Talking dance, doing gender: Gendered language use in a podcast made by and for the West Coast Swing dance community

Traditionally, social partner dance communities have constrained participation by gender, permitting only men to lead and only women to follow. More recently, however, emerging degendering movements have sought to enable all dancers to participate in their preferred role regardless of gender. Like much feminist and queer activism (e.g. Ehrlich & King, 1994; Moulton, Robinson, & Elias, 1978; Zimman, 2017), these degendering movements have also called for language reform, specifically focussing on the use of gender neutral terms in generic reference to dance roles. West Coast Swing (WCS), an increasingly global dance community which originated in the USA, is currently in the midst of such a change, seemingly headed towards complete degendering. WCS, then, presents a unique opportunity to explore the language use of those for, against, and ambivalent towards the degendering movement as it unfolds in public discourse. Using The Naked Truth, a podcast made by and for the WCS community, as a case study, this project analyses the use of gendered versus degendered language in generic reference to dance roles in the context of ongoing social and linguistic activism in the WCS community. “Leading and Following” (February 2019, 92 minutes), the episode used for analysis, features conversations between a male-identifying dancer who publicly endorses degendering, and a female-identifying top-tier professional dancer who, while endorsing freedom to dance in one’s preferred role, publicly resists allowing same gendered couples to compete against mixed gender couples. Despite the two speakers differing in rates of and strategies for degendered language use roughly in accordance with their alignment to the degendering movement, both appear to be aware of and to attempt degendered language use to at least some extent. However, a lack of other-initiated repair and the presence of symmetrical accommodation both to gendered and degendered language suggest that smooth conversational flow was privileged over any activist goals which may have motivated the speakers’ own language choices. Gendered language was particularly common in contexts where generics were linked to specific real-world situations, known individuals, or to an already gendered generic partner. For example, when referring generically to leaders dancing with a specific female-identifying follower, only male reference was used. Similarly, where referring generically to types of conversation experienced with real students, traditionally-gendered reference was more frequent. These patterns suggest that, at least for these two speakers, language change remains relatively superficial. Their mental models of the gender/role dynamic seem to be strongly shaped by exemplars based in existing statistical distributions and by heteronormativity, rather than by their goals for linguistic and social change. Thus, while language reform may play a role in making non-traditional-role dancers feel more welcome in the community, it does not yet appear to be impacting the underlying expectations of these two heavily-involved members of the community. This work provides specific evidence of the need for language reform to be accompanied by continued social and institutional change in order to create meaningful transformations of gendered conceptual categories, even amongst those who explicitly support reform.