Dance And Religion Analysis

While completing this week’s readings on dance, religion, and the nation, one thing in particular stood out: misogyny. In the excerpt of The Unprintable Life of Ida Craddock and “Dance is (Not) Religion: The Struggle for Authority in Indian Affairs,” Leigh Eric Schmidt and Tisa Wenger, respectively, address the way in which sexism persecuted those who participated in religious dance, which were primarily women, and the ways in which the sexualization and racialization of dance made it inappropriate as a religious practice. Women were both persecuted for participating, like Ida Craddock, and used as a justification for the prohibition of dance, particularly in Native American “custom” ceremonies.
On the one hand, sexism persecuted those who

They refused to acknowledge the liberation the dance afforded women or the religious and cultural value of dance customs. Instead, they placed women at the center of a controversy and debate over American values and American identity and framed it in a way that made it seem as if Christian white men, like Anthony Comstock were saviors not only of the abstract (American values and identity), but of women, legitimizing their work and making it seem urgent and necessary, not just for America, but for real live Americans. They otherized these practices and framed them as unamerican and promised that their reform would save these women’s souls and the soul of America. Thus, sexism and misogyny drove the debate over the appropriateness of dance in the practice of religion and the identity of America and, though dance won in both of the cass presented by Schmidt and Wenger, the rhetoric of their debate life on even today as Americans continue to struggle with the intersections of religion, sexuality and the