GENDER CHOREOGRAPHIES: BODY, IMAGE AND PERFORMANCE AMONG YOUNG URBAN WORKERS IN CONTEMPORARY ARGENTINA.

BLÁZQUEZ, GUSTAVO

Panjim. Goa INDIA

Workshop; CULTURAL STUDIES WORKSHOP 2006. CULTURES OF THE BODY.; 2006

CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN SOCIAL SCIENCES, CALCUTTA.

The choreographic figures, according to our hypotheses (Blázquez,2004), can be described as designs encouraged by the bodies and the energy of hundred of organized dancers according to codes and traditions through which the meaning of the dance is built. By means of these performances the agents develop subjectivities in gender, racial moral and aesthetic terms. The choreographies, as long as they are less spontaneous and more dependent of an explicit process of learning than other performances, constitute some privileged practices for the observation of the participation of the body techniques (Mauss, 1971) in the processes of performative constitution of the self. Conjugating the contributions of the Performance Studies (Schechner, 1988; Turner, 1986) with theories of gender performativity (Butler, 1990), we analyze the choreographic practices of these subaltern young and adolescents in a double dimension. On one hand, the choreographies were analyzed as performances and I studied the ways in which the agents put their body in scene during the dance. On the other hand, this presentation consider the choreographies like performative utterances by means of which the agents corporally experience its place in the social/sexual hierarchy, display different subjectivities, and embody a certain image of the self. In this sense, through the dance, the dancers become what they are or what they say they are.