Shimmy, Shake or Shudder?: A Feminist Ethnographic Analysis of Sexualization and Hypersexualization in Competitive Dance

A sexualized aesthetic for dance has been becoming increasingly prevalent in privately-operated dance schools and competition performances across Canada and the United States since the early 1990s. Interacting with a complex constellation of social factors including gender, sexuality, race, class, age, and dis/ability, this aesthetic is fuelled by the persistent presence of sexualized images of girls and women in mass media and dance studio training that focuses on preparing students for competitions. Parents and particularly mothers of young dancers sometimes also contribute to the sexualization of their daughters either through their expectations that the dance studio will reproduce dancing they have seen in reality television shows, films, or YouTube videos or by accepting potentially negative consequences of sexualized dancing to reap other benefits from participation in dance. Not only are heightened levels of eroticization problematic for many girl dancers and the development of their self-identities, but they can be detrimental to the art of dance as stereotypes of dancers as sexualized objects become further entrenched in public thinking about dance. A significant effect of practising and performing repetitive, sexualized movements for girl dancers is that they are constructed and reiterated as objectified bodies. Feminist scholarship pertaining to bodies, sexualization, girlhood, and mothering reviewed in this dissertation contextualizes the current sexualized aesthetic in dance within cultural and historical processes that objectify girls and women. Dance studies literature deepens the conversation about how eroticization of dancing bodies is reinforced through embodiment and repetition of sexualized movement patterns. Qualitative data from feminist ethnography informs theoretical analysis throughout this thesis, supporting my assertion that social-cultural processes of sexualization acting on the bodies and lives of young girls who dance should be of concern to all who are involved in dance education. As modelled in this dissertation, performance ethnography, movement analysis, embodied somatic research, and other forms of body-based research can add to public awareness and discourses within dance studio communities about the issue of sexualization of young dancers. Indeed, dance choreography, performance, and embodiment can give young dancers opportunities to have a stronger voice in the conversation about sexualization.