Uniamo le forze e danziamo oltre i limiti!

In June 2021, after 10 years of active participation in the heteronormative competitive DanceSport scene, I came out as non-binary. Having written my dissertation on the barriers that exclude gender non-conforming people in DanceSport, I was acutely aware of the thin ice I was on and agreed to pass as male for the competition season that followed. In parallel, I was exploring my newly found identity in other dance contexts: raving and (queer) clubbing. In this chapter, I discuss my make-up journey as an essential part of my coming out, and the contrasting experiences I have had through it the (queer) techno/rave scene and the strictly heteronormative Latin DanceSport Here I emphasise how my makeup journey highlights its potential as both an affirmative and subversive practice. Makeup is not gendered per se, but it is perceived as such and can therefore be used to disrupt the heteronormative gender binary, whether on a personal or political level. In order to answer this question, I draw on autoethnography to discuss both my experiences within and outside of DanceSport between March 2021 and March 2022. I show the potentials of make-up, its functions, roles and meanings within different scenes. The chapter is informed by the dispositive analysis I conducted for my dissertation. Extending the work of Foucault and Butler, it tells of transgressions and constitutive experiences in different scenes, of resistance and subversion, of exclusion and productive power, of internal conflicts and conflicts between micro and macro levels in the DanceSport scene.

Ethics committees (ECs) typically base their decisions on established assumptions about the impact of the research process, the researcher and the participant on each other, which my doctoral research project failed to meet. This paper discusses the challenging clash between my experiences as a queer scholar doing fieldwork and the expectations of my EC. I argue that queer feminist ethnography complicates the established assumptions concerning the impact of the research process, researcher, and participant on each other. In doing so, I argue that we need models of this relationship that allow us to capture its complexity, for example in the case of research projects where the researcher is more insider than outsider, or where they remain part of the scene after the research has finished. This is important because these assumptions cause ECs to negatively impact on queer feminist qualitative research projects by silencing marginalised groups and challenging the legitimacy of scholars who are part of them; at the same time, a more complex understanding of the impact of this relationship on the research would lead to more meaningful research outcomes and community building.

This paper intervenes in the consequences of a myth propagated in academic discourse about the dancesport world, according to which half of the men in Latin dancesport are gay. I challenge two assumptions that surround this myth: that cisgender gay men do not contribute to the reification of the heteronormative gender binary, and that the dancesport scene is inclusive of gay people. These assumptions are based on a blatant lack of understanding of the position of gay men within the dancesport world – that is, the ways in which subjects are constituted through the effects of power. This work is based on empirical research I conducted in the dancesport community, including ethnographic and autoethnographic fieldwork, extant documents (e.g. books, blogs, Judging Regulations) and interviews with experts and participants of the dancesport scene (2021/2022). To analyse the data, I relied on the principles of dispositive analysis, grounded theory and dance analysis. I show that gay dancers have turned to assimilation as their only available strategy. I discuss the negative consequences of assimilation as a political strategy and how it impacted queer dancers – between invisibilisation, residual shame and a failure to challenge the heteronormative gender binary. This led gay dancers to rationalise and perpetrate harm based on the systems of oppression they had internalised. I conclude the paper by highlighting a way beyond assimilation for queer dancers.

Ballroom dancing, nowadays a multibillion-dollar industry, has emerged and developed within western, (post-)industrial, (post-)modern societies. As such, its representations rely heavily on heteronormative gender performances, most of which – as shown in this paper – reiterate rape culture codes. To do so, focusing on how heteronormativity is staged and performed in Rumba, the challenging situation that dancers face is first identified. Embodying DanceSport’s aesthetic and technical norms disrupts dancers’ adequacy to the gendered symbolic order, resulting in the dire need to overstate their genders, in order to achieve a subject position. Second, the ways through which male dancers perform dominance is brought into focus. With a close textual analysis of the performance of the six best couples from the World Championship 2019 with methods such as Feminist film theory, semiotics or nonverbal communication, a range of signs, from non-reciprocal gaze and touch, through polarizing positions emphasizing male dominance and female submission, to abstracted physical violence, are identified. Here, a comparison of two couples shows how these signs are used in different manners and, most importantly, various intensities by the dancers, drawing finally, like a photo negative, a possible subversive performance, in which the partners would be equal and these signs obsolete.