I. Introduction

3Starting from such considerations, I elaborate on in the third section, the article will then focus, in the fourth, on the male dancer’s stigma, its histo­rical genealogy and its effects on men’s participation in dance. In the last sections, stigma “antidotes” will then be discussed : artistic-professional excellence, manifest in structural inequalities, professional practice and social discourse ; athleticism, which involves discursive and representationnal strategies ; “wise” choices among dance styles and exploitation of the semiotic resources they provide for expressing gender.

II. Data and Methods

4The article is based on the multi-sited ethnography I carried out from 2006 to 2009 on the world of Western theatrical dance – in particular, the Italian field. I conducted fieldwork and video-based research with two companies and the related schools – differently placed in the national scenario in terms of centre/periphery – as well as, though occasionally, about ten international companies and dozens of national companies/schools. Moreover, for the first time in my life, I participated in classes and shows as a full-fledged member – mainly in Italy, but I also spent 3 months at the Dance Department of the University of California Riverside, attending theoretical and practical courses. Data also includes in-depth interviews (n = 23) with professional practitioners. Whereas both observed companies engage in modern and contemporary dance, some schools also offer courses of classical dance and hip-hop, and most of the interviewees, though expert in one main style, (have) practise(d) the others as well.

Table 1 : Italian dance field(s) mapping.

Dancers (taxpayers/author’s survey) :	10,060/1,245	Specialized firms :	702
Companies :	276	Specialized journals :	21
Academies and schools :	2,181	Specialized editions (book, dvd, cd, etc.) :	1,264
Associations, foundations, etc. :	108	Websites, forums, blogs and webzines :	34
Secondary dance schools :	8	Literature :	115
University dance courses :	13	Figurative arts :	76
Museums, libraries, archives, etc. :	10	Movies (produced/dubbed) :	19/213
Festivals and exhibitions :	79	Advertising :	67
Contests and awards :	36	Television shows :	7

5Finally, I conducted secondary analysis of quantitative data concerning the Italian labour market (Enpals, 2008), and “mapped” the i) institutional (e.g. companies and academies), ii) commercial (e.g. specialised firms and editions) and iii) imaginary (e.g. art and advertising) branches of the nationnal field by surveying their components (Table 1). Some of the latter, such as forums and blogs, movies, and printed advertisements, constituted the basis for further document analysis, focused on both content (themes, characters, plots) and form (discursive, narrative, visual features), and concerned with both style comparison and historical change.

III. Gender and Corporeality : Normalcy and Deviance

6In common sense culture, masculinity and femininity constitute two di­chotomic categories, equipped with their dominant models and more or less appropriate and illustrative bodily properties, bodily doings (movement, gesture, body, techniques, etc.), and activities (e.g. Connell, 1987 ; Goffman, 1979). There are, therefore, female bodies that exhibit bodily and embodied characteristics regarded as feminine (e.g. from slenderness and scarce muscularity to body techniques like waxing or crossing legs), and other – deviant – bodies which do not, and maybe, instead, present so­me of the properties that are socially associated with masculinity (e.g. muscularity, ample movements, shaving). Similarly, male bodies may exhibit or not characteristics regarded as representative of masculinity/femi­ninity. As a matter of fact, each body occupies a specific position along the axis of the bodily properties and doings regarded as masculine and, si­multaneously, on that of those considered feminine. Women who, though defined female, are regarded as non-feminine, are generally called “tomboy” or masculine. This is often the case of women hip-hoppers. In the same but opposite way, those who are identified as sexually male but regarded as scarcely masculine are called “wimp” or effeminate. This is the male ballet dancer’s fate.

7If we construct a semiotic square (Greimas, 1970) of the male/female dichotomy (Figure 1) by negating each of the two terms, we then obtain two more categories, which are in turn in a relation of mutual sub-opposition : not-male and not-female, that we may identify with what, in common sense discourse, is defined as wimp and tomboy respectively. We immediately note the problem of the deixis (vertical lines), which would presuppose the identity, in (formal) logical terms, of male and not-female/tomboy, on the one hand, and, on the other one, female and not-male/wimp. Since biological sex – on which the mainstream discourse (Foucault, 1971), or socio-logic, that constructs gender as a dichotomy is based (Butler, 1990) – differs between the two terms of each couple, logical identity collapses, and reveals the complexity underlying the classificatory abstraction and the distance running between (bio-logical) sex and (socio-logical) gender.

