Category Archives: lindy hop and other dances

This is another post I wrote ages ago, but didn’t bother posting it because I’m feeling pretty paranoid about the nasty responses my ‘feminist’ posts get. As though any post I write could not be feminist.

Anyways, a quick timeline: I first read about Frumious Bandersnatch’s post ‘A Feminist Lead’s Manifesto’ via Lindy Hop Variation’s For Followers’ post ‘Reactions to the female lead’s manifesto’. I read that post and thought ‘aw yeah, whatevs.’

Then I read the actual manifesto (which an awful lot of people on Faceplant didn’t seem capable of doing – they just waded into that response piece, instead of actually reading the original manifesto. I facepalm and I facepalm.)

I read it and thought ‘cool, a manifesto’. But I didn’t have time to reply, because I was busy being a female lead, a teacher, an event manager, etc etc etc. Too busy fighting the patriarchy to write about fighting the patriarchy.

This draws me to a discussion of the role of women’s studies as critical thinking vs feminism as activism. I remember an essay Nancy Fraser wrote about the importance of activism to feminism, arguing that theory is important, but the essential nature of feminism is to enact or work for social change. So, in other words, just talking and thinking and writing about it isn’t enough. I’ve just spent ten minutes trying to find the reference to the article, partly because there are some problems with Fraser’s position (or, more likely, of the way I remember that position), but I can’t find it. GODDAMM it. Anyways, the general point was/is that while theory and discussion is very important to feminism, activism – actually doing things is far more important. You can of course argue that thinking and talking about things does constitute activism (particularly in regards to language and power, but Fraser has things to say about structuralism and linguistics which I can’t go into here).
I’d argue that writing and talking about dance is important. The mediated experience of dance (particularly in terms of youtube videos reframing actual dancing) can be just as powerful – and is probably more pervasive for most people who don’t dance every day – than the actual dance act. But I feel, quite strongly, that talking about dance, eventually, has to give way to dance itself in terms of actual authority. In other words, it ain’t what you say about lindy hop, it’s the way that you do it that counts.

In my experience, if I really want to change things in the lindy hop community, I need to get out there and do it. Less talk, more action. The best way to get more women leads on the floor is to have women leads on the floor. And we gotta start somewhere. Someone has to be that first woman out there on the dance floor, leading. And fuck, I’m ok with being that first person (I took up this point in greater detail in I vant to be alone and lindy hop followers bring themSELVES to the dance; lindy hop leaders value this).

I do also think that it’s important to encourage other women to lead. That can mean just cheering when they’re rocking something on the social floor, asking them to dance yourself, or it can mean saying things like “Fuck, yeah, just get out there and have a bash” directly to them. And you don’t need to use activist or political rhetoric in this sort of encouragement. Really, leading is fun – so encouraging other people to have fun isn’t really a difficult project.

Despite this commitment to actions, I still think it’s important to think about things and to write about them. Because critical engagement with a topic is important. Off the dance floor, we have time to think about things, and to look for connections. We can look for the way systemic disempowerment – patriarchy – works. This is the nature of patriarchy: it is a complex system of actions and institutions and discourses and face to face activities.

If I feel so strongly about the importance of thinking and writing about gender and dance, why haven’t I written much lately, in a concentrated way?

• I get hate mail. And I just got tired of it, especially after that boob post. And I noticed that Parrot Cat and Lindy Shopper haven’t talked about it much either.
• This makes me ANGRY because it shows how attacking women keeps them quiet. It also ‘proves’ the bullshit idea that ‘being in public wearing an opinion’ is ‘dangerous’ for women. When, really, that’s bullshit. It’s no safer keeping quiet and not saying anything. All those attacks on those public women? They were attacks on all women, telling them to shut their mouths.

I have to pause here for a diversion. But it’s a relevant one. I have to talk about the current Australian political climate (Edit: here is a list of articles with more information). When the ‘Female Lead’s Manifesto’ was written, the first woman prime minister of Australia was the target of a sustained, furious hate campaign by the mainstream press and conservative politics, which eventually resulted in her being ousted from the leadership of the ALP (and hence the prime ministership). Anne Summers has written lots of interesting things about this, and I’ve heard Kerry-Anne Walsh’s book ‘The Stalking of Julia Gillard’ is a good overview of this whole issue.

If you’re a person with even half a brain, you’ll be furious about the way Gillard was treated, whether you agree with her actual policies or not. The misogyny, the hatred has been palpable. It’s been a scary time to be a woman in Australia.

