Revisiting Dance in Sociology: A Queer Latinx Perspective

• In Event: Latina/o Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 4: Health, Embodiment, and Structural Inequality

Abstract

This study calls for a renewed sociological engagement with dance through a queer Latinx lens, arguing that the future of the field of study depends on taking embodied cultural practices seriously as sites of knowledge production, political communication, and community formation. I build on Thomas’s (1995) claim that dance has been marginalized in sociology due to its association with the body, art, and the feminine, reflecting broader Eurocentric hierarchies that privilege textual rationality over embodied ways of knowing. For Latina/o sociology to remain analytically relevant, it must center the corporeal, the aesthetic, and the popular as constitutive of social life rather than peripheral to it.
Focusing on Salsa and Bachata as transnational Caribbean genres shaped by migration, capitalism, and protest, I situate dance within multi-billion-dollar cultural industries and digital publics while foregrounding its long-standing political entanglements. Drawing on Mills’s (2007) framework of dance as political communication, I interpret queer Latinx dance as an embodied enactment of equality, wherein dancing bodies contest cis-heteronormative and nationalist scripts through shared movement.
Methodologically, I develop a digital ethnography of 100 publicly shared Instagram and Facebook videos of queer Latinx dancing and dancers. Guided by Thomas’s (1995) intrinsic and extrinsic analytical approach, I examine both the sociohistorical conditions shaping these performances and the internal logics of movement, spatiality, and aesthetic form. This dual framework enables a context-specific analysis of how meaning through and about bodies is produced, circulated, and received in digital environments. I argue that queer Latinx dance and its digital archiving destabilize gender norms, reconfigure nationhood, and expand the analytic horizons of Latina/o sociology. Ultimately, my argument supports attending to embodied practices as foundational to theorizing Latinx futures.

Author

• Amaury Jariel Rijo Sánchez, University of New Mexico