IV. Stigma : the Problem of the Male Dancer

9Concerning men, the relation effeminacy-homosexuality came to be established in Western common sense discourse through specific historical processes, in the midst of what has been almost unanimously defined as the “crisis of masculinity” of the late XIX^th and early XX^th centuries (Car­nes/Griffen, 1990 ; Fout, 1992 ; Maugue, 2001 ; McLaren, 1997 ; Mosse, 1996). Similarly, male dancer stigma arose at a particular time and went through diverse phases, having its foundations in cultural plots and conceptual dichotomies that were becoming progressively dominant.

10The prejudice about men who dance crept in, for the first time in the West, in the XIX^th century. With Romanticism and the invention of “points”, women became ballet’s true stars – and came to personify femininity’s quintessence – and ballet itself became “women’s stuff”. Men, who till then had dominated the (noble) dance world, began to leave it, and by the end of the century almost completely disappeared (Bland/Perci­val, 1984 :12-13). At the beginning of this process, however, the stigma was not based on male dancers’ supposed homosexuality, which, furthermore, was not yet regarded as an identity trait. On the contrary, the stigma had its foundations in the increasingly dominant bourgeois culture. First, the dance-danced-by-men belonged to an aristocratic world which the bourgeoisie was standing up to (Burt, 1995 :17). Second, the most appropriate leisure activity for the bourgeois man came to be identified with sport, which underwent a real boom from the second half of the XIX^th century on. Third, and in particular, male dancers were challenging bourgeois expectations concerning what a man should or should not do with his bo­dy, and they were doing so by systematically occupying the female/femi­nine side of the conceptual dichotomies on which gender was constructed in the society of the time. The male dancer, in fact, uses his body to expressive rather than instrumental ends. He exploits his body in order to ex­press emotions and feelings – shame with which a man, as a supremely ra­tional individual, should not soil his hands. And he does so publicly. Finally, he displays his own body – this being an aim in itself, not the conse­quence of a different end – and, therefore, he makes it an object to be admired for its beauty (vs. prowess/utility) – a treatment usually reserved for the (passive) female body (Bordo, 1999). In so doing, he does not occupy the position he should, i.e. the masculine, and thus masculinising, one of the spectator (Mulvey, 1989 :29), and, perhaps worse, embarrasses those who, as such, find themselves looking at male bodies besides/rather than female ones. Such an issue would become even more relevant in the late XIX^th century.

13That is why engaging in dance may be problematic for men. As the following excerpt shows, an interest in dance, just as such, might be read as a sign of deviation from mainstream masculinity, not to mention actual dan­cing, which leads one to be (regarded as) “a little bit… like that”. Yet, starting to dance in one’s twenties, practicing with a group of male peers, and choosing the most masculine among dance styles, as well as growing older, may downsize the problem :

I started when I was 16 and a half […] Earlier nothing, I had a passion for dance but I didn’t do anything. When I was 15 I attended a theatre course, and it included dance lessons and I was attracted to dance. The teacher told me ’[…] go to this school, do a try-out [...]’. So, that’s how it started.
Question : What does it mean you had a passion ?
I always danced as a child, in front of the television […]. A great need of movement, following the body, the music, the rhythm ; when I was very very young too, I had a record player, I took it all around the house and danced […].
Question : Yet until you were 16 you didn’t ?
Well, no. You know, I was really good at school and my parents didn’t want me to be distracted with other stuff. Maybe they had in mind a sport, or some leisure activity, rather than dance intended not as sport but full-time activity (M, 38 ; Mar. 2006).

15Both a) late involvement with dance, and b) the chance-grounded – thus de-responsibilising – identity performance of self-narration (in front of a woman) enacted during interviews, point to a certain discomfort among men, especially heterosexual ones, with regard to their interest in dance. Those who started dancing relatively early, more or less explicitly allude to discrimination :

Someone joked like ’Should you really dance ? You could be a soccer player! ’ (M, 26 ; Feb. 2006).

16What lies behind such a joke is the soccer player being better not only qua sportsman, but also qua hot-chicks-puller, so to speak. In fact, heterosexual regulations are at play in the dance world too, even if in a particular way, and they produce a tricky side-effect. Physical contact being very frequent, and the body being exposed to the gaze of others «at various sta­ges of undress» (Wulff, 1998 :114), dancers (are taught to) enact what Fe­derico (1974 :252) calls «occupational minimisation of sexual attraction» :

The teacher invites us to “be curious” […] “Paul, don’t be afraid of the breast!” (Field notes 19^th Dec. 2007).

