Product details
- ISBN 9780472058136
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 25 Aug 2026
- Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Dissenting Through Dance examines how femme activists in contemporary Turkey deploy folk dance as a powerful tool of political resistance and collective solidarity. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, choreographic analysis, and archival research, the book examines how traditional dances, particularly those rooted in marginalized cultures such as Kurdish, Roma, Alevi, Laz, and Hemşin communities, are reimagined to contest misogyny, cultural erasure, and oppressive gender politics. Sevi Bayraktar brings to life the stories of feminist, LGBTQ+, and grassroots activists occupying public spaces with dance as a form of protest when conventional forms of assembly are suppressed or criminalized in Turkey.
Working outward from these femmes’ stories, protests, and dances, Bayraktar argues that by reconfiguring Turkey’s folk-dance heritage for their contemporary political aims, dissenting femmes rechoreograph national space in opposition to the state as a way to reclaim the public sphere for pluralist democracy and to subvert hegemonic discourses about Turkish national identity, neoliberal economic development, and female and ethnic bodies. By moving together, activists subvert patriarchal norms, embody new visions of community, and create moments of hope, joy, and resistance even under conditions of surveillance and fear.
Sevi Bayraktar is Professor of Dance Studies, Music, and Performance in Global Contexts at the University of Music and Dance in Cologne, Germany.
