How the Klan’s Ideal of White Femininity Colonized American Belly Dance
By Katya Faris, MA, MA
April 20, 2026
When I was 11, my sister moved to Iran for 15 years. This was after the Revolution, when Iran had become an Islamic country by law, and she had to wear the full chador. She would send me back Iranian gifts, and I was fascinated with the Persian miniatures of graceful dancers from ancient Persia. They stirred something in me that I hadn’t felt before: belonging to a culture I didn’t yet know I had the DNA for.
Fast forward to now. I’ve learned that my maternal line is Bulgarian Romany. My ancestors went to Germany, then made it to the United States in the late 1800s.
I began belly dancing in 1989 and danced professionally from 1993 until 2019. I now curate Arabic music for belly dance with my Palestinian producer in Detroit, giving back to the community that gave me this dance. For thirty years, this art form was my life, my body, my breath, my community. And for thirty years, I watched that community operate like a cult.
This is not hyperbole. This is a structural analysis rooted in both personal experience and documented research—including my ongoing investigation into the Ku Klux Klan’s influence on white femininity in the American Midwest.
Part One: Defining the Cult
When we hear the word “cult,” we think of Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate—groups defined by a charismatic leader, total obedience, and often a violent end. But the sociological definition is both broader and more useful for understanding what has happened to American belly dance.
Sociologist Howard Becker first applied the term “cult” to small, transient religious groups characterized by loose organization, individualized beliefs, and a shared sense of deviance from mainstream society. Colin Campbell later refined this as the “cultic milieu”—a space where marginalized belief systems and practices circulate through overlapping networks of workshops, informal gatherings, and shared ideologies.
The belly dance community in America fits this description with unsettling precision. It has no formal credentialing body, no standardized training, no licensing. It is organized around charismatic teachers and troupe leaders, where authority flows from personality rather than institution. It positions itself as oppositional—to mainstream fitness, to Western body norms, to patriarchal restrictions on female expression.
Sociologist Rachel Kraus has documented that power struggles, legitimacy claims, and status hierarchies are among the most difficult challenges in belly dance communities. Participants experience, in her words, “a host of passive aggressive behaviors from other members… such as backstabbing, undercutting, gig-stealing, and cattiness.” Kraus identifies the fundamental structural problem: performance opportunities are scarce, paid gigs even scarcer, and “the lack of paid performance opportunities partly inflames competition and conflict between dancers.”
This is the economic engine of the cult. When resources are limited, loyalty becomes currency. Teachers control access to stages. Troupe leaders decide who gets seen. And the threat of exclusion—from a community that has become your primary source of identity, friendship, and self-worth—is enough to enforce compliance.
Part Two: The White Queen Archetype
In my three decades in this world, I have observed two primary types of women drawn to belly dance.
The first type: marginalized women seeking to reclaim power that has been taken from them. Black women, Latina women, Jewish women, survivors of abuse, women like me with Romany blood that our families tried to hide.
The second type: women I call “The White Queen.”
These women often come from wealth. They are educated, frequently holding advanced degrees. They were cheerleaders or competitive dancers in their youth, trained to perform confidence while competing ruthlessly beneath the surface. As adults, they bring this same dynamic into belly dance—not as a space of healing, but as a new arena for domination.
The term “White Queen” is not arbitrary. It emerges directly from my research on the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana.
The Klan’s Archetype of White Femininity
The academic literature on white supremacy documents a powerful and enduring archetype: the idealized white woman as a symbol of racial “purity.” Sociologist Kathleen M. Blee’s foundational study Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s (1991) focuses specifically on Indiana and demonstrates how the Women of the Ku Klux Klan (WKKK) mobilized white women by appealing to their roles as mothers and guardians of a “pure” white race. This was not a passive symbol. White women actively weaponized their presumed innocence—even their tears—to police public spaces, enforce segregation, and position themselves as virtuous enforcers of racial hierarchies.
Blee’s more recent work (2020) explicitly documents how white supremacist movements pigeonhole women into archetypes: Mother, Whore, and Fighter. The “Mother of the Race” is the most dominant—the woman whose primary duty is to bear white children and prevent “race suicide.” While celebrated, this role was also a trap, pushing women into support roles while excluding them from leadership.
A 2025 master’s thesis from CUNY introduces the concept of “moralized white supremacist feminism,” examining how white women in the Jim Crow South used ideals of purity, motherhood, and moral virtue to legitimize racial hierarchies.
And critically, sociologist Jessie Daniels has documented that white women’s appearance is deliberately used to “soften the harsher edges of oppression.” She notes: “It’s really hard for us to understand the threat of these harmful systems when it’s being administered and deployed by a white woman who has blonde hair and a skirt on and high heels.”
