ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore how Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) has the potential to facilitate an embodied position of gender fluidity in children and young people. Despite much literature pertaining to the adult lived experience of gender roles in relation to assigned sex, little has been written about the child’s experience. Contemporary literature has identified, however, that the act of ascribed gender roles and qualities continues to be the social constructs the child inhabits. Furthermore, within Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and Education, there is growing evidence of the prevalence of mental health problems in children, associated with living in a binary gender role system. Poignant here is the ascribing of movement dynamics to gender stereotypes and how this manifests in gendered self-perception and self in relationship with peers.
DMP affords an approach where the relationship between internal states and external expression is explored through the immediacy of the sensorial body. Moreover, movement expression may illuminate defended emotions and the presence of inner turmoil. Through examples of clinical work and approaches used, this chapter will seek to demonstrate a way of working, one that includes formation of an embodied neutrality within a spectrum of gender fluidity. A position of embodied neutrality offers a space where polarities of movement alongside arousal/energy levels can be explored, towards the ownership of a flexible movement repertoire that embraces animi and animus. Moreover, this profits congruence between inner psychological and regulatory states, with external movement expression. DMP elucidates the notion that body movement can create changes in the brain. The neuroplasticity of the brain creates a potential for children to embody a chosen way of being and promotes a deeper body-based understanding of the choices available to them throughout their lives. Furthermore, this embodied understanding of shared attitudes towards gender could be transgenerational.
