Abstract
Equality Dancesport in the United Kingdom constitutes competitive ballroom dancing, where mostly LGBT+ dancers engage in same-sex dance partnerships to compete in different classifications determined by gender and age. More recently, increasing visibility of equality dance partnerships in the UK’s mainstream ballroom dancing scene and in media representations such as reality TV shows have contributed to growing discourses around gender norms and sexuality in ballroom dancing. Unfortunately, understandings of sex, gender and sexuality expressions from the perspectives of equality dancers remain limited in academia, with most studies focused largely on the mainstream ballroom dance scene. There is need to examine the identity (gender and sexual) work of LGBT+ dancers’ through equality dancing. Adopting Charmaz’s (2008) constructivist grounded theory approach, this thesis explores equality dancers’ choices of dance roles, movements and costumes, questioning the process through which dancers construct and materialise their gender and sexual identities through these choices. Bringing together empirical data from semi-structured interviews with photo-elicitation and embodied fieldwork, I offer a framework for investigating identity work in partner dancing. My proposed framework suggests dancers’ identity work to involve an interplay of Husserl’s (1989, p. 86) sensing body and Butler’s (1990) performative body, both emerging to different extents depending on the degree of constraints exerted by Bourdieu’s (1977, p. 86) structuring forces within the field. I also illustrated the roles of Ahmed’s (2006) reorientation in bridging a potential disconnect between dancers’ performative and sensory bodies.