Optimising for the hegemonic gaze
Have you ever wondered how much effort dancers put into preparing for a competition?
Introduction
Preparing for a competition requires a lot of effort. On the day itself, after waking up very early in most cases, you have to do your hair and make-up, apply fake tan, pack all your things, get in the car and drive to the venue - if you didn’t have to fly. Once there, you have to warm up, get dressed, warm up some more, dance one round and then wait to see if you have made it through to the next round. Afterwards, you need to cool down, change, get into the car and drive back home. Then you have to unpack, remove your tan, hairstyle and make-up. And that's just for one competition! Now, what if we told you that this effort is distributed unjustly?
Who gets to control the means of media production?
What kind of dancing can we expect to see at a Latin DanceSport competition? More importantly, who has a say in it? In this tool, we invite you to reflect on the mechanisms of power tied to the gaze, or looking, as a mechanism of control. The concept of the 'gaze' originates from Laura Mulvey's work on the male gaze in cinema. In her analysis, she suggests that men - both as spectators and as actors in the film - tend to do the looking, while women are displayed for the purpose of being looked at.¹
Mulvey initiated two discussions: one concerning the internal, psychological processes that occur when people watch films, theatre productions or dance performances, and another concerning who controls the media representations of particular groups.
In this tool, we are primarily interested in the second option. Mulvey points out that gender inequality - both in terms of representation and image consumption - is a status quo maintained by patriarchal structures that encourage the association of cultural production with masculinity. In other words, most movie directors, and also most choreographers are men, including in DanceSport. Furthermore, not only are they mostly men, they are also mostly white, mostly heterosexual, all cis, mostly allosexual (meaning they experience sexual attraction on a regular basis).
When considering who controls the means of cultural production, Mulvey’s essay echoes Iris Young’s work on cultural imperialism, one of the five faces of oppression.²
“Cultural imperialism,” Young writes, “involves the universalisation of a dominant group’s experience and culture, and its establishment as the norm.”
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Often unconsciously, the dominant group projects its own experience as representative of humanity, reinforcing its position by subjecting other groups to its dominant norms. “Those living under cultural imperialism find themselves defined from the outside, positioned, placed, by a network of dominant meanings they experience as arising from elsewhere, from those with whom they do not identify and who do not identify with them."
The dominant group's power of definition affects media representations of oppressed groups by erasing, invisibilising or objectifying them.
In other words, the media representations created by the dominant group reflect what they want to see. In DanceSport, these representations are rehearsed and incorporated into the dancers' bodies through years of consistent practice and repetition in a constant feedback loop with the trainers (We’ve talked about the choreohexis in Tool 3.³ Here, the gaze fulfils the controlling function identified by Foucault in his concept of productive power.⁴
Trainers, adjudicators and choreographers perform surveillance functions, controlling dancers' bodies and the representations that emerge through them using techniques based on coercion, policing or violence. In order to be taken seriously and remain competitive, dancers strive to meet the aesthetic demands of the dominant group on the dance floor and internalise them in the process. Since anything else is immediately deemed illegitimate, all dancers adopt the dominant group's goals, turning their gaze inward and training their bodies to display what the dominant group wants to see, rather than who they actually are.
In this way, the gaze is never just a gaze. It is not a silent device. It is not merely a means of consuming what is presented to the audience. The gaze is an instrument of control and power. It appropriates the body and defines what it can and cannot do. The gaze does more than just look; it produces what it wants to see.⁵
The gaze produces media representations that speak to the dominant group - and these representations tell us much more about the dominant group and its desires than about those whose bodies bring the representations to life through dance.
"The gaze does more than just look; it produces what it wants to see."
