Women Dancing Back—and Forth: Resistance and Self-Regulation in Belfast Salsa

Introduction: Belfast Salsa Nights

It’s a Tuesday night in Belfast. Christina and Leanne are running their salsa class in Mercury’s basement dance room.¹ Afterwards, Christina has arranged to go dancing at the Hairy Hound with her friend Annabel, who is attending Christina and Leanne’s class. Leanne will go home and prepare for her school teaching the following day. Christina wants to forget the illnesses and stresses back home for the night and needs no preparation to be at her reception desk the next day. Annabel is in her mid-fifties. She won’t go to any classes, or she won’t go out, alone. It’s not healthy, seemly, or the done thing in her mind. This attitude makes it difficult for Annabel. She’s been a widow for nearly thirty years, and now that the children have grown up, her time to herself has to be carefully coordinated with others. She loves to dance but she is fearful that she might appear single, desperate, alone, and looking for a mate beyond the three-minute dance partner. She sits in the Hairy Hound with Christina, who is more youthful, in her thirties, dressed to attract attention, but in a married way. For Annabel, the salsa nights are a night out rather than a night in alone. They are a chance to move to the music she loves and to gossip and socialize and catch up with her female friends. For Christina, the salsa night is an opportunity to dance after the salsa job and a chance to show off how attractive she still is before going home to the husband she so dearly loves.

Both Christina and Annabel are Protestant women; they are conscious of their religious/ ethnic backgrounds in a Catholic dominated salsa scene and occasionally surprised when one of their salsa friends turns out to live along the Falls Road when they drop them off for the night. This is the part of town that they’ve lived next to for all of their lives but never ventured into until now. This means that little adjustments in their conversations (where they live, where they grew up, what their husbands do or did) and in their attire (an absence of Remembrance Day poppies come November,² for instance) are necessary when interacting with the other dancers.

Debbie, a Catholic woman living in one of these Catholic quarters, is a very experienced salsa dancer. Some would call her obsessed. She is in her forties but wants all to know that she is still fertile and menstruating. She teaches salsa classes to supplement her meager income as a classroom assistant. She also teaches private classes to individuals in her home. She has been in and out of relationships with salsa dancers and had a salsa love child, who died from a cot death (sudden infant death syndrome). Christina and Annabel’s standard joke is that “you can see her ovaries screaming” at the men she dances with and talks to during the salsa nights. She dances close to the men and will talk and make herself known to new male dancers, showing them moves and sometimes going on dates with them. This makes her unpopular with the many other women dancing salsa. Debbie believes, however, that she acts out what she considers to be her own feminist philosophy. She read Simone de Beauvoir at university and from it she created her woman’s pleasure principle, which she described to me the first time I visited her for an interview. “I like a man to go down on me.” At first she suspected me, the researcher, of being a British soldier with my short hair, English accent, and Protestant sounding name. She was wary but interested. Another aspect of Debbie’s feminist philosophy is that she believes the men she dances with are trying to embarrass her if they try something new or unexpected on the dance floor. She can’t be made to look stupid or foolish on the dance floor. She has too much riding on these nights...