The Sexual Violence Connection
In my interviews with women from Klan families in Indiana, a disturbing pattern emerged. Multiple women told me that if they were born blonde, they were sexually preferred within the family—and also sexually exploited for their “whiteness.” The predator was often the father, sometimes uncles or brothers. The same ideology that elevated blonde white women as symbols of racial purity also marked them as targets for sexual abuse, their bodies treated as vessels for reproducing the white race.
The academic research confirms this dynamic in part. Blee (2020) documents that white supremacist men actively recruited women as sexual partners, with one former member describing the process as finding “the rocker chicks” to “bring them in and feed them some beer and whatever happened, happened.” Some women in her study were forced into sex work to support the movement. However, the specific link to father-daughter incest as a feature of Klan family life remains understudied—a gap this article begins to address.
From the Klan to the Dance Studio
The White Queen archetype does not stay in the Klan. It travels. Women raised in this ideology—or women who absorb its logic from the broader culture that favors blondness and whiteness—carry it with them into every space they enter, including the belly dance community.
In the dance studio, the White Queen reproduces the same dynamics. She positions herself as the virtuous guardian of the art form’s “purity.” She decides who is authentic and who is not. She uses her presumed innocence—her blonde hair, her slender body, her educated speech—to soften the harshness of her exclusionary practices. She speaks the language of sisterhood while building hierarchies. She performs inclusion while hoarding resources, stages, and attention.
And she is often completely unaware that she is doing any of this. That is how the archetype works.
Part Three: The Cult in Motion
So what does cult behavior look like in practice?
In any closed community with scarce resources, enforcement mechanisms emerge. In belly dance, these mechanisms are both social and digital.
Women turn into “mean girl” bullies and gang up on dancers who break unwritten rules. The offenses vary: stealing a gig; being given a gig by a client who simply prefers your dancing over another’s; getting a job at a club and refusing to share the stage; criticizing a beloved teacher; questioning a popular narrative. The punishments include exclusion from performances, character assassination at workshops, coordinated social media attacks, and hacking of websites and Facebook pages. I have heard of a dancer who works for the electric company threatening to turn off a rival’s power. I have watched women call themselves “black witches” and perform spellwork to seal their deeds, believing they are reclaiming power by becoming the enforcers of internal terror.
The academic literature on cultic behavior identifies this pattern: when a group defines itself as marginalized or oppositional, internal dissent becomes betrayal. Loyalty is tested constantly. The group’s survival—its sense of itself as special, as chosen, as under siege—depends on identifying and expelling those who threaten the narrative.
The 2020–2021 period in American belly dance provides a textbook case. Following the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests, the community underwent what journalist Raphael Cormack called a “reckoning.” Lists of “problematic” dancers began circulating on Facebook—naming those accused of blackface, supporting Trump, denying COVID, or attacking BLM. An 11-page blacklist allegedly existed. Then a blacklist of blacklisters appeared. It became a “witch hunt,” in the words of some participants.
And guess what? I was on that list. Yes, me—someone who has dedicated her life to preserving Arab music.
What was my offense? I said online that I was glad Trump finally sent troops to Portland, Oregon, to help the small business owners whose shops were being burned down. Let me be clear: I believe in Black reparations. I also believe in Native American reparations. But you don’t see Native people burning down businesses, because they’re not out of their minds. I will always stand up for innocent people—and in this case, the innocent were those business owners.
Valerie Poppel, a Black dancer and clinical sexologist who runs the Jewels of the Orient festival, told Cormack that she knew of two lists but that “they were made by two white women with no direct affiliation” to the BIPOC-led movement for accountability. Her comment cuts to the heart of the problem: “I’m a black woman in America, I don’t need to write down where I’m safe and where I’m not safe. I know it.”
The White Queen does not need lists. She is the list. She decides who is safe and who is not.
Part Four: The Politics of Erasure
Here is where the cult logic becomes genuinely dangerous.
Most American belly dancers today are Democrats. Most embrace LGBTQ+ inclusion as a core value. Many would describe themselves as feminists, as allies, as people who care about justice.
And yet.
When it comes to Palestine—to the ongoing genocide, to the bombing of Gaza, to the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank—many of these same dancers are silent. Or worse, they are actively supportive of Israel, aligning themselves with Evangelical Christian Zionism and neoconservative foreign policy, all while dancing to Arabic music and wearing costumes adorned with Arabic calligraphy.
The cognitive dissonance is staggering. But it is not new. And it is directly connected to the White Queen archetype.
