Following Norms Or Leading Change: The Language of "Degendering" in West Coast Swing Dance

Abstract

In this dissertation I employed linguistic ethnography to explore how language reform is being undertaken and understood within the context of West Coast Swing’s (WCS) degendering movement. While WCS had traditionally been a heteronormative partner dance style in which men led, women followed, and each partnership comprised a woman and a man, in recent years, efforts have been made to move beyond this heteronormative model of participation—and the language associated with it—under the banner of degendering. In studying this movement, I was interested in: (1) how participants talked about the reform, (2) how the reform was being enacted, and (3) how language reform seemed to be contributing to, or entangled with, the broader social change targeted by the reform. I conducted 11 months of participant observation in a local WCS scene and at weekend competition events in the surrounding areas of the USA and Canada, as well as 20 interviews with 22 dancers. The resulting data was analysed using a scavenger methodology which drew on multiple (critical) discourse analytical techniques as well as theory from linguistics, anthropology, gender studies, queer theory, and dance studies. Overall, the data showed strong uptake of the language reform with most participants using degendered terms when referring to the dance roles generically. This uptake was supported by a liberal (rather than radical) approach to language reform (Cameron, 1995) which framed reformed language as being more accurate; being a response to exogenous social change; and supporting the liberal values of inclusion and civility. Despite this success at the lexical level, however, heteronormativity was still observed in other elements of language use and the participation structure of the dance. As a result, I propose that more explicitly political reforms are required—reforms (both linguistic and otherwise) that directly challenge heteronormative assumptions and model a participation structure in which role is not assumed on the basis of gender presentation.