What happens when boys dance with boys and girls dance with girls?
I analyzed an episode of So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD). Since I am a fan of this show, it was easy to pick an episode, and I was able to access it since I recorded it when it was originally aired on August 15th, 2007. I chose this episode because it was the final competition show of the season, and all of the dancers had to dance with each other; which meant that for the first time, it wouldn’t just be a guy/girl dance or a solo, there would be a guy/guy dance and a girl/girl dance. I was very interested to analyze how the same sex partnering would be framed, and I decided to focus my analysis on those two dances and not discuss much else since this was a 2 hour-long episode.
SYTYCD is a summer reality competition show. It is produced by Nigel Lithgoe, Simon Fuller, and Barry Adelman and aired on FOX. The aim of the competition is to find “America’s Favorite Dancer,” and the dancer who wins gets $250,000. The show has the same generic construction as every other reality competition show. There are three judges: a British man, a loud and crazy woman, and another man. The host of the show is a tall, skinny, white woman who has blond hair. The show uses clips of auditions and past shows, interviews with contestants, and shots from rehearsals before the contestants dance live. The rehearsal shots are always the same: the contestants are shown being silly and goofing around much to the choreographers disappointment, then they are worried that the dance is too hard and they can’t do it which builds drama, and then they perform the dance well. The target audience is teenage girls.
There are many ideas and ideals presented by SYTYCD. First of all, the women who made it to the final show were small, they always showed a lot of skin when the danced, and they were sexy. The men who made it to the final show were strong, tough, and were able to pick up their female partners. The dances throughout the season and this episode often involved simulated sex acts with one major exception: when the boys danced with boys and when the girls danced with girls.
When a male and female dance, there is no story required, they just act like they want to have sex with each other. However, when a male and a male or a female and a female dance together, the choreographers needed to invent a story in order to explain why they were dancing together. When the two females, Sabra and Lacy, danced together, the choreographer decided that the story of the dance was that they were mother and daughter foxes. When the females danced together, they weren’t even humans, they were animals. And Sabra said that it reminded her of being a child, so they weren’t just dehumanized they were infantilized. However, they were still sexy because the choreographer still called them “foxy foxes.”
When the two males, Neil and Danny, danced together, the story was that they were two princes battling for a throne. During rehearsal the choreographer stated that when two guys dance together it is different than when a girl and a guy dance together because they aren’t worried about being careful or safe. The dancers themselves, the choreographer and the judges described the dance as being aggressive, dangerous, raw and strong. This is very different than the mother/daughter dance, which was childlike, soft, careful, and loving.
In The Normalization of Heterogendered Relations in The Bachelor, Yep and Ochoa Camacho said: “The heterosexual imaginary constitutes an ideology that conceals the relationship between heterosexuality and gender, foreclosing any critical analysis of heterosexuality as an organizing institution… One powerful strategy for this closure is normalization. Normalization refers to the process of constructing, establishing, and (re)producing a taken-for-granted, unquestionable, and all-encompassing standard used to measure goodness, desirability, morality, rationality, and superiority” (339). In this episode, the link between gender and heterosexuality is clear: when men and women dance they should act like they want to have sex, when men dance with each other they should act like they are fighting, and when women dance with each other they should reproduce an acceptable female relationship such as that of mother and daughter.