UC Riverside

"Performing Indian Dance" is an interdisciplinary project that reveals the dynamics of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in Malaysian Indian dance. I demonstrate that the emergence of prominent multi-ethnic male dancers in Malaysia is enabled by a unique configuration of "bumiputera" ("son of soil") ethnic-based state discourse, cosmopolitanism (ability to move fluently across multiple spaces), Indian dance institutional structures, global capitalism, and gender mobility, which simultaneously overshadows the visibility of female dancers. I stress that the very conditions that enable the emergence of men dancers simultaneously affect women dancers and render them variously "invisible" on Malaysian stages. I posit that the discourses of ethnicity, gender, cosmopolitanism, community, and family come together differently for men and women, causing them to negotiate gender and sexuality in different ways. This research trajectory explores the ability of dance practitioners, particularly male dancers, to perform gender and sexuality fluidly, along a spectrum and in a way not possible in everyday life due to the local regulatory structures. Although the nation seeks ways to regulate marginalized gender and sexual identities, this dissertation demonstrates the ways in which male dancers claim agency through provocative choreographies onstage and the acts of embracing "deviant" gender and sexual practices offstage. This project identifies the policing of female sexuality in the increasingly Islamic state as the key to male artists' hypervisibility. By examining gender relations and gendered division of labor, I argue in this dissertation that although female dancers may not always be visible as onstage performers, they assert power and authority through their backstage and offstage labor. I draw on ethnographic research in dance institutions located at western Peninsula/r Malaysia to interrogate gender relations, sexual politics, ethnic inequalities, cosmopolitan practices, and transnational dancing bodies. The examination of Indian dance practice, through the intersection of local and global discourses, from the Southeast Asian context, is aimed at contributing new insights to the field of dance studies.