Coding sexual violence as love – choreographed heteronormative gender performances in Latin American competitive dancing

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.