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
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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.³
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.
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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
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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?
What might dance look like if members of oppressed groups were free to determine their own representation?
Lu & Yolanda - queer salsa
Lu (she/her) is a passionate salsa and tango dancer and a feminist researcher. When she arrived in Vienna in 2023, she started to teach in the project Queer Salsa Wien and at the inclusive dance studio Lilli’s Ballroom to promote dance practices that break with binary and unequal gender relations. Yolanda Schrag (she/her), born in 1996 in Southern Germany. She's a cis-lesbian feminist who is into climate justice activism and Latin music and dances.
How was your dance journey so far?
Lu: After years of practicing ballet and contemporary dance as a child in France, I explored other dance styles at university. I discovered salsa by chance during an exchange program in Madrid in 2015 and haven't stopped since. All it took was one class where there weren't enough leaders to try out the other role. I continued studying and dancing both roles, as it doubled the possibilities for movement and connection. It also gave me more options to choose dance partners, and more freedom to navigate specific sexist atmospheres in social dance spaces. When I started tango in 2019, I wanted to learn both roles in this new dance. I discovered the existence of a large and inspiring queer tango community, and I wanted to help build that in the world of salsa, too.
“I wish for more spaces that practice role rotation and build a queer and feminist environment with respect and consent.”
Arno & Damian - queer tango
Arno is a movement scholar immersed in queer tango dancing. At the final stage of a PhD,
Arno teaches queer tango internationally in both regular dance classes and workshops and
as tool for working with theory at universities, co-organizes events (local milongas and a
“My utopian wish is that one day we don't need queer tango anymore, that people understand that we are a diverse species and that the binary is a restriction for everyone.”
Val & Alex - queer Latin DanceSport
Alex (she/her) is a physiotherapist with a strong passion for dance. I’m fascinated by movement, the body, and creative expression. Val (they/sie/elle) is a trans non-binary multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, activist, and lecturer in gender and queer studies. They danced Latin DanceSport competitively together for three years and, still enjoying dancing together, gradually queered their dance practice, no longer taking part in competitions.
How was your dance journey so far?
Alex: I started dancing ballet as a hobby when I was five years old. At the age of fourteen, I wanted to dance more and explore a new style. That was when I visited the local dance club, where I saw partner dancing for the first time—and I was completely mesmerized. Shortly after, I began dancing competitively.
“I wish for dance spaces that are truly inclusive and safe—spaces where gender, gender expression, or assigned roles do not limit how or with whom someone can dance.”
Ina - Vogue Old Way
Ina Holub (she/her) is a queer body positivity activist who lives with her wife in Vienna. On Instagram, she blogs about her reality of facing multiple forms of discrimination as a fat, homosexual woman. Ina is part of Mizrahi House, known as ‘Trina Mizrahi,’ and has been teaching voguing for over a year.
Bo - Vogue Femme
Oyunbat Batsaikhan (she/her) is a dance instructor and coach based in Vienna and Budapest, specializing in heels, hip hop, voguing and experimental movement. Her work celebrates individuality, self-expression and the joy of movement as a tool for growth and connection.
How was your dance journey so far?
Dance has always been my way of exploring identity, emotion and connection. I started in hip hop, discovering the freedom of rhythm and movement, and over time voguing and performance spaces opened doors to storytelling and transformation. Teaching kids and adults has been equally transformative. Watching them grow, experiment and surprise themselves reminds me why dance matters beyond technique.
"I dream of a dance world that fully embraces diversity, where queer stories and identities are central."
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
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Lu & Yolanda
Arno & Damian
Val & Alex
Ina
Bo