Restoring to Restor(y)ing Heteronormativity in Physical Education: A Fru(straight)ed Dance Educator’s Reflections on “Slowly” Getting Changed and “Airing” His Privates

• In Event: Roundtable Session 111
  In Roundtable Session: For the Health of It: Interrogating Boys, Bodies, and Unspoken School Spaces

Abstract

Slowly getting changed for dance

Responding to the recent call for physical educator's to engage in critical autobiographical work (Garrett 2006) this presentation seeks to chart my fru(straight)ed 'altern(arr)ative' (Grace and Benson 2000) of struggling to be, become and belong as a dance educator within a physical education profession, that despite thirty plus years of feminist research, and more latterly queer ‘troubling’, is still largely run along limited/limiting heteronormative lines (Sykes 2011). I will argue dance’s marginal status within physical education and physical education teacher education (PETE) represents a ‘missed opportunity’ towards facilitating much needed gender and sexual justice. I make this claim in the belief that boys/men’s dancing bodies can serve as sites/sights for the re-articulation of sex-gender-desire. As such, my teaching/research seeks to legitimize dance through ‘turning up the volume’ (Bem 1995) on the pervasive silences (heterosexism/homophobia) that serve to minimize both the frequency and style of boys/men’s dancing. A major part of this endeavour is encouraging physical educators’/trainees to critically internalise their frustration with pupil’s resistance and/or slowness in getting changed for their lessons. My question would be, are they getting ‘suitably’ changed for dance? Put more succinctly, are they getting changed into something that is appropriate for sexual/gender/social justice to materialize? My experience suggests not as many physical educators’/trainees change the style of dance to meet the boys (restoring heteronormativity). Boy-friendly approaches such as this tend to solidify rather than fracture limited/limiting notions of what it means to ‘do boy’ and delineates narrow forms of what’s ‘livable’ (Butler 2004). A longer term strategy should concentrate on changing boys/men to meet a breadth of dance experience (restor(y)ing heteronormativity). To do so would create gender/sexual justice while importantly doing dance as an art form justice (Smith-Autard 2004).

Dying to Dance

To illustrate the ‘costs’ (harmful effects) of remaining silent/ignorant on sexual/gender diversity, I will re-tell the near ‘bullycide’ (Marr & Field 2001) of eleven year old ballet dancer, Kristopher King. I will also detail my ongoing ‘pedagogic’ relationship with dances such as DV8’s Strange Fish (1992), Enter Achiilles (1995) and The Cost of Living (2004) as well as CanDoCo’s Outside In (1993). All draw upon contact improvisation which provides a useful metaphor for the power of narrative/storied research. Dancers as for stories can make contact with people; they can touch them and help them to move in new, interesting and more socially equitable ways. In short, both can be touching and moving. To contribute to this embodied conversation/movement, I will detail how my teaching, learning, dancing journey has incorporated pedagogies of censorship, visibility, audibility, discomfort, resist-stance, re-alignment, care, injury, feelings, emotions, refleshment and possibility.

The dance continues …

Author

• Saul Keyworth, University of Bedfordshire