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DanceSport''s Economy of Desire examines how the DanceSport dispositive shapes its actors'' opportunities, desires, and choices to reproduce the heteronormative gender binary, focusing on the DanceSport dispositive, a network of power that spans over and influences objects (such as clothes or competition halls), discourses (such as federations'' competition regulations, syllabus books, judging criteria), and practices (dancing or choreographing). Meneau argues that the DanceSport dispositive constrains what Latin dance can look like, despite resistance and counter-movements, by excluding or invisibilising queerness and objectifying and sexualising female dancers. This shows in all elements that affect or constitute dancers'' performances on the (competition) dance floor; that includes registration, clothing, coupling, partnering, moving, judging. This book helps readers understand how the heteronormative gender binary works, how it plays out in all the elements that influence or make up dance, and how it manages to remain hegemonic. It demonstrates how the DanceSport dispositive affects and influences all its actors, all the time - how we think, decide, move, perceive others, or incorporate knowledge that shapes our bodies according to norms and productive power. Finally, by looking for the heteronormative gender binary in the dance and in the regulations, DanceSport''s Economy of Desire unravels the underlying mechanisms that secure the oppressive systems and allows society at large to better understand them.
List of contents
Introduction
Autoethnography
Chapter One: The Aesthetics of the Heteronormative Gender Binary: Invisibilising and Excluding Queerness on the Dance Floor
Chapter Two: Latin DanceSport's Hyper-Sexual Subculture: Femininity at the Service of the Male Gaze
Chapter Three: Gender[less/ed] Moving Bodies: From Gender-Neutral Principles to Gendered Specialisation
Chapter Four: Gender[less/ed] Interactions: Partnering Paradigms Framed Within a Gendered Grammar
Chapter Five: Gender[less/ed] Judging Criteria: The Heteronormative Gender Binary as a Replacement to Gender-Neutral Official Criteria
Chapter Six: The Economy of Desire: Gendered Subjectivation, Trade-Offs, and the Power of the Dispositive in Reifying the Heteronormative Gender Binary
Conclusion
About the author
Val Meneau is a lecturer and research associate at the University of Graz, Austria.
