The Promise of Feminine Beauty: Dancing, Dress, and Gendered Pursuits of Mobility in Mozambique

The Anthropology Department welcomes Ellen Hebden to deliver her lecture titled, “The Promise of Feminine Beauty: Dancing, Dress, and Gendered Pursuits of Mobility in Mozambique.”

Tufo, a popular performance genre in Mozambique, is often referred to as the dance of the beautiful women (athiana orera), as dancers embody idealized feminine beauty norms through body movements, material adornment and vocal timbre. In recent decades, competitive dance associations that perform tufo have been growing in popularity and expanding into new contexts and regions. This talk approaches feminine beauty as one lens through which to examine tufo’s growth.

In Mozambique—as in elsewhere around the world—beauty has become a valuable commodity and a form of “affective capital” (Jarrín 2017) that can have real upward effects on people’s social and economic standing. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data collected during 21 months of performance-based research with tufo groups in north-central Mozambique, I analyze how both men and women participants perform feminine beauty ideals on stage events for strategic ends, cultivating joy, and animating audiences through aesthetic choices for material and social effects.

Amidst the backdrop of Mozambique’s growing political and economic uncertainty, I argue that “the promise of beauty” (Nguyen 2024) is the opportunity for participants to access critical forms of mobility that they would otherwise be excluded from, and is a primary driver in the continued expansion of the genre.

Ellen Hebden is a Carole & Alvin I. Schragis Faculty Fellow and an assistant professor of art and music histories in the College of Arts and Sciences.