So let’s return to the Female Lead’s Manifesto. The author is Australian, and I think that you’d have to have no media contact whatsoever to have missed the horrid shit happening our media sphere. So this manifesto was written in a particular moment in Australian political and social history. Let me spell it out for you: if you were living in Australia, consuming Australian media, you would have clearly received the message that ‘women leaders are fucked up, bad, and awful.’ …not that this is unique for women leaders in any patriarchal country.

Do I go too far in reading lindy hop ‘leads’ as ‘leaders’ in the same way that a PM is a leader? No. No. No. Leaders decide policy, followers enact that policy. The lead is the PM, the follower is the government. Two different types of power. It is a fairly stretched point, but I think the theory is the same: there is a sense in both dance and political discourse, that the ‘natural’ state of things is for men to lead and women to follow. Hence the resistance to using gender neutral language in dance classes: it is as though teachers cannot even imagine that women can be competent, serious, focussed leaders. So language needn’t change to reflect this idea: that women lead.

Let’s get specific. How did I feel about the Female Lead’s Manifesto? Generally, I thought ‘ah, this is a manifesto. It is a personal statement of intent. It is for this woman, to rally her reserves. It’s not exactly as I would have written it. But then, it’s not my manifesto.’
Faced with the creeping, dragging weight of patriarchy in dance, we all need a little pick me up now and then. So even though it’s not my manifesto, I’m still excited by it. It lifts the spirits.

Let me really get into it, now:

Frumious Bandersnatch makes this clear at the beginning:

Fuck the heterosexist patriarchy, I’m a female lead and I’m not making excuses for it. This post is not a list of reasons to validate the existence of females leads, this is a manifesto.

Yes. This is thrilling. I am not making excuses. I am not validating. I am telling you HOW IT IS.

This is exciting. For a woman to simply state, with no prevarication or excuses, how she feels, is exciting. And for this statement to be such a rallying call! Such a provocation! She’s not apologising for having ideas! She is DECLARING!
This is what a manifesto should do. It is a declaration of ideas and intent. This is HER declaration of HER ideas and HER intent. Speaking it makes it so.

The second part is more challenging. This is the really provocative part:

This manifesto starts with the premise that most leads are men and most followers are women. When we first start dancing we are usually not given a functional choice – even if we are told that women can be leads, we see that the vast majority of women are followers. There is overwhelming pressure for us to be followers too, especially when we’re new and just beginning. I will even go so far to say that all female leads know how to follow to some degree.

How exciting! Yes, I agree with the first sentence. And the second. Not the third – I know women leads here in Sydney who don’t follow, can’t follow, will NOT follow. This is hardcore. I am so impressed, so envious. They are much fiercer than I am. Much stronger in their convictions. This is exciting.

…but here is where I need to pause. What does it matter that I agree or I disagree? This is not a call for discourse, or an invitation to conversation. This is a MANIFESTO. In this piece, the author is REMAKING THE WORLD. How exciting!
Why don’t I just play along? Why don’t I just accept it as read, that women are better leads than men? Why can’t I just pretend. Or at least accept the premise of this scenario. What would the world look like?

IMAGINE:
a world where women lead better, more, than men.
Imagine a world where most cops are women, most judges, most politicians. IMAGINE!1! It’s just so exciting, just so revolutionary and destabilising a thought. And it’s exciting because it is so far from my lived reality. It will not happen in my lifetime. And that is why it is exciting: it is forbidden, unlikely, subversive, transgressive, revolutionary. REVOLUTIONARY.

And that is because the inverse is true.
I don’t think most men stop and think… heck, most women don’t stop and think about the fact that most positions of power are occupied by men in our society. No, biology has nothing to do with it. My uterus is not preventing me from running the world.
Now, here’s a truly radical thing: gender switch the main characters in CSI. Of your news readers. Of your school teachers. Of your bus drivers. Imagine! Just the thought is making me giddy. Everywhere: women being and being portrayed as publicly capable and competent, and more important – being respected and treated as capable and competent! FUCK!

Now, pause. If you’re Swedish or Danish or generally from a more progressive country, this won’t rock your world. But here, in my country, this is our first woman national leader. This is amazing. AMAZING. This has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE, in two hundred years of white history. This is THE FIRST TIME a woman has been the leader of my country. Finally, there’s someone like me being powerful and competent in public.

So when the Female Lead’s Manifesto is written, it is saying, not ‘imagine’, but IT IS SO. Who are we to disagree? How do we know this isn’t true? Sure, you might have anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but what if it’s true generally? This is mind-blowing thought. And why not – why can’t we just accept this? Why can’t we imagine the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely? If it feels revolutionary to imagine half the women in your scene leading, then how revolutionary is it to imagine ALL of them leading, and being BETTER at it than men! It’s mind-blowing!

