Under the Influence: Visibility, Interpretation, and Embodied Pleasure in Contemporary Chinese Heels Dance

Abstract

This thesis examines heels dance practice in contemporary China as both a visually mediated and morally contested display of the female body and an embodied, sensorial dance experience. Methodologically, this research draws on interviews with heels dancers, online ethnography through observing their video practices on digital platforms, and offline participant observation in a dance studio in Shanghai. Although this approach is analytically divided into online and offline components, the two cannot be neatly separated in practice. While attending to this intertwining nature, the structure of this thesis can be understood as a movement from the online environment, where the female body is often framed as an object of display and evaluation within a visual regime, toward embodied experience, where dancers’ sensory and lived experiences complicate such visual interpretations. In this context, this thesis explores how different interpretations of heels dance and sexuality produced in the Chinese context, and how they take shape in digital practices. Simultaneously, it investigates the ways in which heels dancers negotiate these competing readings in order to make sense of and justify their dancing. This thesis further examines how, while the interpretations of heels dance are often grounded in a visual regime that frames the female body as an object of display and evaluation, other sensorial dimensions of dance complicate such readings. Finally, it probes into the kind of pleasure that sustains dancers’ continued engagement with heels dance under the pressures of public discourse and platform regulation.