Transnational Desires: Brazilian Erotic Dancers in New York

4. Performing Seduction and National Identity

76 Chapter 4 Performing Seduction and National Identity On a summer day a dancer leaves the street when there is still daylight and enters the bar as if she were entering a cave. Amid dim lights, black and mirrored walls, and the smell of stale beer, she carries her bag or backpack or rolls a small suitcase containing the props for her performance: high transparent heels, G-string bikinis, small dresses, and makeup. Although the props that Brazilian dancers wear often come from Brazil, they are not so different from those of other dancers. Here and there, the colors of the Brazilian national flag are combined with casual necklaces or ankle laces made of some indigenous material. These pieces are often sold by American outlets in New York, as their agents go around the world collecting signs of exoticism with which people in the global centers adorn their bodies. In New York City, these same pieces are sold to dancers from the periphery, who then re­ exoticize themselves in the eyes of the center and in their own eyes. In the mimetic plays that characterize dancers’ performances, those floating signs of exoticism become attached to particular national bodies and are resignified in the game of seduction that happens in gentlemen’s bars. This game of seduction can be described as theater and dancers’ work as acting or, rather, performance. Dancers assume a role while they are in a bar, and in order to assume this role they must go through a transformation, much like that of an actress going onstage. Indeed, Performing Seduction and National Identity 77 the wearing of costumes and heavy makeup, and the adoption of a fictitious name for a bar persona, reinforce the idea that the bar is a separate space of theatrical performance. But the acts performed by dancers, unlike those of actors onstage, are not restricted to the bar. Although occurring in the context of the bars, dancers’ performances have continuity over time and space. On one hand, the performances seem highly standardized—the dynamics of a gentlemen’s bar involve patterns that are independent of the individual performers. The audition as an initiation rite, the slow walk of the dancer, the greetings— all seem part of the script that structures the functioning of the bars. The identity “dancer,” able to seduce a client through a performance of gender and sexuality, is formed through the repetition of highly stylized gestures and bodily movements (Butler 1997; Schechner 2002). On the other hand, in the postcolonial and transnational context of New York’s bar scene, besides having to follow a series of standardized acts as an abstract “dancer,” a woman’s performance must also have a particular appeal, something that distinguishes her from the other dancers. For a migrant dancer, the first and most significant source of identification and differentiation in the transnational context of gentle­ men’s bars is nationality. Her identity as a dancer, as a woman, is immediately marked by her nationality, which becomes both a stigmata that defines her identity, and a prop for the performance through which this very identity is constituted. Nonetheless, a dancer’s performance must balance the demand for an erotic exoticism supplied by the appeal of her nationality with her particular class, educational, and lifestyle background. Dancers’ body movements while on the stage and their “speech acts” while on the floor are ways of performing gender, nationality, class, and race simultaneously , axes that build distinctions between dancers both inside and outside of bars. Within the bar scene, Brazilian middle-class women seek to distinguish themselves from two other groups of women: “the Hispanics ” and Brazilian women from working-class backgrounds. The play of identity and distancing is embedded in multiple and complex uses of symbols, bodily movements, discourses, and representations— particularly regarding sexual control and morality—that maintain or reconfigure class separations and processes of “racialization.” 78 Transnational Desires Walking into a gentlemen’s bar, one may notice small groups of women who mostly socialize among themselves. The women in smallish Queens bars probably know all the other women dancing on the same night, at least by name and nationality, but associate mainly with women from their clique of friends. These cliques seem at first to be somewhat malleable, with women talking to various groups as they come and go from stage to dressing rooms and while working the room. However, as one looks a...