Category Archives: lindy hop and other dances

Why solo dance?

Best post over at VernacularJazzDance: So solo jazz – why bother?

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This post really says it all. So I’ll just add some crap on the end.

Things I have seen in my weekly solo jazz class (which we’ve been teaching for a year now):

  • Mad skills. Simply put, doing a weekly solo jazz class makes you a fuckoff good dancer. It makes you fitter, stronger, more flexible, more grounded, more centered. It gives you super control of your body, your balance is awesome. All the students who’ve been coming regularly to our classes have improved out of sight in their lindy hop. Even the dancers who’ve been dancing for ages and otherwise not seen much change in their dancing. The most amazing dancers, though, have been those people who started dancing from scratch last year. It’s given them a massive advantage over their peers.
    Solo dance teaches follows a particular set of skills: how to plan ahead and how to initiate sequences of steps. This is something leads learn in classes all the time, but follows have to learn this almost from scratch in a solo class. Many of them find it tricky to be at once really in the moment, and thinking ahead and preparing for the next step.
    Leads learning to solo dance have to learn about quick responses and faster reflexes (which follows tend to develop simply through social dancing with people with a range of abilities and habits). They also have to learn – and this is a weird thing – to be able to begin sequences on their right as well as left feet. Follows do this routinely (tandem and side by side charleston, for example), but leads are less likely to develop these skills. I see male dancers who’ve been dancing for more than a year really struggling just to charleston starting with their right foot.
  • Confidence. This is something I’ve noticed especially in our female students. There’s none of that apologising for mistakes rubbish you hear in lindy hop. If you fuck it up, you say “Fuck!” really loudly and then you get that shit done. No one judges you, no one’s comparing themselves with you (they’re working too hard), no one’s blaming you. So you get confident. You master really challenging stuff, you develop a kickarse repertoire of moves and you get really fit. So you feel like a freeking GUN. Because you are. And then you get up in front of your peers, with a little gang, but still ON YOUR OWN and you perform. And you are so fucking fly. SO AMAZING.*
  • All the learnz. Doing a solo jazz class weekly, you get about 40 hours of solo jazz repertoire in your brain during the year. You learn more about the fundamental structures of jazz dance than in any other type of class. Because solo jazz is just fundamental structures of jazz dance. It’s like pure technique. Pure history. Pure dancing. Because most of our students get really into it, they add at least an hour or two a week to their dance practice. Because they like the clear goals of learning a routine, and because solo jazz is something you can practice any time, on your own.
    This month I’ve seen students who struggled to master a triple step in their first dance class last year DOMINATE complex sequences of break steps. They think nothing of combining kick ball changes with fall off the log and skip ups and stomp offs and jumps. And then do it over and over and over again. They really master complex steps, and commit them to memory. Then they combine them in challenging patterns. And are still laughing at the end of the class.
    Solo jazz just fills up your brain with historic jazz steps. And it teaches you a LOT about musical structure. Our solo jazz students know the way phrases work, they understand about pulse/bounce and swing, they know how to start on 8 (and why), they know where and how to use a break step. Their solo jazz repertoire is vastly larger than their lindy repertoire. And yet their lindy repertoire is massively increased by their solo jazz steps. They not only know lots of break steps and rhythms and things, they’re not afraid to try and squeeze them into their lindy hop, and they’re confident enough to try and lead them too.
  • Hot. People who solo jazz dance a lot look really good dancing. Not only because they’re fitter and in better control of their bodies. But because they feel confident and smile a lot. And because they have mad skills. Their lindy hop really shines.

For myself, I’ve found teaching solo jazz weekly a real challenge. I’ve done my own independent solo dance work for years and years. But teaching it weekly has made the biggest difference to my dancing that I’ve ever seen, in fourteen years of lindy hop. Unlike lindy hop classes, when you’re teaching solo (as the blogpost at the top points out), you’re working damn hard all class. Usually at higher tempos. When we were doing the big apple over six weeks of classes (we are DAMN thorough in our teaching, my friends), I saw a crazy huge improvement in my own fitness, my abilities, and my memory.

