Abstract
Julia A. Ericksen is in love with ballroom dancing and wants those unfamiliar with its allure to know why. Based on ethnography and interviews, and copiously illustrated with black-and-white and color photographs, Dance with Me vividly depicts what goes on behind the scenes and on the dance floor at ballroom dance competitions. Ericksen introduces readers to the structure of the ballroom dance industry, which includes social dance classes for those who take just enough lessons to give them a measure of competence at social occasions; chain studios, such as Arthur Murray, where students are encouraged to enter contracts for extended series of lessons; and, at the high end, independent studios that recruit students to enter what are known as pro/am competitions. Pro/am competitions are expensive and profitable events in which amateur students and their professional instructors form partnerships to compete in the performance of rehearsed choreography. The book’s primary focus is on the independent studios and the complicated intertwining of commerce and desire that takes place in them as teachers recruit, train, and groom students to enter pro/am competitions.
According to Ericksen, the world of competitive pro/am ballroom dancing offers women a kind of low-risk physical and emotional connection to attractive men, publicly displayed in glamorous settings, and is available to anyone willing and able to invest substantial money and time in its pursuit. Ericksen terms the connection formed between dance partners “instant intimacy” and argues that it fulfills women’s unmet needs for touch and romance.
The book’s most important contribution is its nuanced discussion of the nature of intimacy. Ericksen applies Viviana Zelizer’s analysis of the interconnections between commerce and emotion to the ballroom world, in which touch, friendship, and even the enactment of passion are purchased. Ericksen’s analysis is sharpest when it considers the complicated class positions and relationships of dependency that exist between amateur dancers and their professional teacher/partners. Within the fantasy world of ballroom competitions, women who have wealth but not glamour dance with men, who hope to attain upward mobility by offering glamour for a price.
Ericksen equivocates regarding the question of whether the emotions enacted by ballroom partners are genuine. At times she seems at pains to assert that the intimacy performed is real. That tendency is strongest when Ericksen positions her work in opposition to Juliet McMain’s 2006 Glamour Addiction. McMain, who like Ericksen, approached her book as a ballroom dance insider, describes a seductive world in which professionals exploit amateurs. Dance students, most of whom are older women, spend thousands of dollars on lessons, private coaching, gowns, and their own and their professional partners’ entry, travel, and accommodation costs in order to dance in competitions. Ericksen emphatically resists the charge that the ballroom world is built on exploitation.
Dance with Me depicts women who long for, but have trouble obtaining intimate touch, who desire heterosexual romance, and who, regardless of age, wish to embody particular forms of spectacular feminine sexiness. The existence of such desires is presented but not treated as something that must be explained. Ericksen refers to the work of Judith Butler, Arlie Hochschild, and Candace West and Don Zimmerman in Dance with Me, but the concepts of performativity, emotional labor, and doing gender do not fundamentally shape the arguments presented in the book. While it is certainly beyond the scope of the book to explain the structure and content of women’s desires, consideration of how such desires are produced within and by ballroom culture would have deepened the book’s analysis. While its contribution to theorization of gender is limited, the book’s descriptions could nonetheless be effectively used to stimulate classroom discussions about the performance and production of gender.
The book almost entirely sidesteps issues of race, with the exception of brief accounts of older, Asian women who, readers are told, are unable to adequately perform emotion on the ballroom floor. In these passages, whiteness (and perhaps a particular contemporary class form of it, which values staged displays of passion) serves as a norm against with racialized others are characterized as lacking.
Though Dance with Me is a book about ballroom dance, it is ultimately about the larger question of how money, dependency, and inequalities can complicate friendship and intimacy. Its analysis is strongest in its discussions of the class inequalities present in this intimate form of commerce. I recommend it as an especially useful text for courses in the Sociology of Emotions.