Hegemonic representations in Latin DanceSport
Representations in DanceSport are shaped by the male, white/colonial, cis, straight, thin, and sexual gaze - together, these converge to form the hegemonic gaze. Let’s explore how these manifest on the dance floor:
The male gaze:
Latin DanceSport is all about satisfying the male gaze. Men are systematically paired with smaller women and taught to embody undisturbed and unchallenged control and power. Meanwhile, women are portrayed as pretty, mindless, sexy and submissive. There are two main ways in which the male gaze is satisfied. First, women are encouraged to hypersexualise themselves. This is expressed through their movements and clothing in competitions and during training (see Tool 2 for a reminder!). Secondly, women are treated as objects by their male partners and trainers. This is evident in the holds, lead-and-follow mechanics, choreographic principles, idealised body sizes, and discourse surrounding technique books. Women are trained to surrender their agency, privilege male decisions and intentions, move only when told to, and perform their actions in a sensual or erotic way while wearing minimal clothing.⁶
The colonial gaze:
Latin DanceSport caters to the demands of the white/colonial gaze through what Juliet McMains termed 'brownface': Participants, particularly women, must tan in order to be taken seriously in competitions. Alongside the stylistic qualities of the dances, such as hip movements, dancers perform exotic moves that “were perceived as sexual and as evidence of the sexual nature of Latin Americans more generally”.⁷
Latin dancers retain their Western privilege through the hyper-visibility of brown skin because this privilege is attributed to their performance rather than their identities. During the dance, they can appear hyper-sexualised, and once the competition is over, they can wash off the tan and return to their relatively privileged lives.
The cis gaze:
This gaze scrutinises every body, determining whether they perform their gender well enough. Dancers' clothes, gestures, choreography and behaviour are all examined to ensure they fit into the correct binary gender category. Dancers face discrimination if their movements do not conform to the gender binary, and movement mechanics are taught separately according to whether the dancer is male or female (we addressed this in our third tool). Federations allow either men or women to compete, thereby excluding trans and non-binary people.⁸ The gallery below features a counter-example: The couple constellation doesn't feature a cis man dancing with a cis woman, which makes this constellation illegitimate for the DanceSport world.
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While trans people are not explicitly barred from competing, the DanceSport world constantly distrusts its cis dancers for not displaying enough feminine or masculine characteristics. This makes the barriers for trans people crossing the binary seem almost insurmountable. For Val, a trans femme, this would entail a lengthy transition involving bottom surgery, finding a taller male partner, retraining their body to move in a feminine style rather than a masculine one, and learning to follow rather than lead.
The straight gaze:
Dance partners are required to be of the opposite sex — i.e. a man and a woman — and the scene demands that they perform heteronormative sexual and/or romantic desire on the dance floor, regardless of how they feel about it or how disturbing they find it (see Tool 2 for more information). The DanceSport scene negates and renders invisible any relationship that dance partners might have with each other that is neither romantic nor sexual. It also renders invisible the relationships that dancers might have with other people in their private lives (including queer relationships).⁹
The thin gaze:
All dancers must have an athletic build, though the specifics vary according to gender. Female dancers are expected to be slim and graceful, while male dancers are advised to lift weights to improve their physique.¹⁰ The DanceSport scene's obsession with heterosexy bodies is evident in the gendered, fatphobic language and practices that shame dancers for having a large body and encourage them to look fit. This can lead to female dancers experiencing harassment for not meeting the DanceSport scene's standards of thinness, especially if their dance partner is also particularly thin. In the long term, this can lead to the spread of eating disorders or dancers leaving the DanceSport scene.¹¹ Fatphobia in DanceSport is also evident in performances featuring 'fat' costumes that ridicule obesity, as exemplified by the Jones:
The (allo)sexual gaze:
Heterosexy bodies are central to attracting heterosexual attention, especially from judges. The ideal body is constructed or displayed through outfits that accentuate the physicality of the female body as an object of heterosexual desire. Additionally, the desire for partners to engage in sexual or romantic interaction is conveyed through gestures and choreography designed to emphasise female submissiveness and male dominance (see Tool 2). ¹²
" DanceSport teaches us how women and men should behave and move in the world."
