Dance with Me: Ballroom Dancing and the Promise of Instant Intimacy

Amazon.com Price: $35.50 (as of 03/12/2019 14:13 PST- Details)

Description

Click here to hear Julia Ericksen’s interview about Dance with Me on Philadelphia NPR’s “Radio Times”

Rumba music starts and a floor stuffed with dancers alternate clinging to each other and turning away. Rumba is an erotic dance, and the mood is hot and heavy; the ladies bend and hyperextend their legs as they twist and turn around their partners. Amateur and professional ballroom dancers alike compete in a highly gendered display of intimacy, romance and sexual passion.
 
In Dance With Me, Julia Ericksen, a competitive ballroom dancer herself, takes the reader onto the contest floor and into the lights and the glamour of a world of tanned bodies and glittering attire, exploring the allure of this hyper-competitive, difficult, and ceaselessly expensive activity. In a vivid ethnography accompanied by beautiful photographs of all levels of dancers, from the sector’s most sensible competitors to social dancers, Ericksen examines the ways emotional labor is used to create intimacy between professional partners and between professionals and their students, illustrating how dancers purchase intimacy. She shows that, even as to start with glance, ballroom presents a highly gendered face with men leading and women following, dancing also transgresses gender.

Home » Shop » Books » Specialty Boutique » New, Used and Rental Textbooks » Humanities » Performing Arts » Music » Musical Genres » Popular » Dance with Me: Ballroom Dancing and the Promise of Instant Intimacy

Recent Products