Ableism and the belly dance community: Reflections on Massive 2023

I’ve just returned from The Mega Massive 2023, a weeklong belly dance training intensive in Las Vegas. As someone who has struggled with lifelong chronic back pain, there are certain tasks that are harder to accomplish for me than for others, one of which being long, enduring dance practices. In reality, attending an event like this is likely something my doctors would contraindicate, but I wasn’t about to miss out on the last Massive intensive. 

Before accepting that I was disabled, I didn’t pay attention to a lot of the toxic ableist nonsense that permeates the belly dance community. And to be fair, this isn’t unique to us—I spent several years living in gym culture as a personal trainer and lifting weights, and much of this rhetoric exists there as well. And if you have any significant experience with belly dance communities, you know it shares a lot of connective tissue with other various alternative/holistic/etc “wellness” communities where this ableist rhetoric is embraced. 

If you’re someone who has perpetuated these concepts, intentionally or unintentionally, I’m not trying to say that you’re a bad person. I only ask that you consider whom your words are leaving out. As for the context of these, they were curated for this blog only inasmuch as they apply to myself specifically. They are in no particular order.

“The worst thing you can do for your body is sit down.” / “Sitting down is the new smoking.”

When I heard someone say this, my first thought was, “This person is clearly not disabled. I’d like to trade backs with them for a day and then challenge them to make that claim again.” 

First, sitting down is not the worst thing you could do for your body, stillness is. (Personally, I believe that taking intravenous snake venom and drinking cement ought to top the list of “worst things you could do for your body,” but I digress). 

My biggest pain trigger is standing still. I have debilitating chronic lower back pain from degenerative osteoarthritis in my lumbar spine (for more, see this blog). The only thing that helps my back is being seated (preferably in the Gollum posture). As I’ve come to learn to negotiate with my pain, there are some compromises that I have to make, the most impactful one being if there is a chair, I’m sitting in it. And I have no shame about grabbing some floor if there’s nothing else around.   

For the benefit of the doubt, I’m going to assume that this person was being somewhat hyperbolic, and maybe they meant something more along the lines of: “Extended periods of sitting down can create patterns of muscle tension and lead to imbalances that make uninhibited movement challenging.” I reiterate that sitting down is not the problem, but stillness. And to that, there is much you can do in a seated or reclining position to avoid perpetual stillness. 

But to hear someone say that sitting is the “worst thing” for your body, all I can hear is, “If you are sitting, you are failing,” and I’ve spent too many years blaming myself for my unavoidable pain due to no fault of my own (for more, see this other blog). 

When I am sitting, I am healing.

You can choose to feed your disease.

This paraphrasing was said in the context of one’s food lifestyle. Basically, we were told that inflammation is the root of all disease (no) and therefore, in order to avoid disease, you have to avoid all sources of inflammation—added sugar, packaged food, weed, alcohol, gluten, seed oils, etc. As someone with degenerative osteoarthritis, which is characterized by chronic inflammation, you might think this is an appealing concept to me, but you’d be wrong. 

Wellness culture has a way of demonizing anything as “inflammatory” when it decides it’s time to promote a new bullshit diet fad. Nothing is ever that simple. What’s more, telling me that I have the ability to choose to “feed” my inflammation is essentially telling me that I get to choose whether or not I live in pain, and that’s just not true. 

"The pernicious myth that it is possible to avoid almost all pain by controlling the body gives the fear of pain greater power than it should have and blames the victims of unavoidable pain." – Susan Wendell, ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability’ (emphasis added)

I’ve tried years of being sober, being vegan, being primarily whole foods-based, and being super high protein. All I discovered was that sometimes I pooped a lot more than others, but my back pain was unchanged. I would also be remiss not to acknowledge that the ability to live a life free of all “sources of inflammation”* is an incredible privilege. It’s more expensive, takes more time, and takes more space both physically and mentally than most of us have.

Perhaps every day you get to wake up and make those choices, but let’s not pretend it’s because you make better choices than me—it’s because you have more choices than me. Regardless of my dietary choices, my back is going to hurt, and I’m going to be miserable, so I’d rather be miserable with coffee, chocolate, weed, and bread than without. 

I cannot wake up and choose not to be disabled, just as I cannot wake up and choose not to be gay. 

I want to finish this blog with some observations. 

Pain is exhausting. Pain is humbling. Pain is defeating. Pain is inevitable. 

In my opinion, a reason many people purport these wellness culture lies is because they are terrified of being disabled. The idea that something could happen to them where they can’t perform at the level they are accustomed to is scary, because for someone like me, this arthritis isn’t a result of anything I did. It was entirely genetic. It could have happened to anyone. And the idea that this could have happened to them scares them. 

"Suffering caused by the body, and the inability to control the body, are despised, pitied, and above all, feared" (Wendell 1989, 112, emphasis added).

Dancers have a dialectical relationship with pain. It’s inevitable, but obstructive: Our bodies are our instrument, and when we get injured, we train too hard, we get sick, our instrument is compromised. But we all face it at some point or another, and forcing ourselves to rest can be spiritually excruciating, because we aren’t practicing, producing, creating, generating. When dancers get injured, they face their body and its precarity for a short period of time—a few days, weeks, maybe even months or years, but temporarily. Adapting their practice to accommodate their injury is disheartening, and makes you feel like a failure. 

Imagine facing that every single day—forever. 

"Aging is disabling... Unless we die suddenly, we are all disabled eventually. Most of us will live part of our lives with bodies that hurt, that move with difficulty or not all, that deprive us of activities we once took for granted... bodies that make daily life a physical struggle" (Wendell 1989, 108, emphases added).

So the next time you decide to speak prescriptively about what’s “best” for everyone’s physical wellness, remember that if you are very lucky, you will end up like me eventually: forced to face your body and its voice, especially when it starts to scream.

* This is also a problematic way of characterizing things, because inflammation is normal, and not all inflammation is pathological. Moreover, different things cause negative inflammatory reactions in different people, such as the case with allergies. If you’re not allergic to peanuts, avoiding peanuts doesn’t make you healthier.