Letting the Body Lead: A Danced Movement Inquiry into some Pākehā Women’s Imaginaries of Place

Western colonial structures and actions have been supported by epistemologies that privilege claims of objectivity, the attainment of fixed truths, and approach knowledge as solely existing in a discarnate mind. The privileging of rationality, logic, and objectivity in Western societies has meant rich understandings and insights about power, place, space, subjectivity, and embodiment arising from other ways of knowing have been foreclosed. In recent decades, scholars within human geography and allied disciplines have sought to redress this bias and explore embodied ways of knowing. These scholars’ research has shown how attending to other ways of knowing can deepen understandings of place and subjectivity.

Drawing on my background as a contemporary dancer and subjectivity as a White settler-colonial (Pākehā) woman, in this thesis I contest epistemologies privileged by Western settler-colonial structures. I also challenge hegemonic narratives of settler-colonialism by engaging with danced movement as methodology to investigate how some Pākehā or White women of settler-colonial descent’s embodied and more-than-cognitive knowledges might contest dominant settler-colonial imaginaries of place in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In this research, geographic engagement with danced movement is supported by approaches to knowledge creation arising from post-structural feminism, which sees knowledge as situated. When referring to danced movement as methodology, I refer to an approach to research that engages with those forms of bodily movement creatively improvised in space and over time in response to aesthetic, affective, interpretive, or expressive cues via experiential methods. In engaging with danced movement as methodology, this research contributes to ever-broadening scholarship on innovative methodologies that explore embodied knowledges. The methodology of this research incorporated both autoethnographic inquiry and working with a small group of three participants who identified as Pākehā women in the Waikato and Te Moana-a-Toi Bay of Plenty regions of Te Ika-a-Māui North Island from September to December 2021. The research’s methodology consisted of a series of in-person and Zoom workshops. Methods engaged with during the workshops consisted primarily of danced movement methods, which were supported by engagement in discussion, journaling, and body mapping. A pre-workshop group discussion and post-workshop interviews were also held as a means of aiding women’s participation in danced movement and providing a space to further unpack and explore what arose for women over the course of the research. Settler-colonialism is sustained by and reflected in imaginaries that are visceral, subconscious, and unsensed. Inquiry via danced movement as methodology privileges engagement with the embodied and more-than-cognitive knowledges that this research seeks to explore. In what follows, I explore imaginaries of place held by some Pākehā women, how subconscious historical traces of settler-colonial women are present in some Pākehā women living now, and how danced movement might aid work towards rightful relation with Tangata Whenua (Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand).

Key thematic outcomes emerging from this research pertain to the slippery and flexible terrain of participants’ and my sense and feelings of belonging in, with, and around place as Pākehā women; the ways in which participants’ and my imaginaries of place were shaped by the lived experiences, privileges, and beliefs of our settler-colonial female ancestors; and the ways in which engagement in danced movement invited a sense of unsettling.

Problematising Western perceptions of knowing as solely existing in the mind and troubling Western societies’ desire to claim, assert, state, and predict, knowledge generated by this research suggests engagement in danced movement has the capacity to increase awareness of relationality with other bodies, objects, and forces and thus effect progressive change. In the current context of intensification of far-right activity in settler-colonial contexts, my focus on troubling masculinist accounts and engaging with embodied knowledges of White settler-colonisers offers routes for redressing colonial injustices and condemning intensification of discourses and imaginaries that affirm White supremacy.