LGBT+ media representation on BBC's Strictly Come Dancing: Same-sex dance pairings as a means to promote inclusive participation in ballroom dancing?

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

What people see on television, film and in the news media can have significant impact on how they understand the world, interact and empathise with others in their everyday lives. In sports and leisure entertainment, media representations can influence how people treat LGBT+ individuals and their corresponding access to leisure opportunities. In 2021, we witnessed a huge step forward for the UK's LGBT+ ballroom dance community when Strictly Come Dancing (SCD) changed its 18-year long traditional format to include a male-male professional/amateur dance partnership into its line-up, following its first female-female coupling in 2020. SCD's shift was accompanied by increased media representations of LGBT+ lives and relationships through gay-identifying dancers and portrayals of the UK's LGBT+ ballroom dance culture. My main aim in this Fellowship is to leverage this active media discourse inspired by SCD to maximise impact and dissemination of my PhD research on UK's LGBT+ ballroom dance culture, so as to increase the visibility and acceptance of LGBT+ dancers in partner dancing.Despite growing media visibility of same-sex dancing such as in SCD's 2021 finale, and the possibilities it holds for deconstructing dominant gender discourse in mainstream dancing, the subject remains understudied. My PhD is a pioneering work examining LGBT+ dancers' lived experiences of competitive same-sex ballroom dancing through a queer feminist lens. The novelty of my PhD lies in my visual methodology involving photo-elicitation with visual artefacts (Tillmann-Healy, 2001; Boylorn, 2008) and auto-ethnography as a photographer and dancer, to propose a sociological framework for the examination of dancing bodies as material and discursive, relational and resistive. I show that we cannot envision new possibilities for promoting inclusive dance expressions through the same heteronormative patterns, proposing an analytical framework which recognises diversity in transgressive practices across the categories of sex, gender and sexuality. In this Fellowship, I aim to maximise dissemination by leveraging the creative potentials of my visual methodology in my publications and activities, using photography to stimulate new ways of perceiving and articulating gendered and sexual bodies within and beyond academia.I aim to achieve maximum impact to bring about visible socio-cultural shifts in attitudes towards LGBT+ dancers by broadening my audience base beyond academia. I draw on multiple publication mediums and on teaching to reach out to diverse audience. My journal article is targeted at academics to inspire new lines of inquiry for dance studies which celebrates diversity and differences. I will teach 2 hours per week in the autumn to widen my outreach in academia. Beyond academia, I will adapt a monograph from my PhD, present at two conferences and create a website to bring issues of gender and sexuality to the forefront of ballroom dance education and draw attention to alternative dance practices. I will achieve community impact through hosting a photography exhibition with dance workshop in the University of Kent, titled "Reimagining Ballroom Dancing", where I share insights on the UK's LGBT+ dance culture and create opportunities beyond London for inclusive participation in ballroom dancing.I aim to effectively draw on SCD to engage with non-academics, by incorporating up-to-date developments of SCD into my PhD work. I will carry out further limited research (16.7% of the programme) to explore how shifts in SCD's media representation of same-sex dancers relates to the lived experiences of LGBT+ dancers examined in my PhD. This work extends impact by informing LGBT+ media representations in British reality TV programmes such as Dancing with the Stars and Dancing on Ice. I sustain impact achieved in this Fellowship through an ESRC New Investigator Grant to expand my focus to include differently-abled and gender non-conforming dancers.