17Minimisation of (hetero)sexual attraction coupled with maximisation of physical contact constitute stigma strengthening elements. Traditionally, the tacit requirement is for men to be sexually attracted by sexually attractive women, and to be so anytime in their presence, not to mention when touching them (an action which they moreover should not be afraid of or embarrassed by). One of the questions male dancers are implicitly requi­red to answer is the following : How can you call yourself a (straight) man when you spend hours everyday among semi-naked, attractive young women and you do not pull them ?

V. Antidotes : Normalising Strategies and the Role of Dance Styles

18On the basis of my empirical research, I have identified three main anti­dotes. Two of them have been observed mainly at the collective level and consist of emphasising the masculinising aspects of dancing-as-art/profession, such as excellence and creativity, and dancing-as-leisure/body-activity, like athleticism and self-control. Neither of them tries to present alternative masculinities as legitimate. They are “normalising” strategies, and aim to (re)present the male dancer as endowed with (all the) mainstream masculine characteristics. A third antidote, that primarily works at the individual level, makes leverage on the choice of the dance style/s, and the use of the markers of embodied identity that styles as kinaesthetic sub-cultures provide. The increasing variety of styles – that represent gender roles in more or less traditional ways, and present differences with respect to body movement and decoration – have not only changed and made the representation of dance in Western societies more complex, but have also provided semiotic resources for expressing more or less stereotypical masculinity/femininity.

A. The Regime of Artistic-Professional Excellence : Creativity and Virtuosity

athleticism and muscularity were to have brought male dancers mainstream acceptance and respect [… but] have yet to do so at any but the most elite levels.

22Apart from the structural elements of gender inequalities, excellence furthermore takes on different nuances for men and women, both within the professional field and, in a relationship of mutual influence and reinforcement, in the broader society : gender roles «are not only apparent in the reception dimension of dance, but are constantly part of its everyday production» (Saura, 2009 :44). Recent research on auditions and recruitment (Sorignet, 2004), as well as rehearsals and choreographer-dancer(s) interaction (Saura, 2009), shows that, not only in classical but also in mo­dern and contemporary dance, whereas women are judged by their beauty and technical perfection – as “aesthetic sub/objects”, might one say – men, who often spent far less time in training, are evaluated by «less normative criteria, following their strength, creativity or energy» (Ibid. :40) – as “creative subjects”. The male dancer’s body cannot, of course, completely evade an aesthetic judgement concerning its beauty, yet that is exerted on the basis of less strict categories than with respect to female bodies : similarly in the case of UK actors/tresses analysed by Dean (2005), the “accep­ted spectrum” is wider, as well as more nuanced and varied. This constitu­tes a stigma antidote, since it distances male dancers from one of the opposite gender’s defining features : sexual productivity (Adkins, 1995). Technical abilities, on the other hand, are not at all irrelevant, but might be compensated for by subjective qualities such as creativity, energy and passion. These, moreover, are generally framed in terms of artistic geniality or athletic prowess (see also Gard, 2001 :218).

B. Dance as Athletic-Sportive Activity : Self-Control and Self-Overcoming

24Of equal exceptionality, however, the aesthetic/artistic domain remains more ambiguous and problematic for men than the athletic/sportive one. Starting from its mass diffusion since the mid XIX^th century, sport has become a fundamental site of masculinising practices (Whitson, 1990 :28), in terms of both the use he makes of his own body and the masculinity those practices can inscribe on such a body, thus making it “visibly” more masculine.

25Therefore, as variously noted (Adams, 2005 ; Gard, 2001 ; Risner, 2008), attempts at normalising dance-danced-by-men – and fostering male participation in dance (Crawford, 1994) – through “sportivisation” have been numerous. Since Ted Shawn, many “dance experts” have endeavour­ed to present dance as a sportive activity, in stressing its demands in terms of athletic prowess, bodily challenges and, consequently, the overcoming of one’s own physical limits. Gene Kelly hosted a TV show, “Dancing is man’s game”, in which famous sportsmen were asked to execute some ty­pical movement of their discipline, and male dancers then repeated such movements in a full display of self-control, elegance, strength and effortlessness.

27Such a normalising strategy exerts leverage not only on categorising sport as an appropriate activity for men ; nor only on the notion according to which a strong and muscular body is – or should be – a male one (and vice versa) ; but also on two cultural themes of utmost relevance in modern discourse that are symbolically linked to masculinity and can be brou­ght to the surface of both sport and dance : self-control and self-over­coming.

