Desexualising Latin DanceSport
Addressing the rampant sexualisation of female dancers in Latin DanceSport
Introduction
Per i lettori che non hanno dimestichezza con la danza sportiva, ecco un esempio di Cha Cha Cha al massimo livello:
Salta all'occhio che la ballerina è incredibilmente sessualizzata. L'ipersessualizzazione nella danza sportiva è il risultato dell'interazione tra il paradigma agonistico e l'aspettativa sociale che le coppie si esibiscano in una relazione romantica/sessuale ciseteronormativa sulla pista.¹ Cosa intendiamo con questo?
The field is packed with so many great dancers that dancers and trainers feel pressured to use every tool at their disposal to make couples stand out on a crowded dance floor.
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Many couples are dancing on the floor at the same time, and judges only have a few seconds to see each couple per dance, so they have to make up their minds very quickly.
This energises the style towards faster, higher, stronger - towards exaggeration in every possible direction, much to the dismay of many top trainers who would rather see quality on the dance floor.²
Hypersexualisation in DanceSport is a result of the interaction between the competitive paradigm and the social expectations that couples perform a cisheteronormative romantic / sexual relationship on the floor. Couples are incentivised to perform intense desire. Top couples exhibit this behaviour constantly, thereby influencing all other dancers. This normalises a sexual imagery that is picked up by beginners and shapes the decision-making processes of dancers, trainers, choreographers and adjudicators.⁴
"Hypersexualisation in DanceSport results from the interaction between the competitive paradigm and the master narrative of cisheteronormative desire."
DanceSport’s hypersexualisation
The submission and vulnerability of the women is often directly inscribed in the choreography. Female dancers bend backwards, showing the flexibility of their backs; they drop (she falls and he catches her). Many figures emphasise female bodies as objects of heterosexual desire - their feet, legs or hips, or through développés and arabesques - exposing their underwear to the audience. Female dancers lift their skirts, make circles with their bottoms or wiggle them.⁵
Hypersexualisation is central to the fabric of DanceSport. And it upholds the heteronormative gender binary because it is essentially asymmetrical - only she is presented as an object of desire. And she is taught to do it right.
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The DanceSport scene wants female dancers to be docile and compliant enough to be used for pleasure - but they also need to actively sexualise themselves in movement. The scene wants to believe that she wants sex, otherwise it feels immoral. So not only should the female dancers get it right, but this style of movement should become part of who they are.⁷
Women in DanceSport are told that dancing is "having sex with your partner," that it is the "vertical expression of horizontal desire." The scene pays little attention to consent or bodily autonomy, and makes no age distinction, so these values are taught to young students as well.
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The women’s job is to attract attention, to be looked at more - to satisfy the male gaze.⁸ To achieve this, dancers as young as 12 will blink suggestively while touching their private parts, or bite their lips while spreading their knees and looking judges straight in the eye. This happened to Giulia recently while judging a junior competition and she didn't know how to react!
Hypersexualisation teaches dancers different agencies. The direction of the action - which body does what to whom - normalises two different ways of being in the body: the toucher (him) and the touched (her).
Side note: did you know that hypersexualisation is a result of the colonial gaze?
Latin dance is shaped by white European exotic fantasies of the Latin American Other. Gender performances in Latin dance do not fully conform to Western norms, as they allow white dancers to escape social codes and experience an exaggerated performance of sexuality that the colonial gaze attributes to Latin America.⁹
"Hypersexualisation in DanceSport results from the competitive paradigm and the masternarrative of cisheteronormative desire."
Here's our Cha Cha Cha - with a dick thrust, s'il vous plaît!
In open routines, where the dancers are free to choose the figures, anything goes, and hypersexualisation is commonplace. Note how we have chosen to show the way the dancers enter the floor in these videos, as often the man will position the woman on the floor and then walk to his starting position, allowing her to sexualise herself for the audience. Here's our hypersexualised open rumba:
So, how does it play out in dancing? Basic routines may be rather restrictive in the figures that can be used, but hypersexualisation still finds its way through gestures. It looks something like this.¹⁰
So, how does it play out in dancing? Basic routines may be rather restrictive in the figures that can be used, but hypersexualisation still finds its way through gestures. It looks something like this. ⁸
In open routines, where the dancers are free to choose the figures, anything goes, and hypersexualisation is commonplace. Note how we have chosen to show the way the dancers enter the floor in these videos, as often the man will position the woman on the floor and then walk to his starting position, allowing her to sexualise herself for the audience. Here's our hypersexualised open rumba:
Here's our Cha Cha Cha - with a dick thrust, s'il vous plaît!
"Hypersexualisation is about the direction of action - which body does what to whom - normalising two different ways of being in the body: the toucher and the touched."
"Hypersexualisation is about the direction of action - which body does what to whom - normalising two different ways of being in the body: the toucher and the touched."
