The Cost of Competitive Dance: Body Image, Eating Disorders, and DanceSport Culture

I am standing on a chair, in front of the mirror, in my underwear. I have two people trying to “fix” my body so it looks better on the dance floor. Pull here, tighten there, “how can we make you look smaller?”, the ultimate goal, make a woman look as tiny and frail as possible to make sure the man looks big and manly.

This is not a recurrent nightmare – it is a scene from my past, from when I used to compete. But it keeps happening to thousands of dancers everyday. A constant pressure to fit within impossible aesthetic standards (Meneau, 2026) results in eating disorders and several other mental health issues being widespread within the DanceSport scene. A systemic study conducted in 2013 concluded that dancers had a three times higher risk of suffering from eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa and EDNOS (Arcelus, Witcomb and Mitchell, 2014). Several factors play a role in shaping dancers’ eating habits and body image, such as the environment, competitive culture, ideal dancer’s body, mirrors, dance attire and costume, body monitoring, parents and coaches, peer comparison and even jokes made with good intention (Doria and Numer, 2022).

The cost of competitive dance

When you are a competitive dancer, or dare I say, an athlete, your body becomes a public issue. Several people are involved in your appearance: your dance partner, your coach, your parents, your dance partner’s parents, your federation and – if you are dancing at a high level, even your Country! Everyone expects you to fit the standards, and if you fail to do so, you feel like you failed your whole team. In return, your so-called team feel totally entitled to have a say in how your body looks or what you should eat. In some of the interviews I conducted I heard a baffling story about how a male told his partner to eat a single ravioli instead of two while at lunch during an intensive training camp—where athletes practice for eight or more hours a day.

As years go by, dancers internalise these standards until maintaining an extremely fit figure becomes central to their entire life. This goes hand in hand with the idealisation of the competitive career, which is promoted by coaches as something worth pursuing and investing all of your time and money in: dancers are hooked on a story that tells them that if they sacrifice everything, they will achieve a “good life” of athletic glory, monetary reward and purpose. This resonates with what Berlant calls Cruel Optimism (Berlant, 2011): whilst the promise of success is clearly broken, dancers cannot let go of the fantasy of it, because letting go feels like psychological death. We stay bound to the very situations that harm us because the fantasy is the only thing keeping our hope alive.

I suspect this is true of most elite sports. The system is the same; athletes have to believe that the reward will eventually be worth it, because giving up the sport means losing their entire identity, their community, and their sense of a predictable future. Staying in a painful, precarious system feels safer than stepping into the unknown vacuum of "ordinary life."

Just like keeping your physique in check is easier than facing the challenges of the system we live in, it is easier for an athlete to pursue the next medal than to zoom out and really question their positioning and agency in the world. Diet and exercise culture rely on this dogma: investing so much time and energy counting calories in and calories out and making the perfect training schedule distracts us from other much more urgent issues in the world (like, I don’t know, climate change? Wars? Global crisis? Genocides? World hunger?) or in our lives (Trauma? Gender-based or sexual Violence? Oppression?) and focusing on a simple and small issue gives us the illusion of control, rewarding us with tiny hits of dopamine when we achieve any measurable result.

Body image / Body fascism

Gibson (Gibson, 2025) argues that a highly performative body has become a mark of moral standing, and that stigma and shame are the enforcement mechanism. Citing Brohm, they describe elite sport as an institutionalised mortification of the body — a masochistic ideology supported by slogans such as “No pain. No gain.” Or “Impossible is nothing” (I was told this by my coach so many times… along with, “We should remove this part of your thighs!”). Gibson concludes that exercise, or rather, movement could, and should, be common sense. But we need to stop framing it as a means to promote health, physical attractiveness or, worse of all, infinite productivity.

Queering DanceSport wants to shake these foundations. Through new imagery, experimental interactions, queer representation, self-determination and radical inclusivity, we want people to be able to move and express themselves without the limitations imposed from the outside. Queering DanceSport matters because all bodies deserve to be seen — and occupy however much space they do.

FAQ

Why are eating disorders so prevalent in competitive dance and DanceSport?

Eating disorders are highly prevalent in DanceSport due to a systemic environment that prioritizes hyper-specific, rigid aesthetic standards over athletic flourishing. Dancers face constant scrutiny from judges, coaches, partners, and audiences. Because the sport’s costuming and traditional scoring inherently reward a hyper-thin, compliant physique, athletes often internalize these external pressures. This creates what theorist Lauren Berlant calls a relation of "cruel optimism," where the extreme methods used to achieve the "ideal body" actively destroy the dancer's physical and mental well-being.

What does it mean to "queer" DanceSport?

In academic and cultural research, "queering" a sport does not just refer to LGBTQ+ representation; it means disrupting, destabilizing, and questioning the toxic "normal" standards embedded within the system. Queering DanceSport involves dismantling the rigid, archaic gender binaries (such as forcing female dancers to look frail and tiny so male partners look dominant) and breaking down body fascism. It introduces alternative imagery, inclusive narratives, and experimental interactions that allow all bodies to fully enjoy movement and occupy space on their own terms.

How does diet culture offer a false "illusion of control" for athletes?

Under the weight of competitive pressure and broader global anxieties, hyper-focusing on minute metrics—like counting calories or executing flawless training schedules—acts as a form of "lateral agency." It provides a powerful illusion of control and rewards the brain with small bursts of dopamine when measurable goals are reached. However, this control is a trap. It narrows an athlete's focus to a single variable (their weight) and distracts them from questioning the larger, broken system they live in, ultimately controlling the athlete rather than freeing them.

Bibliography

Arcelus, J., Witcomb, G.L. and Mitchell, A. (2014) ‘Prevalence of Eating Disorders amongst Dancers: A Systemic Review and Meta‐Analysis’, European Eating Disorders Review, 22(2), pp. 92–101. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/erv.2271.

Berlant, L.G. (2011) Cruel optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Doria, N. and Numer, M. (2022) ‘Dancing in a culture of disordered eating: A feminist poststructural analysis of body and body image among young girls in the world of dance’, PLOS ONE. Edited by S. Cimino, 17(1), p. e0247651. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247651.

Gibson, K. (2025) ‘On the Process of Becoming a Body Fascist: Stigma and Shame in the Moral Economy of Exercise’, Recalibrating Stigma. Bristol University Press, pp. 87–104. Available at: https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollchap-oa/book/9781529235838/ch005.xml (Accessed: 29 January 2026).

Meneau, V. (2026) Dancesport’s Economy of Desire: A Queer-Feminist Perspective. US: Bloomsbury Academic.