ABSTRACT
Investigating male and female corporeal engagement within dancehall dance, Chapter 8 explores the moral and aesthetic codes set by Jamaica's ‘uptown’ ruling-classes and formal religious bodies, against the subversive opposition established by dancehall participants projecting alternative moral (en)coding through their own cultural expression. The chapter deepens conceptions of transformative and transcendent functionings within dancehall culture, established within the ‘female section’. It critically explores the negative perceptions of dancehall's ‘daggering’ or ‘coupling up’ dances against the restoration of public male and female social partnering, offered in their defense by practitioners. Despite obvious sexual overtones inherent within coupling, the notion of ‘conjure’ (Beckford, 2014) is employed alongside that of ‘jouissance’ (Norman, 2008), in analysing the deeper significations within various ‘coupling up’ style dances. Their long trajectory across Jamaican popular and African/neo-African dance practices is explored and shown to maintain spiritual continuities through the central circling pelvic action that connects to notions of rebirth, renewal, unification and the evoking or summoning of intervention from spiritual deities. Dancehall corporeal dancing bodies are ideologically found to be inscribed with multiple religious signifiers that conjure African/neo-African, formal Christian and post-modern spiritual symbolisms, facilitating transcendence, enchantment and healing processes leading to the experiencing of the Divine.
