Compromising beauties: affective movement and gendered (im)mobilities in women's competitive tufo dancing in Northern Mozambique

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Mozambique's northern coastal provinces, growing numbers of women are joining competitive dance groups that perform tufo, a popular song-and-dance genre. Originally performed by men for important Islamic celebrations, today tufo is danced by women, who perform feminine beauty ideals on stage at events, cultivating joy and animating forms of attachment through a shared, affective experience. In the post-socialist context, however, meanings and practices of women’s beauty are changing, which has moral implications for tufo dancers and complicates the socio-spatial mobility they enjoy as dance group participants. While onstage, dancers are icons of ‘traditional’ beauty and figures of morality, when moving offstage, they are increasingly perceived as a social problem that threatens to upend patriarchal gender hierarchies. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic research as a member of a tufo group in the coastal town of Pebane, I situate dancer’s social power in relation to failing norms of masculinity to analyse how negative emotions such as jealousy can impede women’s movements. Affect, I argue, does not just create connections or bind communities but can also complicate relationships and disrupt movement as evidenced in the context of tufo, when the desirable dancer becomes the undesirable wife.