30Despite the huge collective endeavour, this normalising strategy has not fully succeeded. Stigma is still there (Gard, 2006 ; Risner, 2009a ; Williams, 2003). This depends on the enormous relevance of corporeality and embodied identity, as we shall shortly see, as well as on context. By framing bodies, in fact, context introduces further meanings, which in turn are able to impress different nuances upon the same semiotic resources. If worn by Yuri Chechi on the springboard, rather than Adam Cooper onstage, the same tight suit takes on different meanings. The visibility of the male dancer’s body at the swimming pool needs no legitimisation but that provided by a context in which the visibility of any and every body is socially allowed beyond common norms. And his body is admired – by both men and women – as a male one. On the contrary, in theatre, where the body’s visibility is dramatically asymmetrical, the dancer’s bodily display, though legitimised by the ritual occasion, suffers from the absence of non-merely-aesthetic reasons. Precisely thanks to the framing power of the ritual, furthermore, the muscularity of the dancer’s body is primarily regarded as an attribute of the dancing body, rather than of the male body, and thus loses much of its masculinising charge.

C. The Stylistic Continuum : In/Congruence Playing

31I define style as the maintenance of expressive identifiability, and consider the in/congruence playing it allows as the key to self-construction and self-representation. Dance styles provide systems of signs that the individual dancer as well as the collectively understood dance world can exploit in order to represent themselves.

32As each gender does, each style has its own ways of moving and using the body. It is about different movements (e.g. fouetté vs. kick) as well as different ways of doing the same movement (e.g. fluent vs. fragmented rhythm). For those who dance, therefore, style – which, once embodied, crosses the thresholds of the dance world and penetrates everyday life in habitual form – and gender – an early “theme” in socialisation – combine, and create a complex matrix of kinaesthetic identities, on the basis of which each dancer negotiates on her/his own in the work of “impression management” (Goffman, 1959) s/he does.

33There is more : each style makes a different use of the male and the female body, and considers the two more or less similar and interchangeable. Choreography can reinforce or challenge the common sense

notion that there are specifically male and female styles of movement. If a choreographer believes that they are inherently different, then she or he will design for each sex different steps, which, of course, will reinforce the original notion (Adams, 2005 :76).

35Clothing too – costume and, especially, practice-wear – involves perceptible differences, and therefore constitutes a semiotic resource able to mark and produce gender (Barnes/Eicher, 1992) and, more generally, identity (Keenan, 2001). At the individual level, therefore, such a resource, as we will come to see, can also be used as an antidote via incongruence playing. By moving from classical ballet, with its tutus, tights and the jubilation of pink and other delicate colours ; to modern and jazz, with colourful leotards, shorts and leg warmers ; to contemporary dance, with its almost-naked bodies, wrapped in tight, neutrally coloured clothes ; up to hip-hop, with its vests, low-waist cargo trousers and the prevalence of dark or bright colours, we also move through diverse ways of dressing and decorating the body. Such ways may be more or less attached to the social representations that are dominant with respect to each gender. For men, tights are, or should be, more embarrassing than bourgeois’ (Flugel, quoted in Burt, 1995) dark suits, or “robust workman’s” sleeveless shirts. Whereas someone may choose modern over classical dance, at least until a certain age, for others wearing the garb of the ballet dancer may be traumatic, or at least presented as such :

My first dance lesson was super embarrassing. Tights and jockstrap : dreadful, a trauma (M. 38, Milan, Mar. 2006).

36In sum, the ideal-typical Man is best represented by the hip-hopper, whereas the ideal-typical Woman by the classical ballerina ; vice versa, the female hip-hopper and the male ballet dancer are regarded as mannish and effeminate respectively (Figure 2). One can spot a continuum running from classical ballet, marked by the maximum degree of feminization (and thus women’s presence), to hip-hop, characterised instead by masculinisation (and maximal male presence), passing through modern, contempora­ry, theatre-dance, and so on.

40Moreover, presenting the “choice” of a particularly stigmatizing style as externally-driven and/or chance-grounded – i.e., as a non-choice – can constitute another, certainly less powerful, antidote to the stigma. The last quoted interview continues as follows :

Question : Why did you choose classical ?
They recommended this ballet school to me ; actually, I wanted to do modern. I got close to dance knowing nothing of classical ballet (M. 38, Milan, Mar. 2006).

41Note also that this case is different from that of the hip-hopper quoted in Section 4 : for the above quoted ballerino, it is not only a question of choosing to dance, but also one of dancing a specific style – i.e., classical dance, the most stigmatizing style – that is also presented as chance-grounded and not fully deliberate.