And if you won’t – why not? If you can’t – what’s wrong with you? Why can’t you imagine women being better than men? Can’t you let go of your assumptions about gender, that somehow men are always going to be better? Every day patriarchy asks us to accept that all men are better leaders than women, that more men lead than women. And even though most of the time we have no clear statistical evidence to support this claim, we just accept it.

I’m not saying we have to enact this gender switch. Or even believe it. But why can’t we just imagine women this way? What does this imagining do to the way we see the world? This make-believe stretches our brains. It broadens our horizons. We’re jazz dances. We do the impossible every day! We create the amazing every time we move! Jazz dance is ALL ABOUT revolution and radicalism! So what’s stopping us?

Because, every single day, we are expected to accept that a woman can’t be as good a prime minister as a man. That a woman can’t lead as well as a man. That a woman can’t run a business as well as a man. Every single day, every moment of my life, I’m being told – by everything around me – that I am not as good as a man at leading. And I’m supposed to just accept this and treat it as normal. EVERY SINGLE DAY I am being treated by everything around me as though I am an object to be ogled, there for the desires of any man who may want me. EVERY SINGLE DAY I am being told that I am in danger, and that it is my own fault. EVERY SINGLE DAY my leading on the social dance floor or as a teacher or in competitions is made unusual, remarkable, strange, unusual, radical, unnatural. And I’m not even running a bus, let alone a whole country! If I can’t be trusted with these decisions, how can I be trusted with the whole country?!

So what I want to know, is not whether you agree with the Female Lead’s Manifesto, but WHY aren’t you furious about the fact that I am being told – all the time, by everything around me – that this Manifesto is a lie? That ONLY men can lead?! And that ALL men are necessarily better leads than women!?

WHY aren’t you jumping to your feet in rage when people tell you this?
My question is not “why are you angry about the Female Lead’s Manifesto, but why ARE YOU NOT angry EVERY DAY about the things that women are told by our culture?” If you can’t imagine that a woman can do one part of a dance, how can you possibly begin to imagine that a woman could be prime minister or drive a tank or perform surgery?!

Just as importantly, why AREN’T you enraged that men make up so few of our follows? What’s wrong with following? Why don’t you want it as badly as you want leading?

Apparently men are supposed to be ok with the idea that they shouldn’t want to follow/wear a dress/be associated in any way with femininity.

Finally, I need to tackle just one piece the ocean of stupid that flowed after the Female Lead’s Manifesto. Someone asked about the piece (inevitably, stupidly, painfully), “Isn’t that sexist?” and I’ve heard a variant “Isn’t that reverse sexism?”

No, friends, this isn’t sexism. You must remember: we are not starting from a level playing field. We are living within patriarchy, where everything is loaded in favour of a select special interests group within our community: white, heterosexual, middle class, able bodied men. This minority holds the majority of power, of money, of resources, of public space, of media space. Sexism is dependent upon context. It is a relationship of relative power. I don’t have time to spell it all out for you, so I’ll just redirect you to Feminism 101, where someone with more patience explains things to you.

The most annoying part of patriarchy is that it has convinced you – us – that this is normal. That it is an inevitable consequence of biology or divine intention. That women are not 51% of lindy hop leaders because we have a uterus or too little testosterone or too little body hair.

Understand this (for this is how it is): women are not 51% of lindy hop leaders because some fuck has told us we’re not capable of it. Some fuck has made it harder for us to lead than to follow. Someone has made it easier for us to follow and for men to lead. I am being deliberate about intentionality here. Don’t just accept that ‘society makes it so’ or that the reasons are ‘too complicated’. My being afraid to post a comment on gender in dance isn’t complicated. It’s fucking simple. IT IS SIMPLE.

So you need to look at simple solutions. YOU. Assume that there are things that you can do, and that these aren’t complicated. Start small. Start with things YOU can do.

So ask yourself: are you that person telling women they can’t lead? When you stand up in front of a dance class, are you making it easier for women to follow and men to lead? Gender neutral language is such a tiny, small thing. Why haven’t you taken it up? What’s wrong with you? You’re a fucking JAZZ DANCER, man, of COURSE you can use gender neutral language!. I mean, there are a million other things you could be doing to improve the ratio of female:male leads in your scene. Who rotates in your classes – leads or follows? How many female leads do you have teaching? How often do you reference women dancers when you talk about dance history? Do you know who Norma Miller is? Do you stop yourself saying things like “It’s traditional for women to follow and men to lead?” If you don’t, what’s wrong with you – that statement is untrue!

