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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Strategic Silences: Voiceless Heroes In Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen
Strategic Silences: Voiceless Heroes In Fairy Tales, Jeana Jorgensen
Jeana Jorgensen
In a number of international fairy tale types, such as ATU 451 ("The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers"), the female protagonist voluntarily stops speaking in order to attain the object of her quest. In ATU 451, found in the collected tales of the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen as well as in oral tradition, the protagonist remains silent while weaving the shirts needed to disenchant her brothers from their birdlike forms. While this silence is undoubtedly disempowering in some ways as she cannot defend herself from persecution and accusations of wickedness, here I argue that the choice to remain silent …
Dancing The Numinous: Sacred And Spiritual Techniques Of Contemporary American Belly Dancers, Jeana Jorgensen
Dancing The Numinous: Sacred And Spiritual Techniques Of Contemporary American Belly Dancers, Jeana Jorgensen
Jeana Jorgensen
In this paper, I explore how contemporary American practitioners of belly dance (as Middle Eastern dance and its many varieties are often called in the English-speaking world) conceptualize not only the spiritual dimensions of their dance, but also how the very notion of performance affects sacred and spiritual dance practices. Drawing on interviews with this community, I describe the techniques of sacred and spiritual belly dancers, how these dancers theorize performance, and how the conflicts inherent to patriarchal mind-body dualism are resolved in these practices. My purpose here is twofold: to document an emergent dance tradition and to analyze its …