42Finally, it is worth considering that the matrix of wearable identities overlies that of kinaesthetic identities, with increasing complexity. However “classical” a pirouette may be, for instance, it will be something “different” if performed wearing jeans instead of white leotards. This in/congruence playing is enacted by both choreographers in creating dance and shaping choreographic style within a (or mix of) dance style(s), and dancers in constructing and creating their – artistic as well as gendered – identity.

43At the individual level, in fact, besides style choice, the dancer, engaged as we always are in identity construction and self-presentation, can exploit manifold symbolic and material resources, combining and mixing, accordingly to her/his expressive needs and the context, elements belonging to different systems of signs which are simultaneously related to dance style’s social representation and the dancer’s corporeality and bodily doings. The woman hip-hopper who wears pink, the étoile who devours sweets, the male ballet dancer who wears athletic apparel and avoids delicate or “loud” colours are but some examples of what I observed. It is about “distancing” (Goffman, 1961) oneself from one’s role, and mobilising various bodily and embodied signifiers in order to communicate specific identity meanings. From this point of view, styles constitute a resource, since they provide an identified ensemble of signs that one can manipulate and rearrange. Style can be thought of as a classificatory tool : it applies to dance, but also – as gender does – to the body, and thus to the Self.

VI. Conclusions

44The stigma about male dancers crept in, for the first time in the West, in the XIX^th century, and went then through various phases, having its foundations in cultural understandings that were becoming progressively domi­nant – i.e., common sense. Many male dancers I met or interviewed started dancing relatively late in life, and most of them present their relationships with dance as chance-grounded and/or externally-driven “choices”. This testifies to the persistence of the stigma.

45As a symbolic marker of masculinity, artistic-professional excellence, attested to by the position one occupies in the field, constitutes a stigma antidote. Men, therefore, tend to be either at the centre of – thanks to structural elements of gender inequality that systematically favour them – or outside – that is, they choose not to enter or to abandon – the dance field. However, the increasing variety adds to the picture’s complexity. One may choose among styles as among sub-cultures, and this introduces sub-fields, such as hip-hop, that, though not yet central in the field of thea­trical dance, is characterised by a large male presence. This means that, in terms of antidotes, what we deem to be a central position in the field – which is composed of more or less central and marginal sectors, or sub-fields – must be weighted, so to speak, with the gendered continuum of styles.

46Moreover, artistic recognition works differently for men and women, in a way that a) reduces the male dancer’s need to be sexually attractive, and b) increases the relative importance and social visibility of some aspects of dancing, namely, those concerned with artistic creativity and/or athletic prowess, which receive less attention and emphasis, in both professional practice and social discourse, when it comes to ballerinas. Muscularity and prowess, connected with self-control and self-overcoming, have been at the centre of both discursive and representational normalising strategies as well, in a process of sportivisation whose slogan might be : athletic bodies mastered by powerful (and creative) selves. Given the crucial relevance of the context and embodied identity, however, such strategies have not fully succeeded.

47The individual strategies relying on dance style, and, more precisely, designed on the basis of a kin/aesth-etic (aesthetic, kinetic and kinaesthetic) matrix, inevitably marked in gendered terms, are indeed variously embodied. The in/congruence playing that relies on the kinaesthetic classification matrix involves forms of identity construction and self-presentation that may be alternative to dominant models, more diversified and nuanced. Further research on such in/congruence playing – especially in other fields than dance (think of women bodybuilders or bodyguards, policewomen, male nurses, etc.), the purpose being to find commonalities (and differen­ces) through comparisons – may deepen and refine our understanding of the embodied, seemingly unaccountable yet ordinarily dealt-with aspects of identity construction and impression management.

48Such an endeavour, furthermore, might be helpful in addressing a question that the present work makes more or less implicitly emerge but leaves unanswered. It concerns the change processes that masculinity and, more generally, gender identity are undergoing – processes which seems to hap­pen through the multiplication of masculinities (Connell, 2000) and, therefore, the diversification of the spectrum of accepted-as-normal gender embodied identities (see also Abbatecola et al., 2008). However, if gender models are varying, the changes in direction and intensity are unclear. The persistence of the male dancer’s stigma, and the fact that most of his antidotes rely on normalising strategies, for instance, seem to point to the endurance, in common sense culture, of a sort of underlying hard core of masculinity, whose transgression still entails social sanctions of some kind.