What are you doing to make your lindy hop scene a more interesting place? Remember, if only 0.4% of your women dancers are leads, then you are robbing your scene of the other 99.6% of women who may consider taking up leading. Not every woman might want to lead. But why not assume that every woman can lead? That every woman is potentially a better lead than every other man?

You know, that if women have this, if men have this – this one point of rebellion of self-worth and power – they are putting just one more pebble onto that bridge. They are one step closer to fucking the patriarchy. It will give them the confidence to do things, to be things, to imagine themselves as more, better, bigger, the best.

If that is the case, then, what are you doing to make it possible for women to take up leading?

Assume that, despite your best efforts, you only get 50% of your women leading. Isn’t that a real triumph?

WHAT are you doing to improve things? What is your manifesto? WHY AREN’T YOU ANGRY?

I promised myself I wouldn’t wade in on this stuff, because it makes me far too angry. But I’ve been going through some documents, and I’ve come across a bunch of drafts for blogposts about gender and dance. inorite. Do I have any other blog posts? Yes, I do. But not too many.

Here’s one I wrote in response to a flare-up online about the problem I had with a particular piece someone wrote ages ago about follows, but which used gender specific language.
To be honest, it feels very first year undergraduate arts degree to raise the issue of gender specific language. It’s such a simple, fundamental part of cultural studies, media studies, literary studies any sort of textual analysis, to raise the issue of gender specific language. I mean, we’re talking second wave feminism here – the sort of issue that was important in the 1960s.

Why is language important to feminism? Or to any sort of critical engagement with the way ideology works? This is old school. When we do semiotics with first years, we explain how language choices and use reveal ideology. Or, in other words, the words we choose to use reveal the way we think about the world. I really like Roland Barthes for the way he explores the relationship between language choices, ideology and social power.

So, to use a very relevant example, the mainstream press and conservative political figures in Australia referred to our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, as ‘Julia’, rather than as ‘Prime Minister’. But now that she has been replaced by a male prime minister, he is being referred to as ‘Prime Minister’. It seems like a very small thing. But it’s quite important. Yes, it is disrespectful – of the woman and of the office (I cannot imagine an American television reporter calling his president ‘Obama’ in a formal, live-to-air interview) – but it also works to reveal the speaker’s perception of women as less important or powerful than men. And it also works to convince the listener that this is the correct way to address a woman prime minister.

“So what?”, you say. It’s just one example, one word. But this is how patriarchy works. How hegemony works. There’s a whole, massive, huge body of work discussing the role of language in society. I don’t have time to go into it here. But take my word for it: this is a well-accepted and understood analysis of language and society. You can begin with some reading about cultural hegemony, but, really, you’ll have to read up on your own.

Let me explain how I use it here (and how it is commonly used by other socialist feminists):

Yes, it’s just one example. But our lives are filled with millions and billions of these everyday examples. My prime minister – leader of my country – is referred to by her first name rather than her title. When I go to the bank, I’m referred to as ‘Miss’, even though my title – written right there on the bank account details – is ‘Dr’. A middle aged man that I don’t know might call me ‘love’ rather than by my name, in a professional setting. A man refers to me as ‘that girl’ instead of by my name, when addressing me in a public setting. There are sixty million billion examples of this, including http://saidtoladyjournos.tumblr.com/. This is just everyday sexism, friends. It’s terribly ordinary.

What is important here, is not the individual instances of language use, but the relationships between these many instances, the patterns they create, and the consistencies in these patterns. If I never hear a man refer to me as ‘Dr’ in a professional setting, it undermines my professional and academic achievements. It implies that I am a) not worthy of that title, b) I don’t actually own that title, and c) that title might not actually mean anything, when it’s attached to a woman. If I am then also seeing and hearing other women, even the most powerful woman in my country, belittled in the same way, the message is reinforced: women are not owed public respect for their achievements; women are not capable of demanding our respect.

So how does this work in relation to swing dance?
Simply, let’s assume that teachers never use female pronouns when they talk about leading. They only say ‘he’ or ‘guys’ or ‘doods’ or ‘men’ or ‘gentlemen’ or ‘boys’ or whatevs. They never ever say ‘she’ or ‘her’ or even ‘they’. If I’m in that class, I feel as though I am slowly erased. I just don’t exist. I’m not there in that class. The teachers can be looking right at me, me with my boobs and my hair and all the other fairly traditional markers that tell you I’m ‘female’. They can be looking right at me and say “Ok, gentlemen, let’s lead our follows into the swingout,” and I am just not there for them. Either they don’t see me, or they have some weird sort of dysphasia where they can’t differentiate between women and men. I mean, it’s kind of interesting to think of myself as some sort of under-cover spy for the Sisterhood, slipping through defences to plant big fat fucking feminist BOMBS. But not that interesting. I’m like most other students in a dance class – I just want my teachers to acknowledge me, to tell me I’m doing ok. To see me.

