A Slippery Stage: Tensions and Solidarities in the Cairo Cabaret

Abstract

This ethnographic case study viscerally explores the micro-level of tactics, tensions, and insights cabaret dancers offer in regard to macro-level gender, class, sexuality, and nationality politics within Cairo, Egypt. As the night wears on in a Pyramid Street cabaret, the dancer’s stage becomes increasingly slippery, not just from five-pound notes littered across the dance floor, but from the increasingly volatile intra-MENA male clientele, who contentiously perform their masculinities and nationalist identities through tahayas (greetings) and tipping. As the tipping wars become more heated, the cabaret ra’asa (female dancer), remains the centrifugal force in precariously performing, playing, and being policed by these intersectionally vexed power plays. This case study comes from larger Critical Dance Studies and Middle Eastern Studies ethnographic fieldwork in Cairo; it explores the ways raqs sharqi and other marginalized moving bodies engage with slippery possibilities despite and amidst the tensions of precarious political and economic transformations Egypt has been experiencing since the 2011 revolution.