Gender: The Repetitive Performative

Let’s go way back to the beginning of the year when sex was JUST sex, men were men, and women… weren’t really anything? Except for the object of men and carriers of babes. Yes, ‘twas a simpler time when we didn’t question societal norms. For the very first blog, we challenged our own constructions of gender when we had to find and write about a video that complicated the binaristic system of gender. As with most of the things I do, I spent much too long agonizing over the assignment. While I ended up writing on a SYTYCD video, because I thought that dances exemplified performatives there were others that I didn’t get to spend as much time on, but that I found equally interesting.

The following video consists of three dancers (two men and a woman) and was set to Adele’s song “Set Fire to the Rain” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsWD1FcRYlk.

If we take their movements as performatives we see how the resilience of gender binary. In dance, the male and female assume different roles. Male dancers form a stable base and display more power moves, while and female dancers are to be light and graceful. In several instances, particularly towards the beginning, the male and female dancers are in sync. Despite typical nature of heterosexual couples dancing together, in this video, both seems equally graceful and powerful. In a sense, both perform both genders. But, towards the end when the two men are dancing together, there seems to be an increase in the lifts and, thus, a heightened discrepancy between the genders that wasn’t present initially. Perhaps gender roles are more necessary than we thought from watching the beginning of the dance? Additionally, this video seems to touch on the issue of monogamy. Why do the dancers have to choose one partner in the end? Also, why does this seem to coincide with the reestablishment of gender binaries?