Passing Out: How Space Functions in the Politics and Performance of Masculinity On and Offstage

Perhaps no artistic form unsettles American masculinity more than the Western theatrical dance tradition. Men who pursue professional dance careers quickly learn that their chosen occupation not only carries the stigma of homosexuality and effeminacy, but that it also reduces their masculine status. This reduction in status, whether perceived or real, carries unique compensatory strategies by those within the profession to assuage a consuming public. Strategies to this effect often depict the male dancing body conventionally, in which traditional signifiers of (heterosexual) masculinity are emphasized, praised, and rewarded. Indeed, straying from this script risks suspicion and rejection not only within the presumed queer space of dance, but it also reveals the narrow definitions of gender performance allowed for male dancers. Gender norms and the policing of the male dancing body expose a fundamental contradiction in American concert dance: its embrace and simultaneous rejection of gay men that “fail” to look or act “straight.” Unlike their heterosexual counterparts, gay male dancers routinely face discriminatory practices that underscore their oppressed status in contemporary dance. To this end, my presentation examines the institutional practices of the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation (AADF) that account for the production of an internationally recognized branding of the black male dancing body. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the AADF during the summers of 2005, 2006, 2008, I expose the politics between on and offstage performances of masculinity in two sites—the studio and the Ailey Gala. Within this framework, I highlight how space becomes an important marker for the legitimatized and legible body, and how the embodied resistances of the queer male dancing body disrupts those boundaries.