This may be totally off topic, but I have been reflecting on the nature of men who portray women on stage, such as you would find in Japanese or ancient Greek theater. They were working in formal media, where the presentation of gender would be stylized for both men and women, but they weren't doing parody, but a particular way of being. At the same time I think that in Greek theater (which I know a lot better than Japanese) there was a lot of room for portraying different kinds of women, so that the individual character was as important as the specific ways of performing gender.
But it also has me thinking in terms of how much our concept of gender is determined by our culture. I just got a rather poorly thought-out term paper from a student who was arguing that XYZ happened in Greek myth because women were more emotional than men. Well, in our culture, maybe, women are considered more emotional, but it's hard to make the same claim for ancient Greece when Achilles spends 12 days weeping and not eating because his best friend died, not to mention other equally notable emotional displays. So our cultural construction of gender is different with respect to emotion.
So even if the patriarchies of North America, Europe, Egypt, and Turkey (say) have some points of comparison, isn't the construction of gender bound to be different in each? And therefore isn't the way in which gendered dance emerges bound to be different in each culture? And in each individual in each culture? Our genders -- our individual genders -- are all different points clustered an an orb of potentials that our anatomies and cultures allow.
Having said all that, I had the privilege to see Tito live a couple of weeks ago. He was phenomenal; his energy rocked the house. But I never saw him bring the internal quality that I've seen in Mona Said, Dina, Randa Kamal. It was a blaze of delight, but it wasn't at all interior. Cultural construction? Universal principle? Failure of translation?
OTOH I did find this interior quality in Jim Boz, which (sorry Jim) was the last place I had expected to see it, if only because of my own prejudiced readings of his discourse on masculinity.
I hope this isn't ridiculously obscure ...
