The threat of unrestrained sexuality is a problem not only in traditional dance contexts but equally for mainstream religions. As we have seen, in some parts of Europe social dancing has been constrained by the Christian church, although it was unable to prevent it taking on independent forms within secular domains. Its arrival in permitted contexts did not necessarily mean social dancing left behind the conservative attitudes that had fashioned earlier taboos. ‘Even the waltz, which came to symbolize the very essence of nineteenth century gentility, was denounced by many when it became popular in the first decade of the nineteenth century because of its closed partnering hold’ (Cook 1998: 134). Social dances such as ragtime were condemned by critics as ‘tough’ or ‘rough’ dancing that was ‘“indecent” and “vulgar” for the kind of wiggling, shaking, swaying and pivoting motions it permitted and even legitimated as these movements were read as explicitly sexual if not imitative of intercourse’ (Cook 1998: 137). Social dancing had the power to induce female passion because of its relationship to courtship, and when senses of touch combined with acts of looking they were considered to arouse intimacy, passion and desire. In contrast, for men, dancing brought with it problems of potential effeminacy and emasculation (Cook 1998: 134), which required a masculinization of dance through the displacement of female sexuality.
One folk dance form in which masculinization was prevalent and which cap tured the European imagination was flamenco. Emerging from the impoverished social conditions of southern Spain in Andalusia in the mid-1800s, its influence spread across Europe so that by 1860–1900 flamenco was part of a golden age of passion. In fiestas and carnivals, the vibrant and provocative dresses of female dancers have always attracted attention, vying with the power of the men who strive to retain control of the event. Comparing these interactions to bullfighting, William Washabaugh (1998: 15) tells how the dancer
is the provocateuse, the temptress whose appearance and movements, so ob viously but crassly reliant on the power of ‘nature,’ threaten to throw the ‘cultured’ man off
balance. In the face of such dance, the singer and guitarist (cantoaro and toacaor) – like the bullfighter facing a bull – reassert their cultural composure by taming the feminine animal force that they confront.
Masculine domination of the woman by ‘taming’ (trastear) her links the parallel spheres of the guitarist’s control of song and taming a bull, in each case allowing the man to demonstrate hypermasculinity, but the display does not heighten her status; rather, it increases approval of the male singers in the eyes of male spectators. ‘In all these domains, the man becomes the centre of attention and the heroic main-event’ (Washabaugh 1998: 16).
Alongside flamenco in Spain, in Britain and America the term ‘tango’ became a catch- all term for dances such as ragtime that for some suggested question able morals. Just as flamenco displaced the sexuality of the woman in favour of masculine domination, a similar ambivalence was evident within tango. Jeffrey Tobin (1998: 79, 96) notes that there were two faces of desire in tango: one in which men danced tango with each other in virtuoso displays of steps on street corners and the other where ‘male johns and female prostitutes transgressed marital, class and racial boundaries to the rhythm of tango’ in Buenos Aires brothels. Sexuality is essentially masculine in the dance, represented by the display of women who mediate masculinity as the ‘exhibited signifiers’ (Savigliano 1995: 46). Tobin (1998: 91) notes that in ‘Lacanian terms, the male lead in tango has the phallus while the female follower is the phallus’. Women’s sexuality is thus displaced onto his desire for her as a phallic representation. Instead, homosociality commands the success of the male dancers in terms of how a woman (la tanguera) will submit herself to him on the dance floor, raising his status in the eyes of other men. Tobin (1998: 84, 90) argues that the tango is not about heterosexual love between a woman and her dance partner but rather about the forbidden desires of men watching other men dancing with women which suggest the possibility of repressed homosexuality, since tangueros always operate ‘across a leaky border that separates the straight and the gay’.
TuTus and ‘TuT-TuTs’: guarding sex in sTaged
and social dancing
The proliferation of different kinds of social dancing offered new potentialities for dangerous liaisons through which the boundaries between ‘good and bad’ sexuality could be stretched to the limits. The tights and tutus of ballet that displayed the crotch and legs, with low-cut tops emphasizing the woman’s ‘to be looked-at-ness’ (Mulvey 1975: 418; see also Kaplan 1983), meant that voyeurism became an acceptable part of movement consumerism where displays of kinesthetic pleasure and elegance were deliberately intended for a paying audience. This alternative outlet for eroticism meant that the sexual body was relocated as a site of consumer desire that could encode ‘cultures of pleasure’ (Featherstone 1982). The consumer body was an essentially passive object of gaze and exchange, objectified in its relations with others (Featherstone 1982: 52).
