The Safer Sex Ball is the one event in Exeter that can be guaranteed to generate controversy.
Whether it’s outcry over the outfits or cynicism over its cause, criticism always rises up. Some of it self-righteous, some of it misguided and some of it, well, really quite sensible.
The issue that this article takes to task is this year’s theme: ‘tribal’. The SSB is a fun event and not one to take seriously, but it is worth having a closer look at the theme to see any potential issues.
So, let’s begin by figuring out what ‘tribal’ actually means. A quick Google gives you a decent definition: “Of or characteristic of a tribe or tribes”. So, any outfit at the SSB this year will bepurporting to be representative in some way of a tribe.
The definition of a ‘tribe’ itself is more convoluted but essentially boils down to being a group. However, an analysis of the term in an African social action paper, Pambazuka News, says this: “In the modern West, tribe often implies primitive savagery… stereotypes of primitiveness and conservative backwardness are also linked to images of irrationality and superstition.”
I am not saying ‘tribal’ has to mean something racial or even cultural. Plenty of people have talked about wearing a caveman-type costume to the SSB and some are even going to use their own cultures as costume inspiration, whether being from Wales or from a ‘tribe’ of music-lovers. And that is fine. But when I turn once again to Google, the image results for ‘tribal costume’ are
almost exclusively of non-Western culture.
The problems with this idea of costume as representing a ‘tribe’ are two-fold. Firstly, taking bits and pieces from various cultures (a “Native American” headdress here, a ‘Zulu Warrior’ grass-skirt there) is disrespectful and reductive to that culture. It’s just not cool to ignore the genuine cultural meaning of those items and wear them simply as decoration. It’s not the same as taking various aspects of British culture because, unlike what the BNP might have you believe, Britain has neither been massively subjugated nor repressed. A quick look at history will tell you who has been repressed and a review of the British Empire would be a good place to start.
This brings me to the second half of the issue. If taking bits and pieces of people’s culture is reductive, then lumping them all in together as simply being ‘tribal’ is even worse. It is one thing to simply take inspiration from something, it is another to class a range of varying cultures, societies and people as ‘tribal’ simply because they are not Western and white.
Taking all this into consideration, it is clear that the ‘tribal’ theme has the potential to patronise and reduce non-Western culture to something ‘different’, as well as primitive and backward. We can all see what’s wrong with ‘blackface’, so hopefully we can all see what could be wrong with a largely white, middle-class, privileged group of people parading around in so-called ‘tribal’ costume.
Olivia Luder
exeposedev 