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

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Preface The Passion
Acknowledgments
Introduction to Photographing Emotion, by Jonathan S. Marion
Introduction Entering the World of Ballroom ? The Purchase of Instant Intimacy ? The Th rill of Performance and the Agony of Competition ? The Economics of Ballroom ? Feeling the Dance, Showing the Magic ? The Tan, the Hair, the Makeup: Embracing the Loo
Glossary Notes
Bibliography
Index About the Author

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Click here to listen to Julia Ericksen's interview about Dance with Me on Philadelphia NPR's "Radio Times"

Rumba music starts and a floor full of dancers alternate clinging to one another and turning away. Rumba is an erotic dance, and the mood is hot and heavy; the women 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 competition 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 often expensive activity. In a vivid ethnography accompanied by beautiful photographs of all levels of dancers, from the world’s top 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, while at first glance, ballroom presents a highly gendered face with men leading and women following, dancing also transgresses gender.

Reviews

This wonderful combination of text and image results in a nuanced portrait of the performance of heterosexual intimacy in the emotional labor of dance." For all audiences interested in the historical and social contexts surrounding ballroom dancing." -- S. Ferzacca

Interviews with top competitors and social dancers reveal the power that intimacy between partners can bring

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