Since I watched controversial Russian ice dancers Domnina’s and Shabalin‘s faux Australian aboriginal folk routine earlier this week during the 2010 Olympics “original” ice dance competition, I have been thinking about how the cultural “other” is imagined and enacted to reproduce notions of cultural authority and power.
More specifically, I have addressed in other essays on my blog the importance of the culturally imagined/defined body as a site of colonization and imperial control. Indeed, the body as an experienced reality is simultaneously a metaphor that is ideologically mapped with value and power in cultural, economic, and political/ideological terms. It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that fundamental to any examination of social and ideological relations of power, bodies and the way they are imagined would be at its center implicitly, if not explicitly. Continue reading Incorporating the imagined body
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