Article Title：Factory Girls and the Dancing Queen: The Gender Politics of Social Dance during China's Early Economic Reforms
Abstract：
This essay examines the gendered politics of social dance and its relationship to the wider societal changes of China's early economic reforms from 1978 to the end of the 1980s. It considers social dance a symbol of contested modernities during the initial decade of the reform period. Through the politics of dancing, this article reveals how state policies that repressed social dance during the early 198os were part of a larger project to establish a hegemonic modernity in which social order was partly secured through the protection and regulation of female sexuality. Paying attention to class and economic distribution, this essay shows how, after the legalization of dancing in the second half of the 198os, young women workers used social dance to express their discontents toward China's Mao -era state factory system. The dance hall allowed these women to search for an alternate modernity that provided new sources of self-esteem, social prestige, and upward mobility, fueling a hope to transcend the limitations of an existing work unit system. Using state directives, propaganda materials, and interviews with former women workers from a state-owned steel mill in Chengdu, I consider how conflicting visions of 198os Chinese modernity unfolded inside urban dance halls and state-owned factories, spelling new social and personal dilemmas for women coming of age during the first decade of the economic reforms.
Keywords: economic reforms; dance halls; social dance; women workers; modernity
DOI: 10.1163/15685268-02601041
Source：NAN NU-MEN WOMEN AND GENDER IN CHINA
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