Teaching solo dance requires different teaching skills. You have to remember that brand new students will not have the fitness or control that students who’ve been coming for a few weeks do, so they’ll be more likely to feel frustrated or disheartened if you don’t keep an eye on them. You have to break shit down really thoroughly, because students don’t have a partner to give them feedback.
In many cases, the students who’ve been doing lindy hop for a few years will actually have some pretty seriously bad habits that need to be broken. But this ‘breaking’ can really break a student’s self esteem if you’re not really careful. Many of the male leads in particular find it too confronting to suddenly discover that all their dancing ‘skills’ are actually dodgy habits which good follow turn into a workable dance. They find it really hard to start from scratch and be a beginner again. So you’ve gotta be gentle, but not patronising.

You don’t have all the changing partners and class interaction stuff to lift the energy in the room – you’ve got to keep people feeling happy and confident and good about themselves in other ways. You’ve got to provide the nice, friendly social vibe that partner dancing brings, but you gotta do it through other methods. I find that the solo classes develop a better sense of camaraderie (because we work as a team, not as a series of partnerships), but that it can be damn hard to maintain a good class vibe later in the evening when everyone’s tired and you’re dealing with challenging material. And if two of you are teaching, you have to find a way to develop a good to-and-fro and rhythm to your teaching-talk. Basically, teaching solo jazz dance and maintaining numbers, every single week, makes you a much better teacher.

Coming up with class content is also challenging. We get through stacks more material in a solo class than we do a lindy hop class, though we tend to average about three phrases in an hour. If we’re doing a historic routine, we have to transcribe it from the archival material (argh! the fuzzy black and white!). We usually cross-reference with other videos to be sure we’ve properly understood what we’re looking at. This takes AGES at the beginning, when your own repertoire is really small. But after a while, you start to recognise key rhythms and steps and shapes, and the transcribing goes faster. And by fuck you get a really good, thorough understanding of jazz dance vocabulary and history.

After you’ve written down the steps, you have to learn them. I mean really learn them. And then you have to figure out how to teach. If you’re a bullshit teacher you can just say “Do this!” and then do it a heap of times. But that’s not helpful. So you have to break the movement down into its constituent parts.
A suzi-q is really just a step step step, from right to left (and vice versa). What makes it a suzi-q is the way you then style that step. But you have to start with step-step-step to be sure the students have good weight changes. But you have to teach this concept in a really ‘natural’ way. You can’t make it into some sort of complicated algebra. You have to find ways of describing what you’re doing which everyone can identify with: walking, squatting as though you’re about to sit on a chair, etc etc etc.
And then you try that method on a class, see it fail dismally, and have to recover in real time. And then you rethink your approach later, so the next time you teach that move, you do a better job.

And on top of all that, you have to make sure that you’re actually doing what you’re saying, because students learn more from watching than they do from listening. So you’re going to need to spend an awful lot of time in front of a mirror or with a video camera.

But geez you’re gonna get good.

And then, after a few months of that, you get tired of just drilling students through routines. So you need other class content and structure. So you’re going to need to choreograph stuff. You’ll need to know how phrases work, how music works, and how to join steps together. It’s hard, especially at first. Then, after you’ve choreographed the damn thing, you have to memorise it. And then you have to share it with your partner (if you’re not choreographing together). More videoing.

These days, if someone tells me they don’t solo dance (for whatever bullshit reason) I know immediately that they are inexperienced or ignorant. You simply cannot be a decent lindy hopper without solo dance skills. And I don’t mean ‘good’, I mean decent. Because ‘solo dance skills’ are just dance skills. And if you can’t dance without hanging onto another person, you have a lot of growing up to do.

This has perhaps been the biggest impact of solo dance on my lindy hop. I teach lindy hop as if it were a solo dance first, and I build solo work into each class. As a necessity. There’s a lot of time spent in each of our classes working on rhythms, steps, balance, bounce, all that good stuff. And then we bring people together.

Solo dance because yolo. And anything that gives you a leg up in the lindy hop improvement stakes is worth its weight in gold, friends.

*Watching videos of my students perform solo routines makes me feel crazy proud. They are SO GREAT!

[EDIT: omg imagecreditFAIL. Props to FuckYeahSwingDance/vernacularjazzdance for the memalish. I totally stole her idea]

Women’s History Month 2013: Cora LaRedd!

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Cora LaRedd singing and dancing in the number ‘Jig Time’ with Noble Sissle’s Orchestra in the 1933 film That’s the Spirit.

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She caught my eye because she has a really strong style, and she has darker skin, which is unusual in these films of black American women tap dancers of the period.

Here‘s an interesting photo story about African American women tap dancers.

You can read a bit about her in Constance Valis Hill’s book Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History on google books.