In ballet, the audience expect to be entertained as voyeurs of the dance. Hanna (1988: 124) explains how the ‘ballet girl’ was synonymous with prostitution, the term harbour- ing pejorative overtones until the mid-twentieth century as a ballet dancer was a slave to the stage until a wealthy man fell in love with her and she became his mistress. Women were moulded by men into their image of an aesthetic ideal of beauty, grace and excessive thinness (Gordon 1983: 177) that fulfilled the male fantasy of ‘pert-breasted, narrow- hipped virgins being deflowered’ (Hanna 1988: 128). In the svelte bodies of the dancers an ideal of female submission was created around suppression of sexuality.
The ‘natural’ representation of ballerinas as delicate, light, slim and graceful re- inforced a stereotypical heterosexual hierarchy of sexual difference, according to which men chased and attempted to conquer and win over women until they were handled like, and became part of, the male anatomy. English (1980: 18, cited in Adair 1992: 78) comments that:
The ballerina rises from the man’s waist, from his crotch, above his shoulder, across his legs. He carries her erect, though her arms may soften the line, her legs remain stiff . . . He handles her as he would his own penis. Fondly he holds the phallus in his arms, longingly, he looks into his princess’ eyes, ecstatically he lifts her, his hands around her long, stiff tube of a body.
English (1980: 19) interprets the male lift of the ballerina as representing orgasm after the masturbatory preparation, and he is not alone. These culturally determined sexual meanings have been discussed in a number of ways. Jill Johnston (1971: 199–200) has argued that the dancer soaring is a soaring phallus that, once erected, must fall (ejaculate), while the ballet ‘stretch’ or leg extension is ‘an unrelieved exercise in phallic erected exhibitionism’. Similarly, it has been argued that the openness of the female crotch in ballet positions indicates a willingness to engage with the dancer rather than being his prey (Siegel 1984: 219). But were female dancers to remain powerless sex objects in the hands and gaze of a male fetish?
With a growing critique of nineteenth-century subjugation of women in the spheres of economics, politics and education, women’s voices became increasingly prominent in the workplace, making waves in all areas, including the birth of modern dance. This time women asserted themselves as agents rather than recipients of male desire by ‘breaking the rules of the rigidly codified traditional ballet’ (Hanna 1988: 132). While the ballet corset had enabled a male dancer to lift his partner, it had prevented him from feeling her flesh (Kunzle 1982: 84). In the new era of women’s suffrage and greater sexual freedom in the 1920s, American modern dancers went braless, corsetless and barefoot, enabling ‘spectators to see the body – crotches, asses, thighs and breasts – from every possible angle’ (Hanna 1988: 133). Thus, the taboos of sexuality on the body were gradually broken down and, far from projecting an image of the sexually passive, virginal sylph, modern dancers fought to gain control of sexual perceptions of female bodies, inviting sexual tension, unbridled passion and open eroticism in their works. By the 1960s the sexual revolution allowed ‘stark naked dancers with dangling penises, bobbing breasts
and visible pubic hair’ (Hanna 1988: 191). On the one hand, Mick Jagger epitomized an era of aggressive sexuality in gyrating, thrusting phallocentric performances with excessive sexual drive, expressed in lyrics such as ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’. On the other hand, it has been argued that the expression of male power that demanded sexual return from women evidenced in Jagger’s performances was in fact tempered by allusions to his own sexual ambivalence. Rock stars and other figures of popular culture thus contributed to a shifting focus in sex debates in the 1970s (Whiteley 1997: 95). From rock musicals such as Hair in 1967, with its nude duet to ‘Elvis the pelvis’, also known for his gyrating pelvic movements, the acts of stage performers soon translated into activities on the dance floor as a means of leisure pursuit rather than as elements of consumerist sexual ideals or moral degeneration.