It’s giving us the ick: The expectation towards hypersexualisation
Hypersexualisation is as old as Latin DanceSport (and that's because DanceSport developed as a product of hegemonic society, legitimising oppression through multiple overlapping processes of othering.)¹¹ In other words, we have been creating sexualising figures for the last 65 years. Now it’s time to look for a different way of relating to each other in dance. In fact, hypersexualised dance feels multiple shades of wrong to a lot of people in various situations. Some of these categories overlap.
● People who don’t feel particularly sexual at this point in their life,
● Asexual people,
● Children and young(er) people,
● Gay dancers,
● Dancers who are just friends and nothing more,
● Sibling dance partners
● Dancing with one’s teacher.
For these people, performing cisheteronormative hypersexualised DanceSport feels morally wrong, and being asked to do it regardless feels extremely uncomfortable. It was even the case for us - we have a strong friendship and a working relationship, but having to create, rehearse and record these hypersexualised routines felt super weird!
The scene is obsessed with authentic dance, but only cisheteronormative performances of desire are accepted, which is a huge contradiction, as dancers are not playing a role (like in ballet), but performing as themselves in competitions.¹² They have to show the right amount of romantic/sexual attention to their partner to avoid alienating the audience. People want to believe! But if you ask long enough, the experts break it down to say they want to see any kind of relationship. In other words, they want to see intimacy.
We say, let's focus on intimacy instead!
Eroticism is a side effect of dancing together, not the goal in itself. So we'd like to offer an alternative and invite you to join us in imagining what dancing might look like if we focused on intimacy rather than sexuality.
Centring intimacy
In the following videos, we can observe how the spatial relationship between the two dancers and the use of touch differs greatly from the sexualised routines. The negotiation of space between the two dance partners is more egalitarian with the two partners constantly moving around and maintaining the same level in height. The touch here is more delicate and highly receptive whilst in the sexualised version it is ostentatious and aesthetic, and it is used to draw attention to certain - often sexual - body parts.
In a basic rumba, the focus would be more on mechanics and synchronicity.
"Focusing on intimacy would allow us to adapt our routines to the nature of the relationship we have with our partners."
Focusing on intimacy would allow us to adapt our routines to the nature of the relationship we have with our partners. We are friends, but nothing more? Well, let's do less sexual routines, routines that feel better to us. To do that, we will have to ask ourselves what kind of figures fit us better, or how we can dance figures that are part of the standard repertoire in a non-sexual way.
Desexualising Latin DanceSport: a Tutorial
Note that our solution to this problem is not a reversal. It is not about him becoming an object of sexual desire and her objectifying him, although we wonder why most of us would probably have a problem with that specifically. No, instead we advocate for desexualisation - which, as some scholars will note, will result in a more European style than Latin DanceSport is now.
Want to learn more about what changes in the body?
Giulia noticed while recording the videos that the sexualised routines required her to be lower much more often, with more bent knees and more flexibility in the lower body. This resulted in a general feeling of discomfort in her body due to a constant stretching and bending to the maximum. The desexualised version tends to be higher, more controlled, and 'stiffer,' which according to David Kaminsky is associated with a white performance, whereas her hyper-sexualised version is read by the hegemony as a Black or Brown performance. For the leader, the contrast is not as strong, so he performs dominance and control, both of which are central features of white and male supremacy.¹³
We are aware that hypersexualisation strongly influences the judging situation. If you compare our routines, the sexualised ones are more likely to win because the heteronormative gender binary is an implicit judging criterion.¹⁴
A Call for Cultural Change
So, the possibilities for change are constrained by the values of the scene, and to change them we need a lot of sustained effort. We need an ongoing conversation about the consequences of hypersexualisation, the centrality of the heteronormative gender binary in Latin DanceSport today, and the way the current competitive format promotes hypersexualisation. Teachers often do not know or think about the consequences of what they teach and how they reward some behaviours over others, so we will also need training for adjudicators, coaches, choreographers.
In other words, we need to change an entire culture.
Members of the DanceSport community who realise the scale of the problem often ask whether we should set rules and guidelines to regulate what bodies can do and disqualify certain behaviours. Historically, this has not worked ¹⁵ for two reasons. First, legal documents tend to reflect the worldview of dominant groups,¹⁶ which in this case privileges hypersexualisation. Secondly, prohibiting a behaviour does not make it less desirable (on the contrary, I would even argue), so dancers will try to find the absolute limit of tolerable behaviour that tends towards hypersexualisation.¹⁷
In the meantime, we can challenge ourselves and our choreographers to create routines that are not driven by sexualisation. Let’s prioritise routines that we are ethically comfortable performing.
"We will need to shift a whole culture beyond hypersexualisation."
"We will need to shift a whole culture beyond hypersexualisation."
"Focusing on intimacy would allow us to adapt our routines to the nature of the relationship we have with our partners."
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