LaRedd, Cora Singer and dancer. Raised on Broome Street; Broadway musical star (late 1920s-early 1930s); appeared in Messing Around with music by James P.Johnson at New York’s Hudson Theater (1929) and Hamtree Harrington and Albert Hunter in Changer Your Luck (1930); in her heyday, known for splashing her money around; led band in New York at one point; toured Europe several times; when her star fell, returned to Newark, playing Golden Inn and other clubs; according to Herald News reviewer (1939), “fell into Dodger’s and had everyone in stitches with her funny exchanges… a real trooper”; deceased.
Joe Gregory: “In our eyes, she was a star.”
Wesley Clark: “She had a beautiful body; she danced like a man. She was tough – a top dancer to come out of Newark.”
Bill Roberts: “She was very much a black woman who lavished her money on younger men. That’s what took her down.”
Jonah Jones (The World of Swing): “We [Jimmie Lunceford’s band] had a chance to come to New York [from Buffalo] and try out for a job, but we missed it because a girl called Cora LaRedd (primarily a vocalist) had a band they liked better.”
– Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1925-50
By Barbara J. Kukl

If you’re looking for more information about LaRedd, you could try looking in French newspapers and magazines and film reels in the 20s and 30s. Maybe see if you can pin down her French tour(s) first with some browsing of visas and things.

LaRedd was a Cotton Club dancer, and there’s a reference to her in Duke Ellington and His World, By A. H. Lawrenc placing her in a production called It’s the Blackberries on 29 Sep 1929.

A couple of sources credit her with the first release of the song ‘Truckin’ (eg Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll, By Nick Tosche:

“Truckin'”, written by Ted Koehler (author of “Stormy Monday”) and Rube Bloom (author of “Fools Rush In”), was one of the most successful songs of 1935. A dance song full of whimsical sexual implications, it was introduced by Cora LaRedd in the twenty-sixth edition of the Cotton Club Parade at the Cotton Club in New York City, and was immediately recorded by many artists.”

I haven’t time for any more research, but if you’re curious, these tidbits should be enough to get you searching for playbills, magazine articles, reviews and footage from the period.

Women’s History Month 2013: Sandra Gibson!

(another post I’ve just lifted from 2011 – late night, lots of DJing and dancing, feeling a bit too poop to be creative)

aka Mildred “Boogie” Pollard, aka Lindy hopper!

In Radio City Revels in 1938, Gibson’s in the second couple in the jam, but the first couple after the cut from the singer at the beginning (ie there’s another couple in the jam before Gibson and partner ‘Shorty’ Davis).

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In Spirit Moves in 1950 with James Berry:

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Women’s History Month: Florence Hill and Bessie Dudley

It’s women’s history month again, and I’m a bit slow off the mark (again).
The theme for the Australian Women’s History Month is ‘Finding Founding Mothers’, which is alright by me.

In 2011 I listed a different woman jazz dancer every day for WHM. And in 2012 I chose a different woman jazz musician. The musician one was hard, and didn’t really catch my interest. Because I’m so slack this year, I’m going to recycle my 2011 posts. And I’m going to look for more women, when I get time. There are just so many amazing women jazz dancers, it’s silly to just rehash the same 30. Especially when we need to remember MORE!

But for now, here are my two favourites. One for yesterday, and one for today, the 2nd March.

Florence Hill AND Bessie Dudley!

Here are some stills:

These are all stills from A Bundle of Blues, a short film starring Duke Ellington and his orchestra (including Ivie Anderson), Florence Hill and Bessie Dudley.

(linky)

I can’t confirm this, but apparently Bessie Dudley worked with Snake Hips Tucker, and he gave her a black eye for doing his act.

Here is a photo of Bessie Dudley with Snake Hips Tucker:

snake-hips-tucker2-BessieDudley

I don’t have time to do more research (I say this every single year), but Dudley was a dancer at the Cotton Club, so if you’re curious, you could start there.

Using history in dance classes

I’m very interested in discussions about history and historical research. I’ve written about a million billion times before (this post ‘Try To Write About Jazz’ sums up some of my thinking). One of the things I’m most interested in is the way dancers use history. We do a lot of things with historical narrative and historical texts. People use it to justify sexist behaviour (a friend of mine uses the excellent term ‘retrosexists’), they use it to present their dancing as more important (because it is more historically accurate), they use it as content for dance classes (eg we teach particular historical routines), they use historical photos and art work in their own PR activities, they use old magazines as guides to historically ‘accurate’ fashion…. The idea of ‘history’ as a resource is a very powerful one in the modern swing dancing world.

