Abstract
There has been an extensive history of male dancers in North Africa and the Middle East, which was interrupted during the colonial period as British policies towards homosexuality or assumed homosexuality challenged the position of these dancers. Male dancers were introduced to the international stage during the Chicago World Fair in 1893 in which one of the dancers was a man called Mohammed. In North America in the 1970s, men were influenced by the belly dance’s popularity and began to develop public careers as dancers. The convergence of male and female dancers on the global stage has expanded the conception of the dance as female and drawn attention to the role gender plays in general.
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Sellers-Young, B. (2016). Belly Dance, Gender and Identity. In: Belly Dance, Pilgrimage and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94954-0_6
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