American Belly Dancing Analysis

The wake of September 11, according to Amira Jarmakani, came to form an ‘imperialism-through-freedom discourse’, which represented the events of this day as a symbol of shock rather than a tragic, continuation of hostilities in the political relationship between the Middle East and the United States. In this discourse, the Arab and Muslim world is home to a set of oppressive, fundamentalists, who hate American freedom and their ways of life. Moreover, Jarmakani also described the cover of the movie American Bellydancer, which displays an image of the destroyed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City with a belly dancer standing in front of it in the frame of the Statue of Liberty. As she explained it, this image represented the alignment of belly dancing with freedom, allowing the viewers to feel that belly dancing is not affiliated with the negativity surrounding the Middle East. This soon allowed people to associate belly dancing as a symbol of

Members of this movement focus on one thing: “the capacity of belly dance to help women cultivate a sense of inner freedom” (Jarmakani, AlSultany, & Shohat, p. 147). Belly dancing has also been a form of escape from the restrictive body images which are sought after in the West, in which this type of dance allows for a fuller, more curvaceous body type than ballet dancers for example. This alternative to the skinny bodies promoted in Western advertising and fashion, replaces both the fears and modernizing impulses rooted in Orientalism (Dox, p. 55). Thus allowing the women to feel that her body, regardless of size, is accepted and appreciated reclaiming their body as “powerful, creative, [and] sensual” (Maira, p.