Before the internet (when? yes, in the olden days), a lot of this historical knowledge was shared face to face, by phone, on video and film and in letters and books. I’ve talked about this in terms of ‘cultural transmission‘ – the movement of ideas and practices between cultures (and generations and communities and….). Then the internet happened, and then youtube happened. I wrote about this in a journal article a few years ago, and my favourite part was the concept of ‘stealing’ in jazz dance.
Which is why I tend to take the position that if you want to be awesome, you’ve got to keep ahead of the curve. You have to be the person who’s getting stuff stolen from. You have to be the DJ who presents that new song, which every other DJ then plays – so you gotta keep looking for new music, and improving your skills so you know when to pay that new great song. You have to be the dancer who first does that step in a comp, which every other dancer then uses in comps and teaches in classes. This sort of competitive copying pushes us further, and makes us more creative.
But to be really creative, when you’re stealing that step/song/idea, you’ve got to present it back to the community in a new and improved form: you gotta make it better when you do it your way. Or else that crowd of fierce hoofers in the balcony seats are gonna drown you out with enraged tappeta tappetas.

I’m absolutely enamoured with the idea that we can steal a dance step. I’m fascinated by the way power (cultural, class, social, economic, etc) informs how and when and if we steal ideas and dance steps. In that article I argued that African American dance, in the early days (ie the slave days) was about subversive, underground power. I talked about the idea of appropriating dance steps as resistance, and I’ve used the cake walk as an example.

I’m not hugely interested in whether or not something is ‘historical accurate.’ But I am interested in how people use the idea of ‘historical accuracy’ to justify their dancing or thinking: “You must wear garters, because women did in the 1930s” or “You must play 1930s big band swing because that’s what dancers heard in the Savoy ballroom” or “You must learn to dance on the social dance floor only, because that’s how people learnt in the 1920s.” I am certain that in reading those statements you immediately thought of a dozen counter arguments: “Not every woman wore garters in the ’30s” or “I’m not living in the 1930s, so why should I wear garters?”, “People listened and danced to small bands at house parties in the 1930s, so why can’t I listen and dance to small band recordings?”, “Dance classes were a huge industry in the 1920s!”

I don’t really think it’s worth pursuing these sorts of arguments. But I do think it’s absolutely fascinating to look at the way uses of history (and historical ‘evidence’) can help us map patterns of power and influence. But then, I’m not a historian, nor have I ever claimed to be. If I had to mark my place in a discipline, it’d be feminist media studies, or feminist cultural studies. And we lack data, donchaknow. But then, that sort of demarkation of discipline (and defensiveness) really only makes sense in a university context. And I am not writing or working in a university.

I’ve just read this post, Google-historians, as linked up by Follower Variations. That’s the blog where I find most of the interesting bits and pieces about dance in the wider online swing discourse. I rely on blogs like this for linkies because I’m generally not all that interested in reading a lot of blogs about dance. Most of my online reading is in more hardcore feminist and lefty territory.

But my interest was caught by Harri’s post about ‘Google-historians’. It has a decidedly combative tone, which of course provides the reader with a ‘hook’ – a way into the text. Which is why I think people luuurve to get all up in my blog posts that use all caps, rather than my (much more interesting) posts about jazz discographies or vegetarian cooking. I can’t imagine why people don’t want to read all about which musicians played in which sessions of which bands on a particular date. People love history, right? Right?!

I’m not entirely sure what overall point this ‘Google historians’ post is trying to make: is it ‘stop using google!’, or ‘go to dance classes!’ or ‘cite your sources!’ or ‘don’t simplify history!’ ? I started writing a comment asking the author which of these it was. And then I realised that perhaps all of these are the point. Below is a comment I wrote there. I shouldn’t have written such a long comment on someone’s blog post, but, well, fuck. I write a lot when I’m interested. If I’m not interested, I’ve got nothing to say. But I figured I’d reproduce the comment here, in the spirit of not-thread-hogging.

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I think I need some clarification of your thinking, Harri.

Are you arguing that any researcher who uses just digital sources is going to be full of rubbish?

