ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on micro-level interactions on the dance floor to explore how salsa dancers in the salsa circuit negotiate gender. Salsa as a social practice is a site for the (re)production and negotiation of specific gender arrangements. To dance, salsa dancers rely on several “gender conventions”, two of which are explored in this chapter: the leader and follower structure of the dance and the gendered moves in the dance. Scholarship on partner dance often regards the gendered dancing as reinforcing restrictive gender roles, because the male dancer initiates the dance moves, whereas the female dancer responds to the lead. However, a theoretical framework solely focused on fixed structures of dominance and submission is unsuited to the actual embodied doing and experiences of research participants. Focusing on the interactional level, this chapter explores how salsa dancers are “doing gender” on the dance floor. It shows how some dancers challenge the gender conventions in salsa and engage in a redoing and even undoing of gender in embodied ways, for instance when redefining the partner dance as “a conversation instead of a lecture”.
