AtD and Chicago #2

[Paul Nightingale]

Concluding extracts from Allen's Horrible Prettiness, 226-228

"The ethnological exhibits were neatly ordered along what was presumed to be
an evolutionary hierarchy of racial progress. At the west end of the Midway,
the farthest from White City, were the exhibits of the most 'primitive'
peoples: the Dahomey (Africa) and American Indian villages. Nearer the
center were the villages of the Middle Eastern and Asian worlds. Closest to
White City and thus to the pinnacle of evolutionary development were the
Teutonic and Celtic races--two German and two Irish villages. The logic of
this spatial articulation was not lost on visitors and reporters.

[...]

At th[e] 'semi-civilized' midpoint along the Midway's evolutionary avenue,
visitors to the 'Streets of Cairo' and Algerian village exhibits witnessed
the belly dance being performed publicly for the first time in the United
States.

[...]

"The 'cooch,' or 'cootch,' or 'hootchy-kootchy' phenomenon -- as belly
dancing quickly came to be called -- points out the contradictory nature of
the fair's construction of femininity. Inside the White City, women's
accomplishments were granted a more prominent place than at any previous
international exposition. Yet the exhibits and activities organized to
showcase the contributions of women to world culture juxtaposed
representations of women as innovators in art, the sciences, and the
professions with those of women as child bearers and helpmates. Insofar as
representations of the female body and women's sexuality were concerned,
however, there was no such confusion: both were carefully obscured. The
hundreds of classically styled bas-relief and statues of women to be found
everywhere in the White City hid the body behind 'wind-blown drapery,
floating vegetable matter, and opportune posture.' The fair's official
attitude toward the naked female body, noted Thomas Beer, seemed to be that
it was 'most obscene.' At the same time, on the other, 'popular' side of the
fair, all that had been suppressed in the White City's representation of the
female body as frozen, solemn, and chaste reemerged in the undulations of
the cooch dancer. Just as the African and American Indian exhibits
encouraged visitors to compare the more 'primitive' branches of the human
evolutionary tree with the most advanced, cooch dancers served as a reminder
of the atavistic nature of women in a 'semi-civilized' state."