Dancing the Strata: Investigating Affective Flows of Moving/Dancing Bodies in the Exploration of Bodily (Un)Becoming

Abstract

This article draws on recent sociological work that explores the intangible, sensory, and affective dimensions of social life. In particular, I look at elusive, sensory, and affective elements of young women’s bodily becoming, through feminist lens. My intention behind this is to problematize narrow understandings of (women’s) embodiment in social sciences. I explore the stratification of bodies (through sex, gender, class, and race) and the way in which stratification works on bodies, what it produces, and how it limits and/or enforces bodily potentials. To this end, I follow affective flows between young women’s dancing bodies as they participate in a performance ethnography I have conducted to explore embodiment. To work with partial, dynamic, multisensory data, and to explore the potentiality of what bodies sense, feel, and do, I use a poetic analysis of the participants’ dance encounters.