When I wrote my thesis (Donna was on my graduate committee, btw), I was tasked with defining “fusion belly dance” in order to narrow the scope of the world I was exploring in my paper….Given that I was in a 2-year program, I had to use language that signaled to the specific focus of my research, and after the mass departure from the term “tribal,” I was left without an institutionalized term for the style and community that I was studying. 

Men have been mischaracterized in the historical narrative of belly dance since the 1800s, described in European travelogs as “beastly transvestites,” “unnatural…being partly male, and partly female,” and their movements as “like a woman ready to be fucked” or “a confounded wanton posture.”