JUST FOR FUN? Learning and Doing Gender in Salsa Schools

• In Event: 035 - Section on Sex and Gender Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Leisure Groups and Gender

Abstract

Dance, leisure and time-use studies have documented gender differences and gender inequality on the individual and institutional level. In this qualitative study, I investigated how men and women experienced, practiced, and understood the gendered dance roles that they learned in for-pay salsa schools. In these schools, instructors taught leader and follower dance roles, respectively gendered by masculine and feminine traits—characteristic of a stereotypical heterosexual relationship. Drawing on 18 in-depth interviews with 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 explore how interactions and institutions organized around leisure simultaneously shape and are shaped by structural gender inequality and heteronormative sexuality. Contextualized and constrained by ambiguous gender roles, expectations, interactions, and performances in the rest of their lives, I argue that students used their leisure time to participate in the gender structure of salsa dancing because they enjoyed the security and polarization of its scripted stability and took pleasure in consuming explicitly patriarchal ideas of fun and leisure.

Author

• Kara Leiko Takasaki, University of Texas-Austin