However, unlike the excesses of dance for public consumption in which sexual open ness is carefully staged, some forms of social dancing occupy an ambivalent and liminal space whilst giving the appearance of being tightly controlled. Sex, like gender as Butler (1991: 24) argues, is thus performative rather than a performance ‘in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express’. In his analysis of ceroc classes, Jonathan Skinner (2003: 16) describes how the grammar, tone and move- ments of the lessons have clear structure to their teaching which allows a safety valve for the expression of erotic play and sexual desires; as one dancer commented, these were ‘nights to act out and act up, to perform, feign illicit passions and create rom- antic impersonations within a carefully controlled and contrived social matrix’. Yet, an unspoken tension and pleasure seem to remain between the dancers as they ‘play to each other’ without necessarily revealing the truth of their relationships. The possibilities for flirtation and seduction increase in the bodily intimacies of the salsa context, where ‘notions of being and desire and feeling “with demure” behaviour come into play’, although this too is a calculated risk but one which cannot be wholly controlled (Skinner 2008: 69, emphasis in original). Some dancers find the intimacy ‘too close and suggestive, too exotic and alien/foreign’ (Skinner 2008: 71). As Skinner (2008: 73) notes: ‘For Annabel, the salsa is safe sex, whereas for Debbie the salsa could be a prelude to sex.’ In comparing ceroc and salsa, it seems sexual desire and passion can only be partially regulated in both contexts, although dancers have a belief in how the conditions of dancing mediate the safety of sexual boundaries whilst offering a potentially seductive and tantalizing mix to participants through opportunities to dance out their desires.
Social dancing may also provide a cover for engaging in erotic relationships within a predefined group. As Kirtsoglou (2004: 2, 7, 14, 153) shows in her work on same- sex dancing, a network of women known as the parea drink and dance at a nightspot with live Greek music as a cover for expressing their sexual desires in ‘a constant politics of “concealment and display”’ (cf. Herzfeld 1987). Their sexual encounters are not intended to be long term and the deliberate shroud of secrecy around their activities, as well as their wish to confound sexual categories, ensures that their engagements do not challenge Greek sexual politics. As the women flirt with one another, they and the community assess performativity on the basis of ‘complexity, originality and surprise’,
which is strengthened and legitimized by the presence of an audience watching a stylized performance (Kirtsoglou 2004: 76; see also Herzfeld 1985). The blurring of public display and private sentiment in this context is a bitter-sweet game that facilitates the empowerment of women at the same time as it recognizes the suffering of being on the margins of culture as a gay woman.
As different forms of popular dancing have gained a foothold through discos and nightclubs, facilitating the sweat and grind of unfamiliar bodies, they have re positioned concepts of public and private space, sexual interaction and sociability, as well as adding to the release of sexual desire and eroticism as disconnected from passionate love. In his analysis of the clubbing scene, Phil Jackson (2004: 123) argues that ‘clubs exist at the edge of both the civilizing process and the habitus’ in that they are based on ‘a desire to be together with people’ but with a licence to ‘occupy an “uncivilised” body for a night: to grin like a fool; to laugh too loud; to sweat it out on the dance floor; to flirt outrageously; talk well-meaning shite to strangers; feel sexual, carnal and exhilarated’. Here the sexual gaze rules male and female interaction and allows sexual power games to take place. Seeing dance as sex is at its zenith in these hyper-eroticized zones, as fantasy is given permission to have free rein. As one informant told Jackson (2004: 36):
I love watching women and men dance; I love watching sexy people doing sexy things, I mean actual sex shows are damn boring. I’ve seen girls dancing and they’re turning me on . . . I’m sitting there thinking . . . Oh fuck, the things I want to do to your body.
The experience of sex through dancing can be as viscerally intense for some part ic ipants as the actual sexual act. Music combines with dance in the club scene to be a sensuously seductive power that has the potential ‘to rearrange your internal organs’, as one of Jackson’s (2004: 27) female informants put it. Thus, Jackson (2004: 126) argues that the attraction of music and dance in clubbing is about how sexual and sensual pleasures are unconsciously stored in emotional memory and are carried as part of the person’s response to past and future clubbing experiences. Rather than sex being linked to a moral framework of social expectation, sex in clubbing is about sensual adventures for their own sake. It enables people to experiment sexually in different ways through the intensification of the senses. Jackson (2004: 151–2) cites one informant who told him:
My man and I sat down and wrote out a list of all the things we’d like to do sexually and included some things we weren’t sure about . . . Having a list and just trusting one another and being really honest about our experiences opens up a whole world . . . It’s like giving myself permission to experiment and I’m finding I’m pushing myself further sexually, just to see how far I can go, how much I can feel. (Female, 28, nine years’ experience of clubbing)
As clubbers do not view people or their morality as possessions, so their sexual re lation- ships should be free from the cultural constraints of sexual monogamy and its marital expectations. The rules of sex and dancing in the club scene are those of a hypersocial freedom; they allow clubbers to fulfil socio-sensual experiences through sexual licence
as long as no one gets hurt (Jackson 2004: 165). This is also true of the ‘circuit parties’ in the USA, rave-like events attended principally by gay men and where the dance floor explicitly facilitates sexual play, empowering the homosocial body through open displays of sex and sensuality (Westhaver 2006).