Educated Feet: Tap Dancing and Embodied Feminist Pedagogies at a Small Liberal Arts College

When I was all but dissertation (ABD), a senior feminist scholar advised me to remove tap dancing from my CV. The professor insisted that tap dancing would count against me on the market as it would be considered "unprofessional." I argued against the advice because it was an extremely conscious decision for me to start including tap dancing on my CV. For years, I had separated tap from my scholarly work. Even though I had been teaching noncredit intro and intermediate tap dancing at my degree granting institution for years, my "actual" research was on South Asian feminisms.¹ But I had also started to talk about the history of tap dancing in my women's studies classes as a way to get the students to think beyond violence against women as the only feminist topic at their disposal. Tap history had animated my women's studies students and made me rethink the separation I had made between "silly" tap dance and "professional" feminist academic work. Far from being unprofessional, tap dancing can be a vehicle for teaching the history and legacy of the intersections of race, gender, and class oppression in the United States.

In this article, I examine tap dance as an embodied feminist pedagogy through a course I teach called Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance at Colby College, a small liberal arts college (SLAC) in Waterville, Maine. The course combines introductory tap dancing with elements of critical race theory and black feminist thought. Students learn to tap dance and perform the "Shim Sham Shimmy," a dance known as the national anthem of tap dancers. They also learn how the dominant history of tap tends to highlight the contributions from black male tappers in the early twentieth century, and the recovery of the tap tradition by white/nonblack female performers in the late twentieth century. I use this history of tap as a paradigm for "all the women are white, all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave" whereby tap is either authenticated through the black male experience or legitimated as a form of art by white female performers.² In Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance, I use embodied feminist pedagogies to teach through the concept of intersectionality and to highlight the educational nature of the beat.

I begin this article with a historical overview of tap dance. Tap is so intimately tied to the intersections of class, gender, and racial discrimination in the United States, while simultaneously tied to resistance and activism against such discriminations. I then discuss the (inter)disciplinary challenges of creating a syllabus for Critical Race Feminisms and Tap Dance drawing from music, dance and performance theory, black feminist thought, and cultural studies. Finally, there are particular challenges involved in teaching this class at a SLAC. From finding tapable floors, to teaching about racism to predominantly white (many times read as affluent) students. How do I, a South Asian American cis-gendered heterosexual woman, teach through the guilt and anger associated with cultural appropriation, white fragility, and racial and gendered authenticity/authority? In this article, I discuss these challenges while also highlighting how embodied feminist pedagogies helps both professors and undergraduate students to work through these challenges.

Tap Dance: A Brief History

As one of the first purely American forms of dance, tap dance's history reflects the complex racial history of the United States. The fusing of English clog, Irish jig, and African styles of dance in the early nineteenth century resulted in the creation of a new dance: tap. The first tap dancer, William Henry Lane or "Master Juba," lived and danced in the 1840s at the Five Points in New York City—an area comprised of African Americans and Irish immigrants (Stearns and Stearns 44).³ In the mid- to late nineteenth century, the blackface minstrel show pushed tap into a national spotlight as troupes such as the Virginia Minstrels and San Francisco Minstrels brought tap dance to white working-class audiences throughout the United States. There was even a minstrel show that came to the...