Privilege in Dance Education: A Discussion for Students and Teachers

ABSTRACT

This article introduces privilege and explains how it operates within dance for a high school or college level readership. By discussing how privilege is the flip side of oppression, this article explains why privilege is invisible and does not feel like privilege. Illuminating economic, race, and gender privilege as it relates to the dance discipline and dance education, this article offers questions that students can ask about their own privilege in dance, describes what privilege is and is not, and helps students apply the concept of privilege to their dance education.

KEYWORDS:

• Dance
• privilege
• gender
• race
• economics

A dance major is able to go to college without having an evening job … A student sees herself reflected in the artists and artforms studied in school … A student is guaranteed to be cast in his school’s performances...

These everyday events are so common as to go unnoticed, yet, they all share the feature of describing privilege. While we frequently see and discuss individuals’ disadvantages—a student having to work one or more jobs to afford school, a Black student being taught an all-White curriculum, a female student not being cast over less-experienced and less-skilled male students–identifying an individual’s privileges is equally important in working to undercut biases in the classroom and studio.

Yet what does privilege mean, and how does it manifest in the dance studio? This article describes privilege, how it operates, and how economic, race, and gender privilege often function in dance education. Meant for students to read in preparation for discussion with their instructors and classmates, this article prepares students to consider how privilege may affect themselves and others within dance classrooms. Addressing privilege is necessary in order for dance education to take action against oppression to become more diverse, more equitable, and for dance to contribute to a just society.

Since privilege is intertwined with cultures, it must be examined within a specific culture and society. Here I examine US educational contexts where modern and ballet dance prevail. While this discussion might be applicable to other situations, it is important to consider cultural differences before assuming that privilege works the same in other contexts.

What is Privilege?

Privilege is a set of unmerited benefits given to people who fit into a specific social group. Simply, privilege is an unearned advantage (Harpool 2023). Society grants privilege based on aspects such as race, gender, class, sexual orientation, language, geographic location, religion, as well as others. Privilege is the opposite of oppression; however, privilege tends to be invisible and harder to notice than oppression because social disenfranchisement is easier to notice than fair treatment. As the above situations indicate, however, in order for some people to be oppressed, others are given advantages.

Privileges layer over other privileges (White, male, cisgender, able-bodied, Christian, etc.) just as oppression layers over other oppression (nonwhite, female, transgender, Muslim, etc.) (Harpool 2023). However, privileges do not cancel each other out. An individual can experience both privilege and oppression at the same time. For example, a person can experience race oppression as Black and gender privilege as a man at the same time: he will experience both the oppression of race (lower health outcomes, likelihood of violent police interactions (Gilbert et al. 2016)) and the privilege of gender (will not experience “cat-calling” street harassment).

Unless specifically brought to one’s attention, privilege is often not recognized by the holder: it is simply the way the world is for that person. Privilege is the expectation that you will experience safety and fairness as a normal course of life (Ferguson 2014). Privilege also doesn’t mean that an individual has an easy life, didn’t work hard, or doesn’t have struggles. It simply means that life has been made easier than if they didn’t have that privilege. Ferguson (2014) gives an example of two people riding their bikes to the same location. Both people start and end at the same place and ride the same number of miles. However, one cyclist has a flat route, a tailwind, and few stoplights. The other has a hilly route with many elevation changes, an occasional headwind, and many stoplights and train crossings. They both accomplished the same event and rode the same number of miles, and both worked hard; the first cyclist, however, had an easier ride while the second had greater obstacles and had to expend much more energy to arrive at the same point. As Ferguson (2014, n.p.) asks: “Does that mean that you didn’t cycle to the best of your ability? Does it mean that you didn’t face obstacles? Does it mean that you didn’t work hard? No. What it means is that you didn’t face the obstacles she faced.”

It is important to understand that privilege often doesn’t feel like privilege. For example, most Americans are privileged to attend free public school. There are, of course, many variations in quality, based on zip code and economic status, but when compared to children who cannot attend school, the privilege of free public education becomes apparent. This does not mean that when an American student is waiting for the bus in 20-degree weather that they feel this privilege. And it doesn’t mean they don’t celebrate having a snow day when the opportunity comes.

Because privilege is an unearned advantage, it is not an individual’s fault that they have privilege (MediaSmarts, n.d.). They did nothing to receive privilege; therefore, they cannot be blamed for having it. The desired outcome in naming privilege is not for those with privilege to feel guilty: it would be like feeling guilty for winning the lottery. Feeling guilty helps no one. It does not help those who are oppressed, nor does it lead to a fairer and more equal world. As Utt (2014, n.p.) notes, “if privilege guilt prevents me from acting against oppression, then it is simply another tool of oppression.” However, noticing and naming the privileges that are inherent in the world is a first step toward recognizing oppression and then acting for justice.

