Content area
Full text
Articles
In June 2016, at Zarifi, a popular meyhane (traditional tavern) in Istanbul's Beyoglu district, an audience comprised mainly of locals slip money into the bejewelled belts of male belly dancers like Diva (Ali Murat Sahiner) between bites of meze and shots of raki. Like most zenne, as such dancers are known, Diva is young, lithe and boyish. With hair immaculately sculpted, eyes thickly rimmed with black eyeliner, lips brightly coloured, and chest aglow with glitter and oil, he rouses the entire room, shimmying provocatively toward individual tables, where people clap to the rhythm of the music, cheer their appreciation, and often join in the dance. The coins on the belt of Diva's skirt jingle brightly, and his perfume permeates the air. Lips slightly parted and formed into a faint smile, he commands attention with his gaze, inviting the audience to look at him and appreciate his beauty, and animating the polymorphous desires that live solo dance, in particular, puts into play.
The above scene is not the image of Turkey that has been portrayed in the media in recent years. But in Istanbul, Bodrum and Berlin, a growing number of zenne dancers - historically known as köçek - are displacing female belly dancers in clubs, meyhanes, cabarets, private events and resorts.2As Turkish dance scholar Metin And notes, at the beginning of the nineteenth century 'there were some 600 dancing boys in the taverns of Constantinople'.3However, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and then more decisively when the Ottoman Empire was transformed into the modern Turkish republic in the 1920s, male belly dancers fell out of fashion. The tradition of dancing boys in the former Ottoman Empire was largely eclipsed by the changes in societal structures and the containment of sexual desires that accompanied processes of modernization in the Ottoman Empire and, later, in theTurkish republic.4In the twenty-first century, however, zenne dancers are back on Turkish stages and screens, part of the growing interest among Turks in the Ottoman past and the increasing global visibility of queer subjects and the political issues to which this gives rise.
What does the current revival of male belly dancing tell us about the relationship between modern ideologies of sex and gender...