"A highly original and compelling work of ethnography. The role of urban women in the production of popular culture often tends to be overlooked and undervalued, and Braun's study of female concert dancers in Kinshasa, the beating heart of much of the musical world in Congo, the African continent, and beyond, makes a substantial contribution to fill in this lacuna. Through a refreshing lens of dance as reflective of social form, her lively prose offers innovative insights on the importance of female agency in refashioning gendered boundaries within the context of one of Africa's most iconic urban settings."-Filip De Boeck, coauthor of Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo's Urban Worlds "Braun's study comes as a unique and innovative contribution to our understanding of Kinshasa as a kinetic cityscape that dizzies itself in its perpetual gyrations and metamorphoses. By locating women dancers at the center of Kinshasa's vortex-like ambiance, Braun's fine-grained narrative does more than just render these performers visible and agentive; it disrupts and shakes up staid notions of gender configurations, femininity, and the economy of the affect."-Ch. Didier Gondola, author of Tropical Cowboys: Westerns, Violence, and Masculinity in Kinshasa "A brilliant study of the dynamics of gender, labor, and respectability. Drawing on deep fieldwork, Lesley Braun poignantly shows how the dilemmas that professional female dancers face-of being highly visible and yet respectable-offer a lens through which to analyze the double binds that characterize women's lives more broadly.

Essential reading for anyone interested in gender, performance, and contemporary social change."-Jennifer Cole, University of Chicago.