Privileges overlap each other and work together to create an individual’s reality; this is called intersectionality. Here I will look at discrete privileges individually in order to fully understand them; in reality, privileges intersect. While this article cannot discuss all privilege, it discusses economic, race/ethnicity, and gender/sexuality and its applications in the academic dance studio.

Economic Privilege

Most people understand that children who come from economically secure families have more options than those who do not (Rosalsky 2023). Money buys arts lessons, summer camps, tutors, SAT preps, private schools or attendance at better public schools. The privilege of not having to work while going to college affords obvious privilege, allowing students more time for studying and more leisure opportunities. Money can buy tuition in schools with prestigious reputations. The practice of admitting legacy students is another clear example: a legacy student is one whose parents or grandparents attended the college, and they are given preferential admission over other applicants. This is one way in which educational privilege becomes inheritable (Rosalsky 2023).

Many students who choose dance in college have had several years of private training; disposable income had to be available for that child to take lessons. Choosing dance as a profession generally means making an economic sacrifice. Those who know that they are needed to support relatives and those who do not have an economic cushion to rely on may not be able to choose dance as a profession (Valente 2019). Moreover, an Australian study showed that professional dancers move out of the profession for reasons of low pay and lack of steady employment more often than because of aging or injury (Bennett 2009). For these reasons, dance artists who have access to money from family or marriage are able to achieve longevity in the field that others may not (Murchie 2020). Thus, those who end up studying dance in college and who continue into the dance performance profession may have been enabled by economic privilege while those without economic means may have already self-selected out.

People often mistakenly assume that economic privilege erases racial and gender oppression for wealthy individuals. In reality, one cannot “out-achieve” or buy their way out of racial, gender, or other types of oppression.

Race and Culture Privilege

White privilege enables a person to move through the world with an assumption that they belong, and that the world will readily accommodate them, that their needs will be met (DiAngelo 2018). White privilege also means being treated more readily as an individual, rather than as an example of a stereotyped racial identity. Whites are more likely to receive compassion, be humanized, and granted the benefit of the doubt, and more likely to survive mistakes (DiAngelo 2018).

Institutions and societies have many ways in which they tell racialized people that they don’t belong, as many high-profile incidents have demonstrated. Multiple messages can exist that tell dance students of color that they don’t quite belong within the field of concert dance. First, 20^th century dance education developed as a curriculum of White supremacy. Curricula revolved around ballet and modern, both closely related forms that share European aesthetics, practices, and values (Davis 2018; McCarthy-Brown 2014). Both of these forms banned, segregated, and discouraged dancers of color; elevated Whiteness in their aesthetics and practices; and relegated dancers of colors to “lower” forms of dance. Consequently, Whiteness has become the standard to which all other dance forms are compared (Monroe 2011; Schupp 2020). Dance curricula reproduced theories of social evolution, with its evaluation of “primitive dance” as the lowest, folk dance representing the midpoint of progress, and ballet and modern dance representing the highest form that art could strive for. Inherent in this structure is the belief that nonwhite people and their dance forms are less evolved and therefore cannot reach the ranks of the “civilized” (Prichard 2016). This discredited notion, called the “Evolutionary Fallacy” continued in the texts and curricula of dance education long after it was discredited in other academic disciplines (Prichard 2016).

Twentieth century dance history narratives have been based on establishing modern and ballet as opposing dance forms that cover the entire spectrum of dance, which has had the effect of invisibilizing all other dance forms. Dance history narratives contain mostly White choreographers, with others added as an afterthought to try to correct the record of White supremacy without making significant structural changes to the curriculum. The lack of racialized people in dance is relayed as a personal deficit—that they choose not to participate—rather than of systemic oppression and segregation (Prichard 2019).

Twentieth century dance curricula repeatedly expressed that a White body was the most valuable. Body ideals are based on Eurowestern and White aesthetics, valuing bodies that are considered to reflect Eurowestern priorities and standards (Gottschild 1998). All dance students struggle with issues of fitting bodily ideals; dancers of color have an added struggle that many of the ideals are coded as White. This presents an unenviable bind: dancers of color can strive for White ideals, “play White,” and leave behind their race or culture, or they can stay connected to their race/culture and inhabit the lowly place of the “other” (Walker 2016).

Gender and Sexuality Privilege

Male privilege can be particularly invisible in dance because men face well-known obstacles outside the dance discipline that make it difficult to choose to dance ballet or modern. Boys face bullying, harassment, displeasure from relatives, and a variety of social pressures that tell them that ballet, modern, and other concert dance forms are not an appropriate activity for a man (Risner 2007). These obstacles do not exist across the board: boys who dance hip-hop or Native American dance, for example, are still considered “manly.” It would be wrong, however, to determine that this creates “female privilege” in dance. Rather, it is a direct outgrowth of misogyny.

