Queering Partner Dance

Queering Partner Dance brings work by established and emerging researchers together in one volume, exposing readers for the first time to this burgeoning field and allowing for comparison across genres and geographic areas. The contributors to Queering Partner Dance, who are dancer-scholars themselves, highlight the broad transformative potential of queer dance practices and theorize how those practices are relevant to multiple disciplines.

Since the emergence and expansion of the scholarly fields of gender studies and queer studies, which transformed music and dance studies along the way, social dancers of all genders began to openly question the gendered dynamics of their art and to experiment with how they might be changed. Exploring dances like tango, ballroom, Latin hustle, and salsa, with chapters on teaching dance and queer dance spaces, the contributors show how efforts to queer dance came to mean not only different gender constellations or role distributions, but also the modification of movements and expectations, steps and techniques, and a reorientation of a dance to acknowledge those who are usually excluded.

Val Meneau (they/sie/elle) is a trans non-binary multi-disciplinary artist, researcher, activist, and is currently a research associate at the Department of Diversity Research of the University of Göttingen, Germany. Their expertise lies in body and sexual politics at the intersection of gender, queer and critical dance studies. They are the author of DanceSport's Economy of Desire (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).

Sydney Hutchinson (she/her) is an ethnomusicologist at the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung (State Institute for Music Research) in Berlin, Germany. Her five books and many articles on Latin American music and dance have won multiple awards. She currently leads the project Second World Music: Latin America, East Germany, and the Sonic Circuitry of Socialism.