I can’t agree with that. There’s lots of important stuff to be gained from a little super-powered googling. I’d argue that the important part is not the tools you use, but the way you read the material you find. It’s important to be critical (in the sense of critical thinking, where you ask questions about veracity, accuracy, ideology, context and so on), to be self-reflexive (how is who I am and my ideas about the world affecting the way I read this text?), and to seek out substantiating and corroborating sources.

I’d argue that any historian worth their salt should use a range of sources (primary, secondary, tertiary, etc -> speaking to people who were there; reading newspaper and first person accounts of people who were there; reading informed accounts of events by insightful observers). There are a whole host of digital sources (which you can search using google, which is after all just a powerful search engine – just a particularly clever index), and they can be very useful.
For example, if I wanted to find out about Australian/British responses to a certain dance hall, I might find this Trove search quite helpful. Trove is a very reliable tool, aggregating metadata from a host of reputable Australian digital collections. The most exciting of these (I’ve found) is the series of digitised Australian newspaper and magazine articles.
If I wanted to know what sort of film footage was available, so I could see what those newspaper stories were all about, I might search the catalogue of the National Film and Sound archive, the most reputable source of audio-visual material in the country.
I could use Pandora (a website archiving service run by the National Library) to access a history of the Trocadero in Sydney which includes first person accounts from people who were there.

I could use Youtube to search for some footage from the events described in those pieces, and then I could use google to find a ‘legit’ source for this film (in this case the NFSA).*

But as we all know, this isn’t going to be enough for a really comprehensive historical survey. We’d need some first-person interviews. But all these digital sources are useful for finding out who we should be talking to. Who are the dancers mentioned in the newspaper reports? What do the dancers in the films look like? And so on and so on… Even if we do find a real person to talk to, there are going to be challenges. I remember Peter had written a really good how-to for interviewing older people about dancing on DanceHistory.org, touching on things like not rushing, being polite, being careful with emotive topics, etc etc.

Secondly, though, I think it’s impossible to get an ‘objective’ or final, authoritative history of a topic. So, for example, there’re a number of competing and equally authoritative stories about things like what it was actually like in the Savoy ballroom. Some of these stories are just completely made up (and I do like the idea that Al and Leon might have told Marshall Stearns a heap of lies – lol!), some are inaccurate because the person telling the story was mistaken, and some conflict simply because the story tellers had different experiences in the Savoy (eg a young white woman might have a different experience than an older black man). So if I do manage to chase down dancers from the Trocadero, using all those digital sources, there’s no guarantee that any single story will be enough to gain a bigger idea of what it was like.

I’m guessing this is your point? That we need to treat history as a complex, changing, moving story, rather than a simple one-off meta-narrative?

The next challenge, though, is how you actually go about stuffing history into your dance classes. When I teach, I like to reference the people who told me the story (eg “Norma tells a story in a clip filmed at Herrang in year X where she said…” or “Lennart pointed out that such-and-such was very young when they heard this story”). That seems important, and I think it encourages students to learn from a whole range of teachers (Norma and Lennart and…), which is a good thing for me to do, as a person who invites those teachers out to teach workshops and then needs to promote them** :D I think a lot of dance teachers are reluctant to encourage their students to do their own research and thinking, or to learn from other people. For the usual reasons.

But if you’re telling these historical stories in class, you have to keep them really short – the less talking, the more dancing in a dance class, the better (ie the more viable) they’ll be. You can’t just list a whole heap of facts and hope they’ll stick. You have to use story-telling carefully, integrating it with the physical movements and pacing of the class. This takes preparation, skill and experience. There was an interesting discussion on Jive Junction, years ago, where someone pointed out how Frankie’s story-telling skills improved over the years. He became a better story teller. And not every dance teacher is that good at telling a story.

I guess, what I’m trying to say, is that using history in dance culture is hard. You’ve got to have good research skills, you’ve got to have good story telling skills, and you’ve got to have the time to do all this. Here in Australia, we rarely see old time dancers – maybe one a year, if we’re lucky. And bad luck if you can’t make it to that event. So we’re necessarily restricted to using secondary and tertiary sources. And the internet.

Most dance classes are a labour of love, with very little financial return, and a whole heap of political complexity. We shouldn’t be surprised that some people are just crap at it. They might instead be very good at teaching people how to use their bodies. I think we should be kinder to dancers who’re actually talking about history (many don’t!), cut them some slack. And possibly point them in the direction of some useful research.

*NB I used lindy penguin‘s blog post for these search results.

