Meneau, Valentin

The World DanceSport* Federation’s competing regulations define a couple as a man and a woman, thus being openly heteronormative and featuring at competitions highly polarized gender norms. Yet, neither the judging criteria in use at competitions and set by the Federation, nor the quality criteria conceptualized by the experts to educate couples and adjudicators are defined in relation to gender. This situation has not yet been addressed by Academia or the DanceSport community and matters not only to gender-neutral or same-sex couples, who are as a result forbidden to represent their countries at World Championships, but also influences every dancer’s gender performance. This paper investigates how the quality criteria, specifically musicality and partnering skills, are defined and performed in the DanceSport scene. It draws on qualitative expert interviews that are analysed with the grounded theory method. This analysis poses the question of whether and how the absence of gender in the definition of quality criteria can destabilize heteronormativity in the DanceSport subculture and on the dance floor. The paper further draws on video material and concludes that gender-neutral couples are able to embody these very same characteristics, musicality and partnering skills, that the DanceSport audience expects.

After graduating in Musicology and Gender Studies, Valentin Meneau is now working on his dissertation in Dance Studies at the University of Salzburg. He focused in both theses on DanceSport. Being himself an active competitor, social research satisfied his need to confront the contradictions he was fascinated or irritated by in his daily practice. In Musicology, he researched about the performance of musicality in Slow Foxtrot. For his thesis in Gender Studies, he focused on choreographed gendered narratives in Rumba. Finally, in his current research, he aims at establishing a genealogy of female hypersexualization in Latin American competitive dancing. Native of France, he currently lives in Austria, and was awarded a scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences

* DanceSport is the competitive form of ballroom dancing. Latin American DanceSport includes the following five dances: Samba, Chachacha, Rumba, Paso Doble, Jive, while Standard comprises Slow Waltz, Tango, Viennese Waltz, Slow Foxtrot, and Quickstep.

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