Choreographing the peacock: Gender, ethnicity, and national identity in Chinese ethnic dance.

摘要

This dissertation examines the Chinese Ethnic Dai (or Tai) peacock dance as part of choreographic and political discourses. In it, I look carefully at various versions of the Dai peacock dance from 1950s to 2006, exploring their shifts in choreography and practice. I examine how female dancing bodies in these dances reflect significant social, cultural, and political changes before and after the Cultural Revolution. By talking about how and why the government of People's Republic of China (PRC) has used and continues to use "folk" cultural practices and "ethnic minority" identities to promote contemporary Chinese national identity, I argue that the female dancing body carries and represents racial ideas, gender issues, and nationalism, through this particular shift in China. I explore ways the dancing body has carried the communist ideology of revolution, modernization, and nationalism, and how ideas of feminine identity and dancing bodies have shaped China's national image. I focus on ways the peacock dancing body represent and construct ethnic ideas and gender issues domestically, and discuss how the ethnic minority female dancing body negotiates issues of nationalism, identity formation, property/authority, and globalization. In discussing these issues, I take a global perspective, addressing the practice of the Dai peacock dance in China, Taiwan, and the United States. I demonstrate how the female dancing body shapes and consolidates China's national identity differently during and after the Cultural Revolution period both internally and internationally. The Dai peacock dance acts as a lens through which complex political, social, and cultural issues, and the constant changes China has undergone in the past forty years, can be better understood.