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  • Ambiguous Masculinities:Gender and Sexual Transgression in Contemporary Dance Works by Senegalese Men
  • Amy Swanson (bio)

In mid-January 2016, a photo of the rising Senegalese pop star Wally Ballago Seek, adorned in red skinny jeans, a black peacoat with a thick fur trim, and a pink handbag, circulated the Internet (see Timera 2016). The seemingly innocent photo of the young star sparked a widespread and severe outcry in the context of an ongoing masculinity crisis. Suturing a Senegalese male celebrity and an accessory perceived as feminine—the handbag—the photo unleashed rampant fear that the widely admired Seek was promoting homosexuality, or worse, that he was homosexual.1 Public figures including Seek's friend, the musician Baba Hamdy, participated in the outcry, claiming in an open letter that "it serves nothing to defend the indéfendable [sic] … in my humble opinion, we have to straighten out Waly" (Soidri 2016).2 On January 30, Seek publicly reaffirmed his mutually constitutive heterosexuality, masculinity, Muslim identity, and national belonging in an act meant to assuage concerned fans.3 In front of nearly two thousand audience members at the expansive Grand Théâtre National in Dakar, wearing a blue boubou4 with gold embroidery, a clear indication of his Muslim identity, Seek destroyed the pink handbag with a pair of scissors to resounding cheers and applause (see Leral.net 2016). Following a heartfelt apology and declaration of his love for Senegal, un-coincidentally staged at the national theater, this instance performatively undid the unacceptable yoking of Senegaleseness and homosexuality invoked by the photo.

L'affaire sac-à-main, or the handbag case, as it came to be known, is part of a series of instances over the past decade in Senegal in which gender or sexual transgressions are forced into public discourse, thereby catalyzing a widespread oppositional response in protection of "Senegaleseness" or "Africanness." Rising Islamic fundamentalism, the internationalization of Western human rights agendas, and dire economic conditions are a few of the factors that have contributed to the current anti-homosexual backlash in Senegal (Coly 2013; M'Baye 2013). However, l'affaire sac-à-main is not the full story. A few months following this event, a handful of Senegalese male choreographers, all of whom identify as Muslim, offered performances that present the Muslim Senegalese male body in ways that allow for effeminacy and homoeroticism. Hardo Kâ's Dieu, le diable et moi (2016), which premiered at the annual Festival Duo-Solo Danse in Saint-Louis in the north of Senegal, Mamadou Dieng and Thierno Diédhiou's Laabu Bal (2016), and Bamba Diagne's Gualankor (2016), both created and performed at Andréya Ouamba's Ateliers Expériences et Corps (AEx-Corps) workshop in Dakar, offered ambiguous assemblages of masculinity that disrupt the [End Page 47] coherency of the response to the handbag case.5 At the same time, they denied (Kâ), omitted (Dieng and Diédhiou), or obscured (Diagne) any perspective in favor of minoritarian gender and sexual subject positions in their verbal articulations of their work in rehearsals and public discussions.

I suggest that this discrepancy between verbal framing and staged performance signals the potentiality of contemporary dance to serve as a platform where nonconforming sexualities and gender expressions may be constructed and performed. As a liminal space forged through entangled local and global spheres, contemporary dance exists both within and outside the public domain where Wally Seek's photo circulated and where logocentric discourse is compulsorily heterosexist. Possibilities other than what is accepted verbally briefly materialize through carefully choreographed, intentionally ambiguous bodily enactments. These enactments contain the potential for spectators to consider subjectivities that are widely disavowed outside the theater and to alter their perceptions of them, as Susan Manning's conceptualization of cross-viewing helps to delineate (Manning 2004). To some extent, the masculinities embodied in these performances mirror the multiple interpretative lenses staged by pioneering men in modern dance in 1930s United States, a time of heightened crackdowns on gay bars and drag balls and increased legislation prohibiting the representation of homosexuality. Julia Foulkes describes the "undercurrent" or "allusion" of homosexuality beneath the veneer of virile masculinity—a necessary means toward legitimizing male dancers—in the work of...

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