[Callers] Advice about "gypsy"

[Alan Winston via Callers]

On 10/24/15 12:12 AM, Amy Wimmer via Callers wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I taught a dance this evening that included a ladies' gypsy. I 
> received the email below a few minutes ago. In teaching it I wanted to 
> convey that it is a flirty, eye contact sort of move. This person was 
> obviously offended. I am at a loss for how to respond, except to 
> apologize for offending.
>
> I'm pretty sure I described the move accurately. I meant absolutely no 
> offense. I didn't make up the name for the move, but don't want to 
> make excuses. Does this move need a new name? How would you respond?
>
>
I think apologizing for unintentionally offending is good but I don't 
think you have to take on all of what your correspondent is offended over.

Your correspondent made up the idea that it's so named because of the 
idea that Romani women are oversexualized.

  Here's my take on this:

- the use of the term "Gypsy" is inherently offensive to some of the 
people to whom it refers in just the way the use of the term "Indian" is 
inherently offensive to some Native Americans.  It's a name they don't 
accept (a) because it incorrectly ascribes an incorrect geographical 
origin to them (Egyptian for Gypsies, India (well, East Indies) for 
Indians) and (b) was assigned to them by outsiders and became the terms 
used for them by people who wanted to move them along / kill them.   
(Although the term the Nazis used, Zigeuner, derives from a Greek root 
meaning "untouchable" rather than "Egyptian", according to the US 
Holocaust Museum website.)

- The term "Indian File" for walking in a line, one after another, 
doesn't suggest anything particularly derogatory about Native Americans; 
I think it's an observation or speculation that the way East Coast 
(forest-dwelling) indigenous people walked through forests on minimal 
trails was in single file.  We can point out that white society thinks 
there are many admirable things about native peoples - the whole "Indian 
Guides" thing shows that - and that the use of the world "Indian" in 
that isn't intended to be offensive, etc, etc, and yet the obviously 
right thing to do was to start saying "single file" instead, because the 
benefits of not pointlessly offending people vastly outweighed the 
benefits of continuing to use a non-descriptive term.  It's virtually 
never effective and rarely kind to tell people they shouldn't be offended.

- By me, the same logic suggests that we should stop calling the figure 
gypsy.  We can go at length into why it's not named after Gypsies, why 
"Gypsy" is a superset name that includes Rom and other traveling people, 
some of whom don't mind it, the use of gypsy to mean "traveler" (from 
which dance gypsy, Gypsy moth, etc, derive), the admiring use of gypsy 
to mean free spirit ("gypsy in my soul"), etc, but none of that actually 
matters in this context.  What actual benefit do we derive from calling 
it "gypsy", other than the sunk cost of having a community of people who 
know it by that name?  It's not descriptive.  (It is evocative and we 
have a bunch of dances with "gypsy" in the name; not sure what to do 
about those.)

(I had been thinking that it would be very difficult to get a universal 
change of name for the figure in the absence of a Callerlab for Contra, 
but Yoyo's post (where he says he'll  just drop the name and prompt by 
which shoulder you go around) opened my eyes to the possibility of 
effective individual action by callers; you don't need universal 
agreement on a new name.  That does open the door to a dancer on the 
floor saying "you mean gypsy?" but I guess you can say "that name is 
offensive to some people".)  I'm going to have to think more about this 
for my own practice as an English and a contra caller.

- I'm personally interested in the history of things and how they got 
their names, and I'm convinced that gypsy in contra was picked up from 
gypsy in English which was picked up from "whole-gyp" and "half-gyp" in 
Morris and that there's not necessarily any relationship of the name to 
any group of people in origin, and I do not believe that in  naming the 
figure anybody was saying anything about the stereotypical 
characteristics of any people.  I really, with all the intellectual 
honesty I have available, don't believe that.  (And I've heard different 
stereotypical characteristics assumed to be the origin - sexuality, 
untrustworthiness, tendency to do non-touching dances, so I think these 
are all just-so stories, ex post facto rationalizations.)  I don't think 
this blameless origin is a reason to keep the name, and I know it's 
absolutely ineffective to point out the blameless origin to somebody 
who's offended.

That's the end of my argument, but I have more thoughts.

- This is different from people who are offended by callers who 
sexualize the figure, which they could do whatever it's called.  I don't 
mind gypsy meltdowns, but  I find "until you just can't stand it 
anymore" kinda tedious; let's just walk around each other maintaining a 
comfortable level of eye contact until the music tells us to swing, how 
about that?)  (And I think sexualizing things and telling dancers how 
they're supposed to feel, especially if it's sexual, is just getting 
more and more passe as different people of different (and no) sexual 
orientation are dancing on different sides of the set.  We're all 
people, we're all dancing together, that's enough.)

- I *like* the figure, and I really like the dance providing a safe 
space to look at somebody else's face and look them in the eye without 
it necessarily signaling anything.  In the general world meeting 
people's eyes can carry a lot of unintended freight; I think it's great 
to have a place where you can just do it as part of the dance.  Ideally 
a connection is established, but there are all kinds of connections and 
they're not necessarily sexual.  (Which is not to say that I haven't 
gotten stirred up, even in meltdown-free, far-apart English dance 
gypsies, but that's way different from the caller telling everybody 
they're supposed to.)

-- Alan

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sharedweight.net/pipermail/callers-sharedweight.net/attachments/20151024/e6ee2197/attachment.htm>