**In fact, I have a ‘how to include history in your classes’ class planned for the next Little Big Weekend teacher-development session (11-12 May 2013, with Lennart and Georgia, yo. SYDNEY). HOW EVEN DOES IT WORK?

NB Laura gives an example of how people tend to do research in the dance world in her post Pitch a Boogie Woogie and Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers: it’s a combination of archival work and making contact with other historians who have access to other sources. As with any interesting work in the modern lindy hop world, the best projects are collaborative, and rely on personal contacts, networks of peers, and the generosity of dance scholars (in the dance scene).

Century Ballroom needs your help

I first heard of the Century Ballroom when I was learning to dance, I was on their email list for years, and I first had direct contact (emails) with the CB peeps when dancers came to perform at the Sydney Gay Games. A ballroom that was designed specifically as a safe space for everyone? Yes please. And in practice, a venue which was dedicated to dance and providing a space where dance nerds (that’s us) could come to social dance? Double yes please.

Swing Girls

Sadly, the Century Ballroom is in a bit of shit. They need funds to cover an unexpected tax hit, so they’re having a srs party to help raise funds. Why? From their site:

Why a fundraiser?

Two years ago Washington’s Department of Revenue reinterpreted an obscure tax and, without notice, started applying it to businesses such as ours. This has become known as the “opportunity to dance” tax.

The details of this tax are set forth below if you’re interested. The short version of the story is that the State started to enforce this tax by selectively auditing several local nightclubs and one dance hall, the Century Ballroom. We are now faced with a penalty of $90,000, due in three months . With the threat of this looming for almost two years, we have been altering our programming and adjusting prices while negotiating with the State. Unfortunately, our efforts have fallen far short of raising the required funds.

Our patrons are loyal and generous, and we are truly blessed. We are asking for financial gifts because we have heard from many people who, after hearing our story, would like to help. We are grateful for your continued presence at our dances and classes. It is the best show of support we could ask.

If you would like to consider giving an additional gift at the anniversary party, it would be greatly appreciated. We would not ask our patrons to do even more if the situation weren’t so dire. If you cannot attend the party but would still like to donate, we have set up a PayPal account to make it easy for you to support us…

…and there are links to paypal, etc there on the site.

Supportive, accommodating, welcoming dance venues are few and far between, so you might consider dropping them a dime if you can.

I am so done.

Firstly:
I am so trashed. I am so wrecked. My poor, poor body. We raised > $2000 for the Taree Women and Children’s Refuge last night at One Billion (Jazz Dancers) Rising. It was an event run by a gang of women (with some male helpers) – which is really business as usual in the Sydney lindy hop scene – at the Petersham Bowls Club. It had lots of sponsors. It was really, really good. I had a massive amount of fun. I heard some guy say at some point “We should do more fundraisers!” and I agree.

I still have nine million things to do this week.

Secondly:
This week on FB some guy gave me a patronising telling off and then a mansplain about why I shouldn’t just complain about blokes doing dodgy stuff in the dance world, I should speak to them about it. In a thread that I had begun with the comment that I was done with mansplainers ‘helping’ female DJs.

Hilary Clinton responds to mansplainers

Why thank you, Elder, it hadn’t occurred to me that speaking to people about these things directly, or doing something about these things might be helpful. Where would I be without you to explain where I went wrong with my irrational ladytalk?

Hilary Clinton doesn’t have enough nods to express my feelings.

kraken ripping ships apart

For fuck’s sake.
I am done. I am so done. imma gonna ride my happy post-successful-event mellow right outta this town.

Thirdly:
I cannot be fucked getting back into that whole thing about …whatever it was. I feel obliged to respond and continue, but, honestly, I cannot be bothered. I do want to write about gendered language and dance at some point, but then, I’ve done that a lot already. It’s kind of first year undergraduate stuff, and I’ve gone over it and over it a million times before, here on this blog and elsewhere. Feminism 101 has a piece on it. And I think Feminism 101 gives me a good reason to not do that ‘mother’ thing for people asking why we need to use non-gender specific language:

The first reason FF101 exists is to help ensure that discussions between feminists don’t get continually derailed by challenges from newbies and/or antagonists to explain and justify our terminology and conclusions to them, right now! Substantive challenges can be valuable, but constantly having to explain basic theory over and over, when an interesting discussion was underway, gets really frustrating. There’s a time and a place for discussing the basics, and disrupting a discussion on other feminist topics is not that time and place.

