Carolyn Gage blog: Violence Against Women is Nothing to Dance About
http://carolyngage.weebly.com/2/post/2013/02/movement-vs-dance-moves.html
Carolyn Gage’s blog challenges the One Billion Rising Movement — Dancing to End Violence Against Women. She is not dancing on February 14 because “bouncy dancing with sexy moves … feels disrespectful to me and to the hundreds of women in my life who have been raped, harassed, mutilated, terrorized, and murdered by men.”
I try to picture flashmobs of Native Americans doing a peppy dance number to protest the horrors of genocide, the Indian schools, the ongoing treaty violations. I try to imagine flashmobs of African Americans in choreographed upbeat numbers, bringing awareness to the fact that one out of nine Black males will be imprisoned in their lifetime. I consider the potential effectiveness of Pakistani flashmobs all over Youtube in a dance to protest the drones.
She remembers her mentor Julia Penelope, who died two weeks ago, who decried the “agentless passive” and gender-neutral language of “domestic violence.” How did the shift from “John beat Mary” to “Mary is a battered woman” come about?
