Deconstructing the gazes
Who gets to control the means of media production?
In our previous tool on "Optimising for the hegemonic gaze", we highlighted that the media produced by DanceSport - what is shown on the competition dance floor - is constrained by the demands of the straight cis white male thin allosexual gaze. Straight cis white men are mostly in control of key positions of power within the industry. The media they produce, then, aims to fulfil their goals and desires. This, in turn, discourages members of oppressed groups from striving for positions where they can create different imagery. It also makes it difficult for them to distribute this imagery as efficiently as the dominant group can.¹
Learn more
It will be of central importance that the industry makes space for members of oppressed groups within its decision-making ranks (we will address this elsewhere). Of course, we will all need to educate ourselves on the ways in which we participate in oppression, bearing in mind that belonging to an oppressed group does not guarantee that one is not perpetuating one’s own oppression.²
Therefore, we need to counter cultural imperialism by creating alternatives that decentre the oppressive norm.
In this tool, we explore what Latin DanceSport could look like if we gave dancers and choreographers from oppressed groups - such as women, trans, non-binary, BIPoC, fat, and aromantic/asexual people - the means of production over how they are represented. In doing so, we challenge cultural imperialism and the politics of desirability, propriety, and erotic discrimination. Our goal is to celebrate the beauty, diversity, and queerness of dancers from oppressed groups.
It is particularly difficult to imagine other horizons when we have become so accustomed to seeing the same cisheteronormative performances.
Thankfully, other dance scenes have more experience in that regard, so we turned to them to find out how partner dancing, or dancing in general, could look when members of oppressed groups are free to determine their own representation.
We reached out to dancers of different dance styles, including tango argentino, salsa, vogue (with one shooting from Val and their dance partner, Alex, on DanceSport) and provided them with a photographer for a photoshoot.
Learn more
Due to the limitations imposed by the funder, we were unable to pay for a venue or the dancers' labour. However, we hoped to compensate them to some extent by providing them with the photos for their private and professional use. In this sense, their collaboration falls within the scope of activism. This limited the dancers' ability to create a representation that matched their vision as closely as possible.
When planning the photoshoot, the dancers were encouraged to decide on every aspect of how they wanted to be represented
Learn more
Some found this much harder than others. Social partner dancers are not used to considering how they look to others because their primary audience is their partner, not an external observer.⁴ For us DanceSport folks it was a bit easier. At the same time, however, voguers don’t really understand the point of this exercise because vogueing is all about self-determined representation.
We encouraged them to work with a photographer who is themselves a member of an oppressed group, to ensure that the photographer would also know how to capture the dancers’ agency in the pictures. We display the shots they’ve chosen, alongside their responses to a short interview about how their dance experience interacts with their experiences of oppression.
What might dance look like if members of oppressed groups were free to determine their own representation?
Lu & Yolanda
1. Frage: Wie heißt eure Tanzgruppe und seit wann gibt es euch?Antwort: Wir heißen MoveCrew und tanzen seit etwa drei Jahren zusammen.
2. Frage: Wie viele Mitglieder seid ihr in eurer Gruppe?Antwort: Unsere Tanzgruppe besteht aus acht Tänzerinnen und Tänzern.
3. Frage: Welche Tanzstile tanzt ihr hauptsächlich?Antwort: Wir tanzen vor allem Hip-Hop und Streetdance, probieren aber auch moderne Elemente aus.
“Our strong sense of togetherness and the fact that everyone can bring in their own ideas makes our dance group special.”
Val & Alex
1. Frage: Wie heißt eure Tanzgruppe und seit wann gibt es euch?Antwort: Wir heißen MoveCrew und tanzen seit etwa drei Jahren zusammen.
2. Frage: Wie viele Mitglieder seid ihr in eurer Gruppe?Antwort: Unsere Tanzgruppe besteht aus acht Tänzerinnen und Tänzern.
3. Frage: Welche Tanzstile tanzt ihr hauptsächlich?Antwort: Wir tanzen vor allem Hip-Hop und Streetdance, probieren aber auch moderne Elemente aus.
“Our strong sense of togetherness and the fact that everyone can bring in their own ideas makes our dance group special.”
Arno & Damian
This is a short introduction.This is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introductionThis is a short introduction 1. Frage: Wie heißt eure Tanzgruppe und seit wann gibt es euch?Antwort: Wir heißen MoveCrew und tanzen seit etwa drei Jahren zusammen.
2. Frage: Wie viele Mitglieder seid ihr in eurer Gruppe?Antwort: Unsere Tanzgruppe besteht aus acht Tänzerinnen und Tänzern.
3. Frage: Welche Tanzstile tanzt ihr hauptsächlich?Antwort: Wir tanzen vor allem Hip-Hop und Streetdance, probieren aber auch moderne Elemente aus.
“Our strong sense of togetherness and the fact that everyone can bring in their own ideas makes our dance group special.”
In Western societies and media, oppressed and othered bodies are both rendered invisible and hypervisible.⁵ They are invisibilised in that they are rarely present or represented; if they are, it is usually in a distorted way. At the same time, their presence is strange and disruptive to the normative functioning of our oppressive societies, making them hypervisible. Fleetwood argues that hypervisibility has deep historical roots in the objectification and negation of Black female bodies, particularly in relation to the gaze and consumption of white bodies and whiteness. Fleetwood explores how Black women might engage with and perform acts of bodily autonomy and resistance through hypervisibility as a resistance strategy.⁶ Building on bell hooks’ concept of the oppositional gaze, creating “spaces of agency … for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other, but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see”.⁷
What does it mean to look back, disrupt the gaze, fight against it, criticise it, or reappropriate it? We encouraged our participants to look back at the camera to challenge objectification by the dominant culture. In the case of the shoot with Bo, both Val and the photographer, Carina Armes, feature in some of the shots, to prevent the audience from forgetting the context in which these images were produced.
We celebrate the experience of these dancers and their work in other dance styles with this tool. Our aim is to encourage the DanceSport scene to learn from and draw inspiration from these other contexts, and to reflect on the phobias that make it difficult for members of oppressed groups in Latin to achieve this degree of bodily autonomy and co-determination in media production. This tool sends a strong message that centring the voices and projects of members of oppressed groups in dance is both desirable and possible. You just need to care about it.
Centring the voices and projects of members of oppressed groups in dance is both desirable and possible
Send Comment
Thank you! We are checking your comment.