gender roles in partner dance

All partner dances, as social and cultural practices, exhibit norms. Given the roots of partner dance in heterosexual courting, it makes sense that gender norms and gender roles are a large part of the social norms of partner dance. But in cosmopolitan partner dance, in our current day and age, gender roles and norms don’t make a lot of sense and do more harm than good. Gender norms limit men’s and women’s access to a truly agency-driven and transformative dance experience. They also discourage nonbinary dancers from participating.

Here are the distinctive norms in cosmopolitan partner dance:

• Women take the role of the follower and men the role of the leader.

• Women are approached and asked to dance by men.

• It is rude to deny a dance encounter.

• It is even more rude to stop a dance mid-way.

• It’s inappropriate to chat during a dance encounter. Chatting should be done while on the sidelines.

If you ask a partner dancer about partner dancing, chances are they will tell you that it changed their lives. Partner dance is powerful and unique. As Jackson put it “the energy you get in partner dance is something you can’t get anywhere else.” The magic of the dance hooks dancers, who shamelessly go the extra mile for it. Josh moved cities because of dance. Emma’s “first fake ID was not even for alcohol. It was to get into dance clubs.”

“You dance because you want to be free,” says Arnold. But what if this freest of spaces is only superficially so? At the heart of partner dance, and particularly Latin partner dance, is a set of cultural norms that silently push women into the following role and men into the leading role. The coupling of gender and role is at odds with our current society’s stance on gender and power.

It’s not just that gender nonconforming individuals don’t fit in the gender binary or partner dance, but that cis-gendered queer and straight women and men are prevented from exploring the lived experience and self-discovery that the opposite role might offer.

While the gender norm affects everyone, I argue it disempowers cisgendered, feminine women in a specific way: Unlike gender- nonconforming folks who might identify and question the norm from the get-go, most cisgendered women and men fail to see the gender norm in the first place.

Women in particular are ushered into the lighter end of the dance’s power balance* and are funneled into self-reinforcing patterns of behaviour and thought which push them deeper into following and away from leading.

It’s not surprising then, that in a survey I conducted of 25 women in Latin partner dance in NYC, 76% reported to be interested in leading. In my time in the field I also often heard women’s implicit and explicit desire to lead.

I believe that all dancers should have access to experiencing the joys of Latin partner dance as leaders and followers. I wanted to explore if helping women to access leading could be the pathway to break the gender norm for eveyone.

The gender norm is a system built on mental models and individuals’ patterns of behaviour. I believe that to break the system we must intervene directly in partner dancers’ experience.

In the next chapter of this book, I’ll be walking you through a night of partner dance. I will address four barriers towards leadership that women face at different moments of the experience, from arrival through to departure, through a suite of design interventions.

My first goal with this multidisciplinary design thesis is to contribute to the muchunderstudied field of partner dance in an academic context. My second goal is to contribute in a design capacity, by reformulating the partner dance problems previously studied from a social-sciences perspective, into actionable design opportunities created through dialogue with users. My third and final goal is to create innovative products that provide value to dancers from meaninful social grounds, and which—as a suite of products— contribute to a new, inspiring vision of what partner dance could look like and fundamentally be in the 21st century.

BARRIER: IGNORANCE