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Gender Performance, Gender Norms and Dance

Dr. Xiaoyu Yang

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Abstract

As Richard Schechner suggests in Performance Studies, gender is essentially a performance.  In daily life, gender is a performance based on one’s life experience and gender roles assigned by accepted social norms. The concept of gender first makes sense when being performed. Similarly, performance on stage, including dances, is a demonstration of gender and sexuality. As Judith Butler suggests in Gender Trouble, ‘gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame’ (p.33). Furthermore, the stylization of gender performance in dance also reflects the consistency or transformation in people’s perspective on gender norms. This essay will analyze the gender representations in different dances with specific examples of choreographers or choreographies. Some of them are conforming while some are subversive to the prevailing gender norms characteristic of patriarchy and heterosexuality, but all of them speak about the stylization of body and repeated acts in dance that give birth to gender performativity and conceptualize ‘gender’.

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Yang, X. (2025-07-31). Gender Performance, Gender Norms and Dance. Boston Research Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities, 5(3), 49-54.

References

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Copyright

© 2025 Yang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Dr. Xiaoyu Yang

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