Scripted Stability: The Raced and Classed Reproduction of Gender Roles in Salsa Schools

• In Event: 324 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. RGC, Culture, and Space

Abstract

Leisure activities have been shown to be spaces with enduring social expectations about gender appropriate responsibilities and roles. Some social science research on salsa dancing has studied the agency that female salsa dancers have to resist and regulate their gender and sexuality in social dancing but do not seem to consider the ways that individuals might value the salsa gender structure for its stability. To explore how changing expectations about gender roles in society may impact leisure activities, I examined for-pay salsa dancing schools. In these institutions, instructors commercialized leader and follower dance roles, which were respectively gendered by masculine and feminine traits—characteristic of a stereotypical heterosexual relationship. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews with equal numbers of male and female students and instructors from two Chicago dance schools, in-person observation of salsa classes at these schools, and participant observation at the schools’ social events and workshops, I illustrate how institutionalized and culturally disembodied knowledge reproduces gender role stereotypes that generate pleasure and anxiety for participants that have the resources to invest in classes. While “doing gender” was explicit and central to the dance curriculum, “doing leisure” in raced and classed ways was less acknowledged by participants. I argue that students did not try to resist or challenge salsa gender structure because they enjoyed its scripted stability and thus preferred to participate in it rather than destabilize it.

Author

• Kara Leiko Takasaki, University of Texas-Austin