1.31 - I-Wen Chang

Throwing Out Leader-Follower Rules: Gender-shifting in Taiwanese Salsa Today
12pm
Conference room, 160

Salsa is a transnational and transcultural dance form that has
traveled from the Americas to many other countries. In the past five
years, it has become a craze among young professionals in Taiwan.
Inevitably, salsa is represented differently in various cultural
contexts. In this paper, I argue that the notion of "flow" in salsa
practice, the Confucian discipline of the female body, and the
economic accessibility of salsa in Taiwan are contextual elements
without which it is impossible to situate the social meaning of salsa
dancing in Taiwan in its proper light. In the Taiwanese salsa scene,
not only do female salsa practitioners gain agency and assert their
power to challenge traditional values, but male salsa practitioners
also find a space to perform and enjoy their femininity without being
judged. There are two imperatives for this study: 1) to subvert the
dominant notion in academia about the immobile gender rules at play in
salsa; 2) to illustrate the diversity salsa practice using Taiwan as a
case study where it has not yet been discussed in the growing
scholarship on Asian performance.

I-Wen Chang is a Culture and Performance Ph.D. student at the
department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance in the University of
California, Los Angeles. She holds a MA degree in Art Theory and
Criticism from the Taipei National University of the Arts. Her master
thesis is titled "Beyond Representation: Interpreting Pina Bausch's
Dance Theater and Its Significance to the Contemporary Arts." I-Wen is
a trained Chinese folkdancer and salsa dancer. Her research interests
include phenomenology in social dance, corporeal representations,
gender issues, cultural hegemony, and post-colonialism. Specifically,
she focuses on how pair-dancing becomes a means of communication and
enables social mobility, how corporeal practices construct national
identity, how the Taiwanese encounter the West through corporeal
practices under globalization, and how salsa is represented
differently in various cultural contexts. I-Wen is the special
correspondent for the Artistic Magazine (Taiwan), the art critic for
the ARTCO (Taiwan), and the co-editor of a Taipei based experimental
dance semi-annual periodical titled BINDO PAPER."