Our Western, patriarchal culture creates gendered subjects. A male subject is meant to achieve and hold power over others, to be associated with rationality and the mind, influence the public sphere, and to be the seer and the subject. The “other” is female, who is meant to have power held over her, who is associated with emotionality and the body, whose influence is in the private sphere, and whose role is to be looked at and objectified (Prichard, Forthcoming). Note that all the un-privileged sides of the patriarchal binary are assigned to the female. Because women are associated with the body and are meant to be looked at and objectified, dance is deemed an acceptable activity for women; it upholds sexist logic for women to dance. For a boy or man to choose to be looked at and objectified and to be associated with his body works against the sexist code, which deems his choice deviant. Why would a privileged male choose otherwise, patriarchal logic asks; there must be something wrong with him to want to be associated with the feminine.

The misogyny of the patriarchal system gets temporarily placed onto men who dance because their choice challenges sexist values and misogynist structures. The solution, then, is not to grant boys and men more privilege or to make dance more heterosexist by making it more “manly.” Both of these contribute to the problem by supporting the heteropatriarchal system that determines that men shouldn’t dance. The solution is to challenge the heteropatriarchal values that create and support the misogynistic system in the first place (Prichard, Forthcoming).

The underlying misogyny that deems dance as acceptable only for women reduces a woman to only her body and reduces her value to how she visually pleases a (male-assumed) viewer. Women’s bodies are public goods (Manne 2018), and some see dancers as even more clearly for public consumption. Being considered just a body leads to possible danger and threatening situations, a loss of safety, the lack of a right to public space, and it constrains women’s freedom of speech and public movement (Manne 2018). This occurs in dance training as well, particularly in situations in which girls and women are in nearly naked outfits not of their own choosing, silently following an authority figure, and rewarded for obedience (Stinson 2011).

Males benefit in dance from an entire host of privileges that females don’t (more scholarships, more roles, more attention in class, more entitlement to speak in class, more leeway to enact personhood) that lead to a disproportion of men in leadership roles in dance (Larson 2017; Van Dyke 2017). Boys and girls are told from an early age that a male is worth much more in dance. Moreover, a boy is often told that a “manly” man is worth more than an “effeminate” one, thereby replicating toxic masculinity and misogyny through dance training (Risner 2007).

While dance has been a relatively safe space for LGBTQ+ people, particularly men, that does not mean that dance is absent of heterosexual privilege. Both men and women are often trained to replicate heteronormative roles and rewarded when they dance with stereotypical conformity to their assigned gender (Risner 2007). Dance in Western culture has depended on gender binaries, a clear ability to read a gender on a dancing body, and the assumption that desire is heterosexual. This creates privilege for a cis-gendered, heterosexual dancer and hurdles for trans, queer, non-binary people. In what ways could dance education change to redress these privileges (Figure 1)?

Figure. 1. Questions to Ask About Privilege in Dance.

More Considerations about Privilege

Privilege cannot account for all differences among people and should not be used to do so. Privilege is not a rigid category that can account for the totality of a human life; reducing it to such diminishes individuals to stereotypes and clichés. Individuals have free will and make choices, and many of these choices lead to outcomes that do not relate to privilege. As we know, two similar students in the same class exposed to the same experiences can have very different outcomes. Differences in outcomes among family members demonstrate the power of individual experience and choice.

In addition, status is not equivalent to privilege, nor are employment or leadership roles, which are temporary and context specific. Because this article discusses privilege in a precise and nuanced way and in relation to oppression and biases, privilege specifically denotes unearned societal advantages. These tend to not be temporary or easily gained or lost, like employment, status, or leadership roles. While privilege may be a factor in achieving those positions, inhabiting these temporary roles does not constitute a privilege.

It is common for people to hold privileges in some areas while being oppressed in others; most Americans hold at least some privileges (Chugh 2018). While acknowledging privilege is the first step to being able to fully see the systematic way in which oppression works (Skinner-Dorkenoo et al. 2023), shaming, guilting, cajoling, and embarrassing others into acknowledging their privilege is counterproductive. It can lead people to feel offended and believe that their hard work is discounted. This is why “check your privilege” activities often backfire: they often inspire shame and lead people to think they are being personally blamed for injustices. Psychologists call this “negative moral persuasion” (Mascolo 2019). As Mascolo (2019, n.p.) observes, “guilt is a profoundly conservative emotion and as such is not particularly useful for bringing about change. From a position of insecurity and guilt, people do not change or inspire others to change.” “Positive moral persuasion” on the other hand, convinces people who are privileged that they have a moral duty to work toward correcting systems of disadvantage (Mascolo 2019). Rather than feeling personally blamed for having privilege, perhaps consider that you have been given a gift. What will you do with that gift?

It does not matter if you are White but not racist; you have benefited from racism. It does not matter if you are a cis-gendered male but not heteropatriarchal; you have benefited from the heteropatriarchy. And you will continue to accrue benefits from the system until it is dismantled. You can use your privilege to continue to accrue more privilege for yourself and others like you, or you can acknowledge your privilege to help create a world in which justice and equity prevail.

What will you choose to do with your gifts of privilege?

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.