Dr Yen Nee Wong Y.Wong@napier.ac.uk
Research Fellow
In this article, cultural cisgenderism is adopted to investigate Equality DanceSport, a sporting context emerging out of an LGBT+ community.1 The study questions the extent to which Equality DanceSport enforces regulations and practices which promote trans-inclusivity. Drawing on a constructivist grounded theory approach, I conducted autoethnography and 35 semi-structured interviews with LGBT+ dancers representing diverse genders and sexualities. I examined the discourses shaping the recent revision of Equality DanceSport competition rules in the United Kingdom and the experiences of transgender dancers in the competitive arena. Findings suggest that despite challenging some cis and heteronormative practices in mainstream DanceSport spaces, essentialist notions of sex and gender continue to feed into the shaping of Equality DanceSport's competition rules. These notions are hinged on debates around fairness and inclusivity and inform the constitution of a binary sex category in the competition rules. Transgender dancers face several challenges within the binary sex system, tending to cope through identity compromise. Such a strategy contributes to transgender erasure and invisibility. Overall, this paper provides a critical understanding of trans-inclusivity in an LGBT+ sporting space in the United Kingdom. It highlights the complexity of achieving inclusivity and calls for a critical interrogation which does not conflate LGB with the T when investigating the inclusivity of LGBT+ sporting contexts. The paper concludes with a proposal for radical regulatory and policy changes that question the epistemological understandings of sex and gender and celebrate other values in competitive sports which de-emphasise the focus on winning.
Wong, Y. N. (online). Equality DanceSport doing transgender inclusivity in the United Kingdom: Cultural cisgenderism and transgender experiences. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, https://doi.org/10.1177/10126902241259342
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Jun 1, 2024 |
Online Publication Date | Jul 21, 2024 |
Deposit Date | Jul 26, 2024 |
Publicly Available Date | Jul 29, 2024 |
Print ISSN | 1012-6902 |
Electronic ISSN | 1461-7218 |
Publisher | SAGE Publications |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1177/10126902241259342 |
Keywords | transgender, LGBT+, Equality DanceSport, fairness, inclusivity |
Equality DanceSport Doing Transgender Inclusivity In The United Kingdom: Cultural Cisgenderism And Transgender Experiences
(300 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
LGBT+ ballroom dancers and their shoes: Fashioning the queer self into existence
(2023)
Journal Article
Review Essay: On Their Own: Women, Urbanization, and the Right to the City in South Africa
(2017)
Journal Article
About Edinburgh Napier Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@napier.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search