Once or twice I can handle it. It’s no big deal. But it doesn’t happen just once or twice. It happens 99.9% of the time. And keep in mind it’s not just the teachers who do this. Other students in class say “Are you being the man”? “Are you doing the boy’s role?” It was not until this year, when I moved into the highest level classes at workshop weekends that I experienced a single weekend where no one said this sort of thing to me in class. I have never, ever, in fifteen years of dancing, been at a weekend where no one commented on my gender, and no one referred to leads as male. NEVER.

Let’s just pause here: most of this insistence on traditional gender roles happens in lower level classes. When we’re at our most vulnerable, and we’re least sure of who we are as dancers. I think that many of us sort of assume that women leading or men following is ok or acceptable in ‘advanced dancers’, because OMGHARD. But it seems far more radical for brand new dancers to do anything other than BE NORMAL.

So, sure, your saying ‘guys’ when addressing your leads in class is just one time. One small thing. It’s just that little thing. It’s nowhere near as important or interesting as that particular rhythm variation. But mate: you are not the only person in the world putting that little word into the discourse. Yes, it is just a straw. But it’s one of a million billion straws, each slowly loaded up onto that camel’s back.

It’s nothing, right? It’s tiny. No one’s being mean to me. No one’s saying I can’t lead, or that I don’t deserve to lead. I’ve only ever come across one or two teachers who’ve openly said that they won’t use gender-specific language. But I can count on one hand the number of teachers who’ve openly, explicitly encouraged me as a woman lead. Those moments shine in my memory. I take them out and polish them. They’re so important to me. Once, a female teacher whispered to me in class, “Don’t you ever give up leading.” It was the most important thing anyone has ever said to me about dancing. When I’m just so fucking tired of it, I take out that memory and I hold it in my hand for a minute. I don’t have to be the best. I just have to keep going.

[RAGE EDIT—God fucking damn it. What the actual FUCK. This is fucking crazy. CRAZY. Dancing should be fun – not a battle! WHY can’t we just stop being arseholes, and START being grownups about this? Use gender-neutral language. Don’t be a dickwad.— /]

So I literally do not exist in some classes. The woman lead is not here. We are invisible. What does this do? It tells students that women leads aren’t ‘real’ leads. That we aren’t as important as male leads. In my experience, it’s resulted in people saying to my face that I can’t teach as well as a man, because I am a woman teaching as a lead. Many people have said to me that people won’t want to learn from a female lead, or from two women leading together. So many people have told me that it will be/is difficult.

You know what? It’s not. It’s the least difficult part of my job as a teacher. In fact, I rarely stop to think ‘oh, does my vagina impede my ability to scat?’ I can say, categorically, that being a woman does not make me a rubbish lead teacher. I’ve got plenty of other things that make me a dodgy teacher :D Other people’s ideas about women leads as teachers can make them shitty students, but that’s not my problem.

And I think many of us can say that women leads do exist. We’re out there, every night, across the world, kicking arse and taking names. Leading. We’re good at it, we’re great at it, we’re the best at it, but we’re also shit at it, ordinary at it, just plain capable. We’re just as diverse a group as male leads.

Now, ask yourself: how often do you see men follow? It should frighten you, worry you that male follows are so very rare. This is the real problem: patriarchy screws over men and women. It’s not just a matter for women. It’s not just a women’s issue. It’s an issue for all of us to be concerned about.

But all that is really just an introduction to a piece I wrote earlier. Let’s get into it.

Why is gendered language in a swing dance context important?

When we generalise, and say ‘most follows are women, therefore it’s ok that we always refer to follows as ‘she’ or ‘her’ or female’, we are making some mistakes.

1. What evidence do we have to support the statement that ‘most follows are women’?
Why can’t we just assume that women are as likely to lead as men, and men as likely to follow as women? If we just make this assumption, then maybe we’ll find this becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
One of the most important moments in my dancing life was at Herrang, in a class with Peter Loggins and Sugar Sullivan. We had no women leading in the class. Sugar was explaining something, and said something like “And when we do this, men, you have to… oh no. Wait. Girls and guys lead nowadays, and that’s alright. So I’m going to say ‘leaders’.”
My heart LEAPT. Here was a old timer saying, without provocation, that not only was it ok for me to lead, but that that was ‘ok’, and that it was important for her to recognise that. By the end of our next class, half a dozen women were leading. Like GUNS. Say it, and you make it so.

