative understanding of a family (Kandiyoti, 2016). In Turkish reality, the course of the

ruling party is directed by a “big man” who is seen as a leader, father figure, and hero (White,

2015), and a conservative family in his understanding stands on the shoulders of a perfect
citizen, a husband who is the ultimate source of power and authority in a family, whilst a wife or

a mother in this family is seen as a dependent element instead of being seen as in individual.

Coming to the question of women's rights, Yarar (2020) provides us with an illustrative example:

AKP leaders explained that the ban on headscarves affects the rights not only religious, but basic

human ones, whilst the right of a female to have an abortion was not looked from her

perspective, but from the rigidly Islamic perspective of a “right” of the fetus. Another example is

when AKP in 2005 undertook such an initiative as the Commission for “Equality of Women and

Men required to access EU. Even though the female organizations insisted on the original name

for the initiative, the state preferred another title: Commission on Equal Opportunities for

Women and Men, which implies that women’s and men’s natures are different, and they should

be provided with equal opportunities. Mister Erdogan later specified on this issue, saying that he

“already thinks that women and men are not equal, but complete each other” (Yarar, 2020, p.

132) and suggested that women “need ‘equality among women’ and ‘equality among men”

(Yarar, 2020, p. 132). Looking at women from an Islamic perspective he stated that the role and

position of a woman is Motherhood and also blamed feminists for rejecting the idea of it (Yarar,

2020).

AKP, making the concept of familialism one of the key ones in their program, intended to restore

the family to fix the decline of the state. The last expressive example of not only neglecting

women’s bodily rights but erasing a woman from the contemporary political discourse is

renaming the Ministry of State for Women and Family to the Ministry of Family and Social

Policies in 2011. All these steps lead to the deterioration of the relation between women’s

problems and power relations established in the concepts of gender, ethnicity, and class

inequalities (Yarar, 2020).


4. Flamenco and empowerment

Since we’ve settled that the body and especially a female’s body is affected by history, politics,

and society, we feel the need to find ways to liberate a female’s physical body that is directly

connected to her well-being. If a bodily expression is influenced by surroundings and

experiences, then it can also be affected by flamenco.

The research by Leventhal & Chang (1991) shows us how can dance therapy be a healing tool

for battered women. The victims of domestic tend to experience “patterns of helplessness,

ambivalence, and inactivity” (Leventhal & Chang, 1991, p. 1). In contrast, flamenco motivates

them to act, helps them to embody a positive self-vision, and improves their control over bodies

and emotions.

Flamenco, an expressive dance that originated in Spain, includes in itself the following notions

of “clarity, beauty, strength, pride, and self-confidence” (Koch et al, 2019, p.1). Traumatized

patients often have issues with the control of emotions, and problems with body image and its

ownership (Tsakiris, Schuetz-Bosbach, & Gallagher, 2007); they develop avoiding both positive

and negative feelings as a tool to survive which often results in undermined personal

relationships and low confidence. (Koch et al, 2019). Strength is frequently associated with

violence for trauma survivors. As Flamenco provides feelings of “strength, pride, and well-

being” (Koch et al, 2019, p. 1), hospitals decided to implement Flamenco in the framework of

body psychotherapy. They conducted an experimental pilot research with 32 patients, where 16
of them were placed in an experimental group and had a single Flamenco Therapy interference,

and another 16 were provided with a regular treatment. The tests were created to measure an

alteration in the following aspects: well-being, body self-efficacy, interpersonal resonance, plus

experienced health, fitness, and pain levels. Analysis of the results led the researchers to

encouraging results: the indicators for well-being, experienced health level, and experienced

physical pain showed a considerable improvement in the experimental group together with the

marginal improvement of the indicator of interpersonal resonance (given that all the Flamenco

therapy intervention participants’ baseline was different, the researchers concluded that the

negative effects reduced). (Koch et al, 2019). Apart from the improvement of the indicators

listed above, Flamenco can give a feeling of being grounded and provide a resource for

addressing troubling issues distinctly and boldly. Usage of such accessories as dresses, shoes,

fans, scarves, and hair garments reinforce the themes of body image and gender identity in

therapy. Given all the results we can assume that Flamenco has a significant potential in

addressing the issues of creating a positive body image, confidence, sexual identity, and the

feeling of control of the patients’ bodies and lives. (Koch et al, 2019).

5. Conclusion

The topic of the article concerns the ways of empowering women through dance, more

specifically, Flamenco. My research hypothesizes that Flamenco has a strong potential to

increase well-being and improve the perception of body image and interpersonal resonance

which is supposed to lead to gaining autonomy and self-determination for women. Since the

body is a discursive phenomenon and language, when used in communication creates discourse,

we can assume that the body is influenced by language. H. Cixous appeals to all women who

were driven away by the course of male history from writing and their bodies and encourages
them not to be afraid and to go against the capitalist machine, oppressive patriarchy, and

phallocentrism, that has been imposed by parents or a partner, and take their bodies back, own

them and become a “new woman” who takes and initiates her right, since a woman is an

essential, intrinsic part of all liberations.

The recent change in the course of a Turkish leading party (AKP) raises serious concerns as all

the steps taken regards body politics and female sexuality lead to the deterioration of relation

between women’s problems and power relations established in the concepts of gender, ethnicity,

and class inequalities (Yarar, 2020). Under the current circumstances, when a female’s body is

being “taken away” from a woman and there is a repressive policy against sexuality, I suggest

that Flamenco has significant potential in addressing the issues of creating a positive body

image, confidence, sexual identity and the feeling of control women’s bodies and lives.
References:

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Cixous, H., Cohen, K., & Cohen, P. (1976). The laugh of the Medusa. Signs: Journal of women

in culture and society, 1(4), 875-893.

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