Bodies, Embodiment, and the Experience of Passion: What Tango Dancers Can Teach Us
Thursday 05 March, 2015
6 - 8pm, $0
Columbia University, Knox Hall
606 West 122 Street, Room 403
Biographical researchers depend upon communication with their informants, usually in the form of a chronological story about their lives. However, not all experience can be put so easily into words, let alone into a linear narrative with a beginning and an end. Drawing upon her research with people who are passionate about dancing Argentine tango, Davis will explore how they make sense of this passion – a passion which is highly embodied, attached to strongly-felt emotions, and often implicated in unexpected and sometimes dramatic biographical transformations. Passion is not only difficult to capture in words, but it can be difficult to reconcile with people’s sense of who they are or how their lives should be. Davis will argue that tango dancers have much to teach us about people’s life experiences and biographical trajectories, but also about some of the shortcomings of the discursive approaches we use to investigate them. But most importantly, Davis hopes to show that by ignoring passion as an embodied experience we fail to do justice to what makes life worth living.
Kathy Davis is senior researcher at the Institute of History and Culture at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Kathy Davis has a long-standing interest in feminist scholarship on women’s bodies and health. Her work is situated at the cutting edge between cultural studies, gender studies, and the sociology of the body. She has published extensively on contemporary feminist approaches to the body, cultural constructions of beauty and beauty practices, interaction between physicians and patients, the political and ethical dimensions of surgical technologies, and transnational feminist health activism. She is the author of many books, including Reshaping the Female Body (Routledge, 1995), Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body (Sage, 1997), The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (Duke, 2007), and Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World which has just been published by NYUPress.