2. When we say ‘most follows are women’, the more disturbing correlative point is that we are also saying – implicitly – that most women are follows.
Or, as it plays out in a discursive sense ‘all women are follows’. This is highly problematic. I have never seen a scene where allthe women dancers only follow. I know virtually no female teachers at an international level who can’t lead.

So by declaring ‘most follows are women’, with the correlative statement ‘all women are follows’, we make the female leads disappear. More importantly (because a lot of women choose not to identify as ‘leads’), we make women leading disappear. We are saying that ‘women do not lead’ (because they are following). The following point would be that ‘women can’t lead’ because #vagina. This is just weird. We can’t make that argument, that the biological nature of ‘being a woman’ makes us unfit to lead. Sure, my (enormous) bosom might make some moves challenging, but it doesn’t actually make it impossible for me to lead. And I’m not quite sure how having a vagina would impede my movement. If anything, surely internal genitalia are an advantage in lindy hop.

….that’s all just crazy talk. Let’s stop there.

So, can we argue that nurture has resulted in women being ‘unfit’ for leading? Hm. Considering how diverse we are, I’m not sure you can make that argument, not across cultures, and not even within a single city. But let’s go crazy. Let’s assume so. Nurture is, by definition, mutable. It can be changed. If this is the case, then perhaps in creating dance classes and scenes where women feel comfortable leading, and men feel comfortable with women leads, we are doing something profoundly radical. We are changing social relations. We are undoing ‘nurture’, or the effects of cultural conditioning.

That’s exciting. It’s a big call, though.

Is it too much to ask of lindy hop? People have spoken about the Savoy ballroom as overcoming segregation, with white folk dancing with black folk. That’s a lot to ask of lindy hop, that it overcome legislated, ingrained racism. But lindy hop did it. Surely we can ask a little more of what is, at heart, a profoundly transgressive dance. I have discussed this before, and in fact, I am exploring this idea every day, with everything I do. In the context of patriarchy, every time I step onto the dance floor as a woman, every time I DJ, every time I manage an event, every time I express my opinion, I am committing an act of radical feminism. I am undoing patriarchy. But mostly it just feels like dancing. Normal.

3. When we spend this much time and effort defining women as follows and follows as women, we make following and women the ‘other’, or the problematic role/gender.
The feminine becomes one we have to spend a lot of time discussing. Why don’t we feel the impetus to define and redefine the masculine this way? It is because we normalise leading as masculine. And there aren’t enough people agitating, and asking ‘why aren’t men following?’ What, then, we should ask ourselves, are the benefits to maintaining patriarchy? Why aren’t people shouting about it? Who benefits from the status quo?

This is important, because leading and following do not occur in a social and cultural vacuum. How do these roles – leading and following – and their gendering correlate with broader social roles? How is leading masculinised and following feminised in our culture?
I could go on and on and on about this. How do boringly heteronormative ideas of the lead/follow male/female relationship permeate and inform our conception of lindy hop?

Let me throw this at you:
– passive/receptive/responsive/object (the ‘heavy follow’, the ‘light follow’ – objects to be moved)
– decision-making/active/reactive/subject (the ‘strong’ lead, the one who ‘moves’ the follow – subjects moving objects)

If you’re a dancer with even an intermediate knowledge of dance, you know it’s simply not that simple. This is a very amateurish, beginnerish understanding of leading and following. We understand that follows are actively engaged in the partnership, and that any decent lead is as responsive as a follow, reacting and responding to what they feel happening in the partnership and to the floor around them. I’ve done some very close textual analysis of this before in the post ‘Lindy hop followers bring themselves to the dance, so I won’t go into it again.

So there are two jobs to be done here.
1) Undo that boring gendered dichotomy idea of leading and following, by redefining following as active, and leading as responsive.
Most advanced dancers are all over these ideas. In fact, one the most interesting and challenging ideas getting about in higher level classes, conversations and choreography in the lindy hop world today, is how a lead might actually make their leading work to accomodate and encourage active follows in complex ways. It’s as though most people have just gone ‘of course! durh!’ to the suggestion that active follows are a great idea. They’ve just moved straight on to the next challenge: leaders are asking themselves ‘how do I encourage and facilitate active following?’

