Couples dancing is easy to degender. All you have to do is stop calling them the gentleman and the lady, and start calling them the lead and the follow. I've seen plenty of heteronormative dance halls do this already, because they're simply more descriptive titles anyways --it's pretty clear from names alone what the "lead" and "follow" do in a dance.
Then it comes time to describe the roles in a set dance, and my tongue stumbles. Lead and follow are no longer accurate descriptions, because most of the time, neither person is doing anything of the sort. Relabeling the gents as leaders simply starts to reinforce the leader/male, follow/female dichotomy that I'm specifically trying to avoid. And so the problem remains: In a set dance, you are one of two roles. How do we label these roles?
The words I've been using are "lady" and "gent", for lack of anything more recognizable1. Most of the set dance forms I do label them along similar lines. The least gendered role names come from ModernWesternSquaresDancing, where the technical terms are "Beau"(gent) and "Belle"(lady). Still gendered, albeit in a more archaic fashion, and unfortunately unused --I almost exclusively hear the words boys, girls, men, or ladies when calling one role to do something specific.
Riffing on my footnote below, I suppose a movement could be started to refer to the people on the left as the Lefts, and the people on the right as the Rights. Two things make me hesitant however --first that both words are called often to refer to hands or directions and second that a good number of dancers seem already unclear on the difference between left and right, especially when presented quickly. Saying "first Left turn the second Right by the right then turn the third Right by the left" is a technically accurate instruction for Scottish Dancing, but it becomes a parsing nightmare as the dancers try to work out what hands and people were indicated above.
I could, of course, use the above when writing here, and it wouldn't be problematic at all --I'm only rarely giving instructions to dances in this blog, after all. However, just finding good words for me to use is only a small part of my problem. I really just want something that can be universally used across dance forms and halls to indicate who's who, without attaching gender to the role.
I suppose the best current solution exists in some of the gender-free contra halls I've been a part of, where the dancers are divided into "Bands" (or "Beads") and "Bares". The people on the left are given bright ribbon to wear as armbands, or mardi gras beads, clearly marking them different from those with bare arms or necks. This is certainly the most well implemented solution, in that not only do the dancers understand who is who, but the caller is able to actually call moves one role or the other, without having to use gendered terms. Unfortunately, the practise seems limited to the contra communities, which make the words less appropriate to use universally. Not because I don't think the terms are excellent, but again, because they wouldn't be recognizable except to that particular crowd.
The conclusion of this post is that, unfortunately, I don't _have_ a conclusion. If there *are* easily recognizable names for the two roles in most set dances, I haven't heard them yet. The choice is two-fold, currently: either attempt to degender the terms Lady and Gent, at least when regarding dance roles, or attempt to bring new vocabulary into dance forms that may very well not see any need for it at all.
Seriously though, this is why I ask my partner what role they want to dance. Because then the onus of choosing a name for the role falls to them, instead.
1: Recognizability is _key_. I could easily declare that the people on the left of the hall when facing the music are the "glucks" and the people on the right are the "shoobs", but unless I'm willing to preface every following post with an explanation, the words are essentially meaningless.
6 comments:
I have two comments to this. The first is an explanation for why you have not noticed callers using "Beau" and "Belle" in MWSD. Those terms refer to positions in a given formation, rather than which role someone is dancing. In a static square, boys are beaus and girls are belles. If all the dancers sashe and trade places, boys will be belles and girls will be beaus. The second comment is that Boston Uncommons, a gay MWSD club in Boston, uses beads to distinguish between gender roles, so the practice is not limited to contras.
The use of "Left" and "Right" to refer to the roles in set dances has problems for improper and Beckett contras, where roles alternate up the sides.
To present an alternate opinion, I actually kind of like the gendered names of dance roles (perhaps because dances are one place I can say "I'm a guy" and have no one question me). I've always found the armbands/barearms or similar designation at gender-free contras to feel kind of awkward and contrived. I don't have an issue with dance roles being gendered, as long as people realise that someone's "dance gender" need have no relation to their biological sex or gender identity.
!!!
I was thinking about this the other day, because I really wanted a way to de-gender ECD, which is already pretty gender-free in terms of motions. The one place where it gets really sticky, in my eyes, is when corners are doing anything. What would happen if you numbered like in a morris set? First gent is 1, first lady is 2, second gent is 3, second lady is 4. You're either odd or even.
If someone sees problems with this, please poke holes in it before I get my hopes too far up.
@Pi-nerd: Ahhhh. There's still some appeal to the Beau/Belle names then, in that they're not particularly gendered, but yeah, that does make it harder.
And I think I knew that about Uncommons. I really have to get to one of their dances sometime.
@Blaise: Oo, good point. I think part of my original indication was meant to be that Left is the person standing to the left of the person on the Right, but yeah, that's a _lot_ easier to define when it's by sides of the dance hall than in Beckett or improper contras.
@Anon: I'm not totally unhappy with the idea of just keeping the gendered dance names, unfortunately, too often the dance-gender becomes linked with gender identity. In theory, it's a perfectly valid idea, but in practise, until people stop assuming that dance gender has a relation to gender identity, I'm loathe to support it.
@Mog: Well, the first problem I see is the same as the problem with using lefts and rights --in a lot of dances, you already have your couples numbered (SCD, where you have the 1s, 2s, 3s, 4s; contra where you have 1s or 2s). So you'd get into vocal patterns that are like "First one turns second three by the right".
That being said, just using the "odds" and "evens" structure might be workable. "First odd" is not an immediately problematic term. It just runs into the problem of not being immediately recognizable.
@Kat: I was thinking of it primarily from the perspective of (and for use in) ECD, where you've got many longways and occasional set dances. And "Ones and fours turn by the right" doesn't feel that awkward too me, if you ignore previously established numbering convention, and well, you'll have to ignore some previously established naming convention to ungender things anyway.
I will continue to think about this.
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