The price of submitting to the hegemonic gaze
All members of oppressed groups within the DanceSport community will feel at odds with these imperatives. Women are at odds with the male gaze; white people, with the exoticising gaze; queer people, with the straight and/or cis gaze; people who don’t fit the thinness norm, with the thin gaze; and asexual people, or those who are not, or no longer, allosexual, with the sexual gaze. However, for these individuals to be accepted in the DanceSport world, they must conform to the expectations of the straight, cis, white, thin, allosexual male gaze in order to perform well in competitions and access better training opportunities. This submission requires the internalisation of the gaze, which Foucault calls the panopticon: a constant scrutiny of oneself to ensure that one fits the norms.¹³
In other words, optimising oneself requires Herculean amounts of work. The video you watched at the beginning showed our documentation of a couple's preparation for a single competition. This shows how much work goes into satisfying the straight, cis, white, male, thin, sexual gaze on the day of a competition, not to mention the labour involved in dance training beforehand and learning the skills required for that specific preparation. It is absolutely exhausting. Submitting to the demands of the gaze when you are far from its ideals takes a lot of resources. As mentioned above, other forces impact what we see at competitions prior to dancers preparing for the event. For instance, only straight- and cis(-passing) dancers can register with federations. Furthermore, some labour is invisible, such as the work that gay dancers do to appear straight, which is more likely to be hidden and affect their mental health. Therefore, submitting to the gaze has very real consequences; it enables us to participate.
Conversely, since everyone either submits to the hegemonic gaze or leaves the scene if they fail to do so, what we see on the dance floor is restricted to those who fit the mould: straight-passing, cis-passing, tanned white dancers who are thin and athletic. Queer, fat, BIPoC and asexual/aromantic dancers are not represented on a DanceSport floor. This in turn makes members of oppressed groups feel like we don’t belong. If we can’t see ourselves on the competition floor, we assume it's not for us. Meanwhile, for those of us who are part of the scene and slowly realising that we are queer or that we don’t want to be sexual with that person, we internalise the shame of being different. This shame teaches us to accept and legitimise the normative violence coming our way, which leads us to hide our differences, thus contributing to our own oppression.
Of course, everyone is expected to put in a certain amount of work for competitive ballroom dancing. Blog posts about dancers' competition weekends illustrate the extent of the labour people invest in it. However, we argue that the psychological cost is much higher for members of oppressed groups.
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We would like to point out that, like most people participating in competitive Latin dancing, even the more privileged dancers commonly reap very little financial return on the investment of signing up for competitions, or for their competitive careers as a whole.
Representations in DanceSport are characterised by an unequal distribution of power and an asymmetry in the production of images. Straight, cisgender, white men predominantly occupy positions of power within institutions, whether as teachers, judges, high-ranking officials in federations or organisers of competitions, and create representations that cater to their desires.¹⁴ The gaze is one of the most powerful tools that systems of oppression deploy to colonise bodies. In the next section, we will explore ways to disrupt and counteract this aspect of oppression by providing members of oppressed groups with the means to produce media, ensuring they can portray themselves as they wish, rather than to satisfy the dominant group. This tool will offer a glimpse of the broader mosaic that must be implemented on a large scale; otherwise, we are likely to witness many more decades of depictions of violent power relations that perpetuate hegemony.
2. Mechanics as gendered aesthetics:
In their book DanceSport's Economy of Desire, Val explained that gendered mechanics are central to the performance of cisheteronormative aesthetics on the dance floor.¹⁴ Depending on the gendered style in which dancers were trained, each body part is used in a slightly different manner. Women are taught to use their bodies like so:
Men, in contrast, are taught to use their bodies like so:
Keep in mind that we use a descriptive rather than a normative turn of phrase, which gives the statements an essentialising vibe. By this, we mean that saying women are like this creates the impression that they are 'naturally' like this. However, the way these statements are made in the DanceSport scene is primarily normative, i.e. dancers should move in gendered ways.
Combining gendered ways of moving happen for instance when dancers practise short solo choreographies to warm up or work on technique during group lessons. The masculine version looks slightly different to the feminine version. Gendered styles always exist in relation to each other, so we dance the routine twice, once with Giulia dancing masc and Val dancing femme, and once the other way around. Can you spot who dances what style?
"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."
"Through thousands of hours of practice, dancers learn how to behave in a masculine or feminine manner."
For members of oppressed groups, meeting the demands of hegemonic gaze is much more costly.
For members of oppressed groups, meeting the demands of hegemonic gaze is much more costly.
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