Dissenting Through Dance examines how femme activists in contemporary Turkey deploy folk dance as a powerful tool of political resistance and collective solidarity. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, choreographic analysis, and archival research, the book examines how traditional dances, particularly those rooted in marginalized cultures such as Kurdish, Roma, Alevi, Laz, and Hemşin communities, are reimagined to contest misogyny, cultural erasure, and oppressive gender politics. Sevi Bayraktar brings to life the stories of feminist, LGBTQ+, and grassroots activists occupying public spaces with dance as a form of protest when conventional forms of assembly are suppressed or criminalized in Turkey.

Working outward from these femmes’ stories, protests, and dances, Bayraktar argues that by reconfiguring Turkey’s folk-dance heritage for their contemporary political aims, dissenting femmes rechoreograph national space in opposition to the state as a way to reclaim the public sphere for pluralist democracy and to subvert hegemonic discourses about Turkish national identity, neoliberal economic development, and female and ethnic bodies. By moving together, activists subvert patriarchal norms, embody new visions of community, and create moments of hope, joy, and resistance even under conditions of surveillance and fear. 

Documenting the rise and disillusionment of El Salvador’s postwar activists in the face of populist authoritarian politics.

The conclusion of El Salvador’s long civil war, in 1992, was supposed to bring about equality and political freedom. Leftist insurgents laid down arms, and the government formally embraced liberal ideals. Yet today, El Salvador is ruled by an authoritarian president who was reelected via unconstitutional means. What went wrong?

Anthropologist and journalist Ellen Moodie embedded with indignados—young middle-class protestors, demanding that the government live up to its liberal commitments—to better understand the course of political change since the civil war. Yet the “post-postwar” generation is only the latest demographic disappointed with liberalism in practice. Moodie examines a nineteenth-century “racial liberalism” that saw descendants of colonists “civilizing” Indigenous people while dispossessing them of lands and mobilizing them for labor. Today, the failure to make good on the promises of postwar liberalism has inspired robust support for strongman Nayib Bukele. Moodie argues that El Salvador’s case, though inflected by local concerns, is not unique. Rather, it is another stark demonstration of how liberalism’s imaginary social contract gives rise to populist authoritarianism.