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Men do and have always participated in raqs.

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This post will be short because I don't know much about either of these regions, but I don't want to leave them out. In the future, I am hoping to have this re-written by some one with more expertise in the areas covered.

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Many American dancers hold Egyptian style up as a standard as a result of shifts that happened during the 80s. Cheaper travel and the hard work of the Egyptian tourism board, plus tapes of Egyptian dancers from the golden era, Lebanon's civil war, and changes in Turkey shifted the focus of dancers in the US from Anatolian areas to Egypt. But while dancers in the US were idolizing Egypt's golden era, many changes were taking place within Egypt's dance scene, especially during the 1990s.

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​This post is about the style changes that happened in the US between the 90s and 2010s and how the situation dancers in the US found themselves in changed. During the 80s, dancing in the US was still basically the same styles as the previous decades, with more fringe on the costumes and more dancers starting to get into historical research, but several changes to the national context were starting.

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The story of fusion belly dance as we know it today can be traced back to Jamila Salimpour and her classes and performances on the West Coast of the USA starting in the 1950s and 60s.