Compulsory Mating Dances: The Construction of Gender Difference in Ice Dance Figure Skating

Compulsory Mating Dances: The Construction of Gender Difference in Ice Dance Figure Skating Ellyn Kestnbaum Men must wear trousers, and not tights. Ladies must wear skirts. —United States Figure Skating Association Rule Book, 1992-93 (new ruling) Performing one's gender wrong initiates a set of punishments both obvious and indirect, and performing it well provides the reassurance that there is an essentialism of gender identity after all. —Judith Butler A man and a woman dance together on the ice: what does it mean? I want to examine some of the ways in which competitive performances on the ice carry cultural meanings, focusing especially on meanings about gender and malefemale relationships. Theorists such as Judith Butler discuss gender in everyday life as a performance, "a stylization of the body . . . the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self" (270). Such an understanding of gender contradicts the common-sense assumption that femininity and masculinity are either/or categories directly corresponding to the biological fact of femaleness or maleness. In the early 1990s, the sister-brother team of Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay challenged the very definition of ice dance, throwing the discipline's assumptions about masculinity and femininity into question. In the mid 1990s, the traditional definitions are again officially in place (how firmly or permanently remains to be seen). An analysis of recent developments in international ice dancing competition reveals the uneasiness surrounding challenges to gender binarism within this cultural practice. What Is Ice Dance? Ice dancing is a branch of figure skating that derives from the turn-ofthe -century Viennese and English attempts to translate the waltz and other ballroom dances to the ice and to devise ballroom-style dances suitable for performance on skates (Brown 169-72). English skaters continued to lead the 1 2 Ellyn Kestnbaum sport throughout the 1960s, with North America and Western Europe following . Beginning in the 1970s, Soviet skaters began to claim most of the world medals (see Copley-Graves). International competition began in 1952, and ice dance became an Olympic event in 1976. Currently, ice dance competitions consist of two compulsory dances, an original dance, and a free dance. The compulsory dances, in which all competitors perform the same steps to music of the same rhythm and tempo, are drawn from a pool of four dances on the test syllabus, a large proportion of which developed in England in the 1930s. The International Skating Union (ISU) selects the pool two years in advance. The skaters, their coach, and often a professional choreographer devise the original dance to music of a specified rhythm and tempo. In the free dance, the skaters can choose their own music and style (USFSA 58-59). In compulsory dances, specific steps are assigned to the male and the female partner, with more backward steps being given to the woman.1 In both compulsory and original dances, the traditional character of specific ballroom dance styles circumscribes the relationship between the partners. Sally Peters describes ballroom dance as role-playing that "reconstructs and reiterates courting rituals that idealize the female body. . . . Here fantasies are brought to life. . . . All men are suave, handsome, and powerful, while all women are beautiful, desirable, and vulnerable" (26-27). The image projected by the woman may be ethereal, as in the waltz; haughty, as in the tango; or openly seductive, as in the Latin dances (Peters 28-29). "As the man frames and displays the woman, he invokes his utmost artistry, making the woman a virtual icon of the feminine. In the process, his theatricalized efforts to win the woman elevate him to the realm of the idealized male" (Peters 36). The narrative of all these dances presents a more or less aloof female who eludes yet finally (or simultaneously, since the images persist throughout the dance) submits to male desire. This vision of all male/female relationship as mating behavior also informs role-playing on ice. A former competitor at the Canadian national level describes young skaters as being trained to perform certain relationships in which "the boys pursue the girls and the girls are all snots" (Chen personal interview). Or, as Dick...