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Year of Graduation
2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MFA: Dance
Directing Professor
Jeffery N. Bullock
Abstract
This thesis investigates how pelvic politics shaped Black women’s hip-centered movement practices by examining their transformation from sites of spectacle into sources of somatic sovereignty. Colonial and postcolonial systems targeted the hips as sites of reproductive control and cultural surveillance. This positioned Black women's bodies as objects of regulation while attempting to suppress African diasporic movement knowledge. Through the lens of Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectic framework, analysis of African diasporic choreographic traditions, and embodied practice, this work traces the mechanisms through which somatic sovereignty operates in and through my own womanly, Black body. This research asks how embodied practices may develop strategies for transformation within conditions of constraint. Within this, embodied subterfuge emerges as the central mechanism for transformation and reveals three evolutionary stages: covert sovereignty functions through concealment and strategic compliance; archival sovereignty positions the pelvis as an active archive capable of storing and reactivating historical and cultural memory; and temporal sovereignty collapses past, present, and future through embodied repetition and variation. Methodologically, this research is situated in a historical analysis of my documented embodied practice rooted in my Caribbean heritage. It then moves into a theoretical analysis of that embodied history, positioning hip-centered movement as an epistemological system for understanding sovereignty as an ongoing tidal process that continually reshapes liberation in the body.
Recommended Citation
Bellamy, BreAnna, "From Spectacle to Sovereignty: Hip Movement through Tidalectic Time" (2026). Dance (MFA) Theses, Hollins University. 60.
https://digitalcommons.hollins.edu/dancetheses/60
Performance Access Statement
If you wish to see the creative piece or performance that accompanied this thesis, please complete the Request Form, and you should receive a response from the Dance Department within two weeks.