Phantom Limbs: South Indian Dance and Immigrant Reifications of the Female Body

Abstract

Abstract This paper explores the phenomenology of migration and gender, seeking to understand how it is that a certain construction of ‘Indianness’ and of womanhood finds one form of expression in the enrolment of middle-class girls in south Indian and other ‘classical’ dance schools. The paper argues that the immigrant situation recalls and opens up to be retrieved, an earlier history of nationalism. It does so, not in the form of intellectual recall, but because the structure of affect in the immigrant present resembles an earlier crisis of the emergent middle class under British colonialism. In this situation, the patriarchal universe of the immigrant requires wives and daughters to magically function as phantom limbs, providing an unstable and illusory impression of continuing to enjoy a grip on the world. The paper interrogates this impression from the perspective of young Indian women deeply involved in Indian dance. Keywords: PhenomenologyMigrationGenderFemale BodyDancePhantom LimbBodily MemoryAffectLived TemporalityDisplacementPost-colonialismMerleau-PontyIndian Diaspora Acknowledgments The author wishes to express her thanks to her friends who shared with her their love of dance, and in the process, shared their lives and thoughts with her with such openness. The author thanks the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Journal of Intercultural Studies for spurring her to fresh revisions. Notes Dr Kalpana Ram is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University. She has recently moved into teaching from a research career as ARC Research Fellow and before that, at the Gender Relations Centre at the Australian National University. She publishes on gender, postcolonialism and the body, in the area of dance, but also in the area of class, maternity and puberty in south India where she did her ethnographic fieldwork. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKalpana Ram Dr Kalpana Ram is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University. She has recently moved into teaching from a research career as ARC Research Fellow and before that, at the Gender Relations Centre at the Australian National University. She publishes on gender, postcolonialism and the body, in the area of dance, but also in the area of class, maternity and puberty in south India where she did her ethnographic fieldwork.