Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation examines Thai fire dance, a form of labour in the Thai tourist industry, as a platform through which fire dancers confront and negotiate the tensions of increasing tourism, marginalization, capitalist expansion and neoliberal ideologies. In particular, this research highlights the ways in which affective, embodied and spatialized practices in fire art communities form political interventions and group solidarities that are also intimately entangled in the reproduction and recreation of social hierarchies and unequal relations of power. While fire dance communities hold utopic potentials and moments of sharing across spectrums of social difference that allow for the reimagination of geopolitical, cultural and ethnonational boundaries, they are also spaces and practices fully implicated in the issues they seek to address. The affect born and danced into being in these communities is the nexus through which these complex negotiations are worked out through the body, and is the basis for micropolitical and messy solidarities to form in the midst of capitalist and neoliberal times and spaces.
Source: YorkSpace (York University)
Author: Tiffany Rae Pollock
Language: English
Topic: Arts and Performance Studies
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Chulalongkorn University
OpenAlex ID: W3191243057