The School Dance
Spacetime co-ordinate: Bara, October 1987
”The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and styles of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.” (Butler, 2006:191)
The posters on my bedroom wall were a silent rehearsal;
Annie Lennox, Martin Gore, Prince.
An aesthetic of androgyny and playful sexuality.
The school dance floor emerges as a stage.
We enter from the back.
Gazes shifting—curious, anxious—
from body to body.
Teenagers searching for belonging, for infatuation.
Dreaming of a slow dance.
Boys dancing stiffly, swaying side to side.
Arms hanging awkwardly.
Girls dancing with girls.
Someone copying a move from MTV.
Others watching from the edges of the dance floor.
In the periphery—the shy ones.
We who would rather abstain
than risk being turned down.
Buying candy, sipping soda.
Talking about something else.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” she asked.
That gender might be something one does,
rather than something one is—
a thought not yet thinkable.
It would take three more years
until Judith Butler spoke that idea out loud.
The dance floor,
the posters, my spiky hair, my patterned cotton pants—
all part of an apparatus where gender was materialised.
The question left no wound.
But it stayed with me.
And it reminds me still—
of the dissonance between pop culture’s androgyny
and the dance floors of junior high.