It’s so exciting. It’s like they’re saying ‘Feminism will make me a better lead. Now how can I play a role in feminism: what can I do?!’ And they’re getting off their arses and figuring it out themselves.

2) redefine the language we use to describe these roles.
Why is this important? Isn’t the important part just to redefine our thinking about these roles? This is where my background as a discourse analysis scholar comes into play. I believe that language is important.
Any dance teacher worth their salt knows that what they say in class has a profound effect on their students’ learning. Talk too much and the students lose interest. Talk about arms, and the students focus on arms. Scat and the rhythm becomes clear. Use only numbers and the students’ understanding of rhythm is limited.

Language matters to dancers.

It’s really not difficult at all to shift from using gendered pronouns when talking about leading and following. Or is it? In my own class, my teaching partner and I found it harder than we expected. There was a period of a few months where we struggled. This suggests that the way we think about gender and dance roles is related to language, and that these association are quite firmly rooted in our understanding of dance.
But once we did it, we found that using this language really isn’t difficult. It becomes normal.

I mean, fuck. We transcribe complex jazz steps from blurry old black and white films, break them down, learn how to do them, then teach them to students. Learning to say ‘lead’ instead of ‘him’ is a fucking cake walk in comparison.

I wrote this post in April this year. And I began it with Clementine Ford’s piece ‘Why ‘can you have it all’ is this century’s dumbest question’.

I’d like to make a provocation:
A dance floor of one’s own is as important as a room of one’s own. And just as Virginia Woolf’s essay(s) are problematic for women of colour, the idea of a dance floor of one’s own is not without its own problems. But let me begin to explore the idea, and we’ll pick up those problems as we go.

There something powerful about simply having the time and energy to commit to self expression, to a creative art, to pleasure for pleasure’s sake.
Accepting and acting on the idea that what you have to contribute is valuable, important, creative, funny worth while is a radical act. Speaking up – getting on the dance floor – is a radical act, because it presupposes your ideas are important. In this respect, dancing is a contribution to public discourse, to public life, and to creative, social life. This is where lindy hop – as a social dance that you do with other people in public spaces – is different to writing or painting or other visual arts. It is a public, social cultural and creative practice.
The distinction between professional dance and amateur dance is important. There is the sense that being a dancer is ok if you can ‘make a living from it’ or ‘make something of it’. Dancing just for the sake of dancing – for the pleasure of your own body in movement – is dismissed as irrelevant, trivial, selfish, unimportant.

There is nothing more important than a woman accepting, and being able to accept, that her own pleasure, her own interests, her own ideas are important and relevant. Important and relevant to her. They do not need to be deemed important by a male observer, or by culture and society as a whole. They can be wonderfully, deliciously, selfishly important to the person dancing, and to her alone. She needn’t even be very good at it, so long as it makes her feel good and brings her pleasure. Or even if it brings her occupation, challenge, stimulation. This is important in the broader context of patriarchy, where women are expected to subsume their interests, desires and pleasures in the needs of others. For men, for children, for parents, for employers, for babies. One of the most challenging and powerful parts of lindy hop is that it can exist solely for a pure, social and selfish pleasure.

Clementine Ford makes this point:

It’s abundantly clear that women … aren’t considered to have ascended to the status of accomplished human being until they shuck off that amateur mantle of ‘woman’ and become mothers.

In this sense, women are expected to prioritise the needs and interests of others. To concentrate solely on art or creative practice, to use her body for something other than making babies, is considered less important, less valuable. By extension, women are judged for their bodies, not their creative or cultural or social actions. This body must be beautiful, and it must make babies, and these babies must be the centre of a woman’s life.

There is the obvious discussion about women’s bodies and sex to be had, but that is not what I want to talk about. I think the idea that a woman might use her body for something that is not sex or sexual reproduction is quite radical and powerful. I’m not the first to point out the empowering qualities of physical exercise. I’d argue that lindy hop combines the power of adrenaline and knowing your body can be trusted, is powerful, is a source of pleasure and excitement, with the creative and artistic process of painting or drawing or writing. But while painting or drawing or writing in their most traditional forms are quiet, solitary things, lindy hop is loud and exuberant and dangerous. Even when it is at its quietest and gentlest.

As a jazz dance, lindy hop responds to jazz music, which combines both structure and improvisation. Rules and rule-breaking. Cooperative and collaborative work with individual, independent creativity. While we might shut ourselves away to write a book, lindy hop demands its participants publicly accept and value a woman’s creative work in a public, and creative communal space. Lindy hop is a public discourse, a public creative space. And women’s contributions are not only tolerated, but expected and required.