Gender-specific language was not the most important part of Ladies first: Sometimes we are triumphantly cycling to victory in our sports bras, though it was the first part. So if you need help with language use, check out Feminism 101.

Before I decided I couldn’t be fucked, I asked a scholar friend for a basic intro to this stuff. I can’t believe I did this: google could have given the solution as quickly. I could have written something. I am a lazy arse. But my friend Kerryn is a complete gun. Her guide to language is below. As you can see, this is not the final point in our discussion. It’s a first step in the discussion of why we shouldn’t assume all or most leads are male and all or most follows are female. In generalising we make exceptions to these difference invisible or a weird aberration. And in assuming follow = woman (and lead = man) we’re just wrong. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. And there is no historical evidence to support this thinking. Women have ALWAYS led. Men have ALWAYS followed. An AWFUL LOT of women lead, know how to lead, demonstrate leading, teach as leads in class. I don’t know a top rank female lindy hop teacher who can’t lead, even if she doesn’t identify as a lead. Because it’s part of being a good dancer. It’s just that an awful lot of retrosexists like to rewrite history to make the female lead and the male follow invisible. And dodgy language use perpetuates this myth.

…but I have to stop. Time is getting away from me. And this post is harshing my mellow.

Kerryn Goldsworthy, a very clever friend who is more than qualified to write about this sort of thing did this for me:

A Very Basic How-To Article for Using Non-Gender-Specific Language.

(For Sam Carroll, as requested)

PRONOUNS

1) The traditional, ie pre-feminist, grammar rule is that ” ‘he’ includes ‘her'” (as in, say, ‘Man is a mammal: he is a warm-blooded animal and he gives birth to live young’), and that masculine pronouns — he, him, his, himself — should be used in cases where both sexes are being talked about. Any woman can see that this is palpable nonsense, and reinforces the notion that women are lesser, and relative, creatures.

This is the underlying principle of non-gender-specific language: to avoid the implication, in your use of language, that women are a lesser variation on the theme of, and a sub-set of, men. Avoid any language reinforcing the notion that — as Simone de Beauvoir once said — ‘There are two kinds of people: human beings and women.’

2) Therefore, such phrases as ‘he or she’, ‘him or her’ and ‘his or her’ are perfectly acceptable, and a much more accurate reflection of reality. ‘She or he’, ‘her or him’ and ‘her or his’ are also acceptable, particularly if you want to make a point.

3) Sometimes, however, these phrases may look barbaric to you. In which case, rewrite the sentence in order to avoid the problem.

Examples: ‘Each winner took home his or her choice of wines.’ = ‘All the winners took home the wines of their choice.’

4) There is a newish thing called the ‘singular “they”‘, designed to avoid non-gender-specific language, as in ‘Each teenager decided what music they wanted.’ This is also (IMO) barbaric. ‘They’ is by definition a plural pronoun, and ‘singular they’ is therefore an oxymoron. Again, as in (3), rewrite the sentence.

OCCUPATIONS

The names of some occupations are gender-neutral: writer, teacher, factory hand. Others are not: actor/actress and waiter/waitress, in particular, still persist. There is no difference between the work these people do, and therefore no earthly reason why they should be differentiated by gender. But a lot of this sort of usage has died out and a good thing too: words once in use but no longer common include ‘poetess’, ‘authoress’ and ‘chanteuse’, as though it’s necessary when talking about artists to say which sex they are. It’s not.

GENERALISATIONS

‘Goodwill to all mankind’ presumably means you don’t care about the women. ‘Jobs for the boys’ presumably means that none of the women are being given jobs they haven’t competed for and don’t deserve. ‘The sales counters are being manned by the casual staff’ presumably means that all the casual staff are blokes. Acceptable alternatives are, respectively, ‘humanity’, ‘nepotism’ and ‘staffed’. If you can’t think of a non-gender-specific alternative, use your thesaurus and be creative.

Forms such as ‘foreman’, ‘chairman’ and so on are a bit of an issue because people like to argue the toss about them. The Wikipedia entry for ‘chairman’ is extremely interesting on this point.

The main thing is to remember that if you are referring to a group or activity that includes both sexes, masculine pronouns and any form of the word ‘man’ are all best avoided.

Isn’t Kerryn great? I’m so grateful.

And now, I have more work to do. Pity me, as I prop my eyelids open and take Bechet intravenously to help me make it through.