Consuming the Culture, Abandoning the People
Amira Jarmakani’s foundational study Imagining Arab Womanhood (2008) demonstrates that American representations of belly dancers, harem girls, and veiled women function as “cultural mythologies”—images that serve American anxieties about power, progress, and empire, rather than reflecting any reality of Arab women’s lives. The belly dancer in American popular culture has never been about Arab women. She has always been about what white American women want her to be.
More directly, anthropologist Carolina Bank Muñoz’s research on belly dance in the Bay Area argues that the dance has become “a popular site for the mobilization of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Americanness’ in relation to Arab/Muslim femininities and masculinities.” In a 2008 article, she documented how non-Arab women’s embrace of belly dance intensified after 9/11, precisely as Arab Americans were being profiled, attacked, and erased from public life. The dance became a way for white women to consume “Middle Eastern culture” as costume, while remaining utterly silent about the actual Middle Eastern people being bombed, detained, and deported.
This is the White Queen in action: claiming the culture while abandoning the people.
The Demographic Reality
Arab families in America do not encourage their daughters to become professional belly dancers; it is haram, forbidden. In Cairo, there are many Arab dancers, but they are considered low-class, and their profession is frowned upon. So here in the United States, the dance has been taken up primarily by non-Arab women who then—intentionally or not—speak for, perform, and profit from a culture that is not theirs.
This is “Arab-face,” as the Palestinian-American writer Randa Jarrar called it in her explosive 2014 essay “Why I Can’t Stand White Belly Dancers.” White dancers adopt fantasy Middle Eastern stage names, dress in exaggerated “Arab-style” costumes of diaphanous fabrics studded with glitter and gold, and parade Arab culture onstage as entertainment, while remaining utterly indifferent to the actual suffering of Arab people.
Jarrar was met with fury. She was called racist, stupid, fat. Major publications attacked her premise. But she held firm: “I Still Can’t Stand White Belly Dancers.”
The White Queen cannot stand to hear this because it threatens her self-image. She believes she is honoring the culture, celebrating it, keeping it alive. She does not see that she is also erasing it—substituting her own fantasy for the messy, difficult, politically fraught reality of Arab existence.
Part Five: Breaking the Spell
I left belly dance in 2019 because I could no longer breathe in that room. After several injuries and a bad taste in my mouth, I walked away.
But the cult has not won. I continue to co-produce Arab music for belly dance and will until I can no longer breathe. However, the White Queens have consolidated their power. And the women like me—the ones who came to dance because our blood remembered something our families had tried to erase—have been pushed out, silenced, or turned into collaborators.
This is not a call to abandon the dance. This is a call to see it clearly.
The belly dance community in America is not inherently a cult. But it has cult features: the scarcity that enforces loyalty, the charismatic authority that resists accountability, the oppositional identity that punishes dissent, the performance of inclusion that masks hierarchy.
And layered on top of all of this is the White Queen archetype—a specifically American, specifically Midwestern, specifically white supremacist construction of idealized femininity that travels from Klan families into dance studios, from father-daughter incest into community leadership, from the protection of “white womanhood” into the policing of who gets to call herself a belly dancer.
If we want to save this art form—if we want it to be genuinely liberatory, genuinely cross-cultural, genuinely just—we have to name what is broken. We have to name the White Queen. We have to name the cult dynamics. We have to stop pretending that gig-stealing, blacklisting, and “black witch” spells are just drama, just personality conflicts, just women being catty.
They are not. They are the mechanisms of a closed system. And they are killing the dance.
References
Bank Muñoz, C. (2008). Belly Dancing: Arab-Face, Orientalist Feminism, and U.S. Empire. American Quarterly, 60(2), 317-345.
Blee, K. M. (1991). Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Blee, K. M. (2020). Do White Supremacist Women Adopt Movement Archetypes of Mother, Whore, and Fighter? Studies in Conflict & Terrorism.
Campbell, C. (1972). The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization. A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain, 5, 119-136.
Cormack, R. (2024). Don’t Call It Belly Dancing. Evergreen Review.
Daniels, J. (2020). [Interview on white women’s role in white supremacy]. City University of New York.
Jarmakani, A. (2008). Imagining Arab Womanhood: The Cultural Mythology of Veils, Harems, and Belly Dancers in the U.S. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jarrar, R. (2014). Why I Can’t Stand White Belly Dancers. The Rumpus.
Kraus, R. (2016). “There’s enough drama in belly dance”: Gendered Bodies and Leisure. In Routledge Handbook of Gender and Leisure. Taylor & Francis.