On a more prosaic level, simply choosing to leave the house to go dancing is a radical act. I choose to walk away from the dirty dishes, the unfolded laundry, the unwritten essay, the incomplete report, the unfinished argument. I go out into the night, by myself, to meet other people in a public space. And in that public space, I can commit myself, wholly to my own body, to my own pleasure and satisfaction. When I dance with men, we are both negotiating a public relationship that is necessarily mutually respectful and creative. Though there are always moments when the power dynamic between partners is fucked up (the disrespectful, controlling lead), lindy hop itself – with the open position – builds in time for subversion, resistance and powerful self-expression. Improvisation is expected. It is required.

This is where solo dance and women leading become the ideological icing on the cake. A woman leading is an act of radical politics in a community that cannot even manage to divorce the word ‘lead’ from male pronouns.

The follow up piece to this post, then, is what happens when a woman lindy hopper has a baby? This is particularly relevant to us now, as the most recent generation of lindy hopping women move on to having children. Is there space in lindy hop for women with babies? Can they have it all? At this point, I want to rage the way Clementine Ford does. This is not the question that I want to ask.

We should be asking: “How can we make room for fathers with children in lindy hop?” and “How can we make room for children and babies in lindy hop?” We should not be assuming that caring for babies is the sole province of women. It is the work of men and women, in partnership, alone, and with same-sex partners. More importantly, for a community which has perennial problems with longevity and social sustainability, children are the responsibility of all of us, of all lindy hoppers. It is in our interests (as well as theirs!) to build dance communities which accommodate children, babies, parents and carers. Not simply for the sake of those children, or for our communities.

Our creative worlds are made eminently richer by the presence of the dancing woman, who has that moment in time and space to be utterly submerged in her own body and own dancing pleasure. Because that moment of utterly independent pleasure is essential to the health of our communities as a whole. We cannot be a socially sustainable community if we assume that for the majority of our dancers (and women are the majority of our dancers in lindy hop) their own dancing can never be their highest priority. Adequate child care facilities, supportive partners, robust communities allow women moments where they can make their own dancing the most important thing in that moment. Child care does not disappear for them in that moment, but they have the freedom to accept and believe and be confident that someone else is looking after their child, and that they can be trusted.

Our culture spends a lot of time – all of its time? – convincing us that men in particular cannot be trusted. That they are dangerous. And that women have to protect themselves (and children) from men. From the world. Working to secure child-friendly dance communities works hand in hand with securing women-friendly dance spaces, without sexual harassment and bullying. And, ultimately reworking our perceptions of bodies and bodily responsibility are good for men too. If it is bad to be continually thinking of yourself and your body in danger, what must it be like to be continually, always regarding your own body and self with suspicion? To fear, all the time, that you might hurt someone. You might rape or assault them. That your body cannot be trusted, that you cannot be trusted? Patriarchy is not kind to men either.

Having said, that I think Ford makes an excellent point when she says

Gender inequality wasn’t created by women and their unreasonable ambitions. It’s vital that we shift the focus of women’s oppression back to its beneficiaries rather than perpetuate the kinds of meaningless conversations that imagine these things are perplexing problems for women alone to solve.

I think we need to start engaging with masculinity and ideas about men in the modern lindy hopping world. \

In May 2011 I wrote a post called A difficult conversation about sexual violence in swing dance communities

I need to bump this post again, because it’s been getting a stack of traffic lately.

This was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever written. When I started linking ideas together, and mapping out the way gender roles and ideology contribute to sexual violence in my community, it nearly broke my heart. I was so, so upset by the connections I was making. I didn’t want to realise these things about my people, my places. I started being afraid. Afraid of my own dance spaces – the places I felt best about myself. So I decided that rather than letting this sorrow eat me up from the inside, I’d do something about it. Fear and anger and despair will eat you up and finish you. So you need to step up, do something, make something, change something. Be a force of good. Remind yourself that jazz dance is built on a history of resistance to oppression. It is radical politics. It is a powerful tool. A powerful idea.

I am not going to accept the general response to these issues: that violence towards women happens on the street (not my street!), in bars (not my local!), to ‘slutty’ women (not my women!), and is perpetrated by rough/violent/aggressive/’low’/male strangers (not my friends! not me!)

Sexual harassment happens in your lindy hop community. In your city. To your friends. And it is perpetrated by people you know, maybe even by your friends. This makes it your responsibility.

The only logical response to this is sadness, despair, RAGE. And then action. Do something. Do something!