Salsa is a transnational and transcultural dance form that has traveled from the Americas to many other countries where it has taken on diverse meanings among its participants. In the past five years, it has become a craze among young professionals in Taiwan. In this paper, I argue that the notion of "flow" in salsa practice, the Confucian discipline of the female body, and the economic accessibility of salsa in Taiwan are contextual elements without which it is impossible to situate its social meaning. In the Taiwanese salsa scene, not only do female salsa practitioners gain agency and assert their power to challenge traditional values, but male salsa practitioners also find a space to perform femininity and to enjoy their embodiment of the female role. 

There are two imperatives for this study: 1) to subvert the dominant notion in academia about the immobile gender rules at play in salsa; 2) to illustrate the diversity of salsa practices around the world using Taiwan as a case study where it has not yet been discussed in the growing scholarship on Asian performance.

This study investigates how dancing salsa emerges as a strategy to address issues of gender, class, and national identity formation in a transnational context, with a focus on Taiwan. I examine the globalization of salsa as a cosmopolitan dance, the intersubjective experience in partner dance, and the ways that gender and national identities are choreographed through salsa’s transnational circuits. In order to trace the trajectory of agency in Taiwanese salsa practice, I propose and develop two special theoretical terms: flow and flirtation. This new approach challenges the individual emphasis of much applied phenomenology by looking at how salsa allows for a multiplicity of intersubjective experiences. By reading salsa as a site of body politics, I argue that salsa enables Taiwanese dancers to flirt with a temporary and imagined identity.

I examine identity formation in Taiwan in relation to a changing, culturally and historically constructed body (Confucian body, modern body, combative and national body). By contrasting salsa with a genealogy of Taiwanese corporeal conformity, I investigate how salsa provides a semi-sanctioned space for rule-breaking in Taiwan. I argue that Taiwanese salsa practitioners embody exoticism and eroticism as an alternative strategy to dominant Chinese norms that mandate a highly sedate and regulated use of the body. I examine the embodied sovereignty by Taiwanese salsa practitioners. Salsa enables Taiwanese dancers to imagine a future characterized by a global citizenship rooted in Western modernity. This soft resistance is especially useful for Taiwanese who are in a precarious nation-state position to differentiate themselves from a Chinese identification.

This project is centered on my archival research, and ethnographic fieldwork of salsa practice and performance in Taiwan, Los Angeles, and Shanghai. I ground my argument in the combination of choreographic analysis, national and transnational discourses, cultural studies, and intercultural performance analysis. I look at specific examples, including salsa performances and art works by Larry Shao, Japanese salsa music by Orquesta de la Luz, and the salsa version of the Rite of Spring by Emanuel Gat. My research intervenes in critical interdisciplinary theories of phenomenology, dance